Ed Rivera is a director with BDO Alliance USA, a network of 255 CPA firms and 180 Business Resource Network firms across the country. As an accounting firm owner or practice leader, the question Ed hears most is whether ownership structure determines success. His answer: it does not. Across the public accounting firms he works with, what separates growing practices from stalled ones is leadership alignment, not whether the firm is a traditional partnership, private equity backed, or an ESOP.
In this episode, Ed and Brannon dig into the volume of private equity interest reaching CPA firm owners today, and why treating private equity as one single category misses real differences in holding period and strategy from firm to firm. They also unpack what drives a firm toward merging versus staying independent, and Ed’s view that both paths are usually driven by the same underlying pressure: whether the accounting practice can invest in the systems, talent, and technology its clients now expect.
The conversation also covers what alliance membership can unlock for practice management beyond training, from peer roundtables to leadership development pipelines, and why firms that build something their community is proud of tend to have an easier path through firm succession, whether that means a sale, a merger, or staying independent. Ed closes with a simple framework for any accounting firm owner weighing a succession decision: start by asking why the firm was built in the first place, and who it is really built for.
The Conversation Covers
- How firm leadership alignment matters more than ownership structure or capital source
- Why the volume of private equity calls to CPA firms has changed the conversation for accounting firm owners
- How firms decide between merging, selling, or staying independent, and why the early pressures often look the same
- Why joining an alliance for one reason often uncovers value the firm didn’t expect
- How asking “why” before a succession decision keeps the process grounded
- Why community identity and pride show up as a real differentiator for public accounting firms
Ed’s closing point is a useful one: the firms that build something genuinely attractive, whether they stay independent or eventually partner with someone else, are the ones that focus on the work itself and the clients and communities they serve. The structure follows from that. Getting the structure right first, without clarity on the mission and the people, rarely works in the other direction.
This episode is for accounting firm owners curious about how alliance membership could support their growth strategy, practice management leaders wondering how private equity interest should factor into their long-term plans, and firm owners ready to think through firm succession, whether that means selling, merging, or staying independent. It’s also a good listen for anyone exploring what makes a CPA firm attractive to a future buyer or partner.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan with guest Ed Rivera
01:32 – What the BDO Alliance is and how 255 CPA firms work within it
03:10 – What’s top of mind for accounting firm owners in 2026
05:20 – Why the pace of change in public accounting feels faster than ever
06:45 – Why leadership alignment matters more than ownership structure
09:15 – Mergers and acquisitions activity across Alliance member firms
11:40 – Private equity call volume and why not all PE firms are the same
14:05 – What drives a CPA firm to merge versus stay independent
16:50 – Culture concerns firm owners raise before a merger or sale
18:40 – A firm that joined for training and found unexpected value in roundtables
20:30 – How one firm built a stronger leadership bench in three years
22:50 – A framework for firm owners weighing sale, merger, or firm succession
25:15 – Why community identity shows up in the buildings firms choose to build
27:40 – A memorable travel story from earlier in Ed’s career
30:05 – Book recommendation: The Human Element
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
TRANSCRIPT
Brannon: I’m Brannon Poe, and this is The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast, where you can enjoy engaging conversations about mergers and acquisitions and accounting practice management. Listen in on strategies to build a more fun and valuable accounting firm.
Hi, welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. I have a guest that I met at the Engage Conference this year, and Ed Rivera has agreed to join us for a great conversation about mergers and acquisitions, BDO Alliance, and everything in between.
A quick introduction to Ed. He is a director with BDO Alliance USA. He helps accounting firm leaders put the Alliance’s resources to work on growth strategy and long-term positioning. He works with firms across the country and has a broad view of the forces reshaping the CPA profession, from consolidation and alternative ownership models to advisory growth, talent, and succession. Before BDO, he built a management consulting practice focused on the accounting profession, advising firm leaders on growth, mergers, governance, and partner transitions. And he began his career in tax. Ed, welcome to the show.
Ed: Well, thanks, Brannon. I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.
