Frank Longobardi started a five-person CPA firm in Hartford, Connecticut on November 1st, 1984, with a first-year revenue goal of $300,000. For the next 23 consecutive years, the firm grew both top and bottom line, every single year. By the time he and his partner decided to merge up, they had built a $14.5 million firm with over 100 people and ten partners.
That merger brought Frank into what would become CohnReznick. He went from running the Connecticut office to leading industry groups, then helped architect one of the profession’s first mega mergers when J.H. Cohn and Reznick Group combined to create a $430 million firm overnight. In 2015, he was elected sole CEO. By the time he retired in 2021, CohnReznick had grown to over 4,000 people.
In this conversation, Frank walks through every phase of that journey with the kind of candor that only comes from having lived it. He talks about the early days of working 3,000-plus hours a year, the moment he realized hating to lose a $400 tax return was holding his firm back, and why he told every partner the same thing: it is not your client, it is the firm’s client. He also shares his perspective on the partnership model at scale, why private equity entered accounting, and what the profession’s talent structure will look like as AI reshapes the work.
Since retirement, Frank has stayed active as a board member, PE diligence consultant, and advisor. He has spoken with over 30 private equity firms about what makes a good accounting firm acquisition and has been involved in 8 to 10 transactions in a diligence capacity.
The conversation covers:
- How a five-person startup grew for 23 consecutive years without a single down year
- Why hating to lose any client, even a $400 return, was the biggest early mistake
- How to transfer client relationships to the next generation of partners without losing the client
- Why he told every partner “it is not your account, it is the firm’s account” and what shifted when they embraced that
- How the CohnReznick mega merger came together and what it took to lead a $430 million combined firm
- Why the traditional pyramid staffing model is evolving into a diamond shape as AI changes the work
- How private equity entered accounting and what PE firms are actually looking for in acquisitions
Frank’s career is a rare example of someone who has seen the profession from every angle: sole proprietor, regional firm leader, mega merger architect, top 25 CEO, and now PE advisor. His perspective on what it takes to build something worth buying, merging, or leading is grounded in 40 years of doing exactly that.
This episode is for firm owners curious about what the path from small firm to large firm leadership actually looks like, leaders wondering how to transfer client relationships without losing them, practitioners thinking about whether merging up makes sense for their next chapter, and anyone interested in how private equity is evaluating and reshaping accounting firms from the inside.
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Brannon Poe intro and podcast welcome
00:13 – Introducing Frank Longobardi, former CEO of CohnReznick
00:56 – Why Frank chose accounting: a blue-collar family, a high school course, and the University of Connecticut
01:55 – Frank’s career path: regional firm, Big Eight, and starting his own firm in 1984
02:42 – The first business plan: $300K goal, five people, $40K salary each
03:02 – 23 consecutive years of top and bottom line growth at Longobardi and Company
03:27 – Merging into J.H. Cohn in 2007 as their entree into Connecticut
04:33 – Running industry groups and earning a board seat at J.H. Cohn
04:46 – The CohnReznick mega merger of 2012: combining a $240M and $190M firm
05:09 – Becoming a $430 million firm