Brannon: So let’s start with a broad overview. What is the BDO Alliance, how many members do you serve, and how does it work?
Ed: Think of BDO Alliance as an association of accounting firms that is also part of BDO USA, the accounting firm in the US. As an alliance, we bring together CPA firms, along with other firms that work with CPA firms, from across the country. We’ve got about 255 CPA firms that are part of the BDO Alliance, of all shapes, sizes, types, and structures, along with 180 of what we call Business Resource Network firms. Those are firms that work with CPA firms or with the clients of CPA firms. Think of some of the more niche advisory practices that are not specifically CPA firms themselves.
Within that, we have a broad ecosystem that we think can solve nearly any problem that a CPA firm or their clients would encounter. It is a broad ecosystem designed to provide the best opportunities for firms to improve and grow their business.
Brannon: That’s a great overview and will help set up our conversation today. We’re recording this in August of 2026. What is top of mind for most of your firm owners in the Alliance right now?
Ed: A lot of what’s top of mind today is new, but at the same time not entirely new. You’ve got people, technology, and changing client expectations. AI and technology are at the forefront: how much it costs, what investment capital is required, and what to actually invest in. There are so many new tools and new things coming online that it’s hard to know where to make the right moves and what’s going to really work for internal workflows or client delivery. That’s genuinely challenging for firms.
On the talent side, even as the shortage eases up slightly, firms are still looking at how to motivate experienced staff and the people coming into the profession to take real ownership of client work and act like they want the firm to succeed, rather than just clocking in and out. And the flip side of that is firms asking themselves what experiences they need to create to give good staff the knowledge and confidence to serve clients that way.
Brannon: What you’re describing is what I think a lot of the profession is facing. The rate of change isn’t just high, it’s probably more rapid than it’s ever been. Are you hearing that across your Alliance firms?
Ed: Absolutely. The level of change in the profession has increased to a degree that people say their heads are spinning a bit. The talent piece, the AI piece, and then of course different ownership models and private capital entering the profession. If you step back and look at it, the profession has somewhat transformed. We don’t traditionally look at accounting as a capital-intensive business, but each firm has become more capital-intensive than it was five, ten, or fifteen years ago. That has changed some ownership structures, and it adds to all the other challenges around technology and talent development.
Brannon: Are you seeing any ownership structures that seem to hold up particularly well with all of this change? The traditional partnership model where everyone has an equal vote has worked for a long time. Are there alternatives doing better at managing the pace of change?
Ed: I want to be clear that these are my observations and my opinions. BDO and BDO Alliance are not taking a position on which ownership structure is better than others. But what I have observed is that it is not so much about the capital structure or the business model itself. What makes a firm strong, from the firms I’ve seen growing significantly, is strong leadership with alignment. Whether the leaders are partners, principals, or outside capital, the leaders of the firm agree on where the firm is going, what kind of firm they are building, what the culture is, and who their clients are. And there is a leader where the buck stops and decisions get made to move the firm forward.
From my observations, it’s not really about whether you’re a partnership, have private equity, have chosen a different model, or have become an ESOP as some firms have, including BDO. The model matters for what you’re doing. But I don’t think it determines whether your firm is successful.
Brannon: Fair enough. Let’s get into mergers and acquisitions. Are you seeing a lot of that activity in the Alliance?
Ed: We’re seeing movement in both directions, to be honest. We have firms that are very acquisitive and have occasionally acquired a firm in their market or expanded to new geographies. And by the same token, we have Alliance firms that get acquired into other firms as well. We have a chart that we present at some of our meetings showing the number of Alliance firms that have been acquired over the years. That number has gotten bigger and bigger over the last five or six years. What is interesting is that our attrition from Alliance membership typically comes from mergers. Firms leave the Alliance program because they were acquired by another firm, not because they decided it wasn’t working for them.
Brannon: Has private equity’s entry into the profession changed the conversations you’re having with members?
Ed: Every firm we talk to says they get at least one call a day from different private equity groups interested in their firm. A couple of years ago, the conversation was more focused on fielding those calls with some curiosity: we’re not interested, but we should at least hear what they’re offering. Today, more Alliance firms are a little more aware of what their options are and more focused on what their own strategy is and where they’re going, independent of the noise around them. That’s what we’re seeing more of.
Brannon: I heard a statistic that there are as many private equity firms in the United States as there are McDonald’s franchises. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but it certainly tracks with the call volume our clients are describing.
Ed: I’ll tell firms that. And what’s interesting is that private equity gets thrown into a single bucket in some people’s minds, but there is so much variation across PE firms: their holding periods, their thesis, everything. They are not all the same.
Brannon: With a lot of firms taking on outside capital or merging into larger organizations, what do you think drives the firms that are staying independent? What are those conversations like?
Ed: I think the reasons are similar for both groups, actually. I don’t think there’s necessarily a different initial driver between firms that look at selling a stake or all of the firm to PE versus firms that decide to merge into a larger organization. What drives the search initially is usually the same set of pressures. Firms look at a variety of options, and at the end of the day, it’s really about where their business is, where they’re headed, and what the potential looks like if they team up with someone else versus keep at it themselves.
What I think is challenging is that we still have, though less today than before, a bit of a defeatist mentality in the profession: if we merged up, we lost. But the reality is that the business you built was attractive enough to help build something larger, serve clients in a different way with new capabilities, and invest in things you weren’t able to do before. There is a lot to be said for firms that have built something and have a strong legacy platform in their communities over decades, and for wanting to keep that independent. I think there’s a lot of value to that. But there’s also a point where some firms see the need to make investments they can’t make today, whether it’s because they can’t scale, they need different systems, or they need technology they can’t ramp up in time to close the gap between what they have and what their clients need.
Brannon: I find that most CPAs genuinely care about their clients, and if they’ve built a really good team and culture, they’re very protective of it. Some people are very concerned that those things are going to get lost in a merger or a sale, and that concern is valid.
Ed: It is. And private equity culture changes can feel more abrupt sometimes. Regardless of who your buyer is, if you are looking to exit, you have to be really thoughtful about how the fit lines up with your culture and your client service model. That said, some firm owners are caught between a rock and a hard place. They don’t have the internal talent coming up and wanting to take leadership roles. There’s a leadership shortage, which connects back to the talent development challenge we talked about earlier.
Brannon: Which is part of what makes community and peer learning so valuable. Can you share a success story of a firm that joined the BDO Alliance and found it meaningfully changed their trajectory?
Ed: I’ll share a couple of aspects of it. Think of the Alliance as an entire ecosystem. You’ve got what BDO can offer from a technical and training perspective, plus 255 other CPA firms sharing, working together, and collaborating, plus the 180 Business Resource Network firms there to provide resources for your firm. Firms join the Alliance for specific reasons, whatever they think will benefit them most.
We had a firm that joined just for the training. That was all they wanted. But then they discovered roundtables, of which we have about 50 covering internal roles, industry niches, and different service areas. They said it was a very nice bonus that really added a lot of value and changed the way a lot of their professionals operated. It gave people from a firm that wasn’t in a large metro area a lot of perspective into what other successful firms were doing across the country.
We had another firm in Michigan that joined specifically for training and technical expertise and growth development for their upcoming leaders, including face-to-face networking with other Alliance firms in their area and with the BDO office in their area. Three years in, they said they had a stronger leadership bench and pipeline than they had before. We see that a lot: firms come in for one benefit and get several others.
Part of what our 30-person Alliance team does is work specifically with member firms to curate that experience for them. Each firm has specific goals, and our job is to take everything the Alliance has to offer and put it on a platter so each firm can take what would benefit them most.
Brannon: I imagine a lot of members don’t even know everything that’s available to them.
Ed: That’s true. I was talking to a firm recently that had a client issue they tried to solve in several different ways, and it took a lot of time and effort from a lot of people. When they finally figured it out, they said, we should have just called the Alliance. It turns out there was someone who could have helped them. Part of the effort is staying top of mind with firms and communicating well so they remember to use the resources they already have access to.
Brannon: If you were advising a firm owner who isn’t sure whether to sell, merge, or stay independent and grow, where would you start?
Ed: I’d start by having them go back and ask why. Why did they start the firm in the first place? And then who are they serving: the clients and the people within the firm? I think this connects to what Brannon, you’ve built into your Seamless Succession approach, which is really asking what they want the end outcome to be. What does the firm look like five years out, ten years out?
There’s always a little bit of ego involved, and I think some of it is healthy. When you serve a client well and help them accomplish something, that ego boost is a good thing. But when it grows into a belief that you’re the only one who can serve this client, or the only one who can make this firm succeed, that’s when it becomes challenging to ask the right questions. It makes it harder to go through a thoughtful succession process with the ability to say, we’re building this together for this group and this community.
Keeping the main goals top of mind throughout the process is really important, because it’s easy to get carried away into the weeds of the day and forget what you set out to do.
Brannon: You mentioned earlier that CPA firms genuinely care about clients and community. What do the firms that embody that most look like to you?
Ed: I’ve got four firms top of mind right now that have all recently either built or remodeled a building. This isn’t to say you have to have a new building, but there’s a story in all four of those cases. All of them are in their own distinctive community, outside a major metro area. I’ve toured their buildings, and there’s a sense of pride in the community they’re sitting in. The building was designed to reflect both the community and the work they do. In some cases it’s the railings, or a centerpiece piece of artwork, or something historic from the community woven into the building. That level of commitment, that pride in serving clients and the community, is what shows you that these firms are in it with their clients. They’re not just building a business off of their clients. They’re building a business right alongside them, advising them, and growing with them.
Whether you want to stay independent or find a partner, building a great business that you’re genuinely enjoying is what gets you to the right place. And if you want someone to carry that legacy, most people genuinely do, but they also want the right price and the right deal. Getting that right on all fronts is a difficult thing. But it is possible.
Brannon: Do you have a funny or memorable story you can share from earlier in your career?
Ed: This is more of a travel story, but it goes back about twelve or thirteen years. I was with an accounting network that had more of an international role, and we were trying to build a presence in Paraguay. No presence there at the time, so it took several trips. On my very first trip, the key contacts there asked whether I wanted the best hotel, a mid-range hotel, or a budget hotel. I said the mid-range business hotel near their office should work fine.
I got there and I was not comfortable, not just from a cleanliness perspective but from a safety perspective. There was noise, I was tired, and I told myself I’d give it a go for one night. Close to midnight I couldn’t do it anymore. I went across town and found a different place, nicer and a little bit better in every way.
The funny thing is that the next morning at breakfast, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Justin Bieber were both there at the same time. They were doing separate global tours but happened to be in the same city, and apparently staying at the same hotel. So that was a pretty cool ending to that story.
Brannon: You checked out at midnight and ended up having breakfast with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That’s great.
Ed: There might be a business story in there too: the value is in the eye of the beholder, and mid-range can mean a lot of different things to different people.
Brannon: Last question: do you have a book recommendation for our audience?
Ed: Yes. Our Alliance team of about 30 people meets in person once a year, and as part of our meeting we read a book together. I probably wouldn’t have picked this one up on my own, but it’s actually quite good. It’s called “The Human Element” by Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal. The subtitle is “Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.” It’s about how we move away from patterns of this is how we’ve always done it, and what you can do to break through that resistance, not just in your own mindset but as a team.
Brannon: Sounds like it touches on persuasion and influence, and building the kind of environment where new ideas can actually take hold.
Ed: Exactly. It’s a pretty good read so far.
Brannon: Thank you so much, Ed. If people want to follow you or connect with the BDO Alliance, what’s the best way?
Ed: Find us at bdoalliance.com. We’re always looking for firms that want to connect with other growing firms they can learn from and grow with. Happy to talk to anyone who reaches out.
Brannon: Great. Thanks for coming on.
Ed: Thank you for having me, Brannon. I appreciate it.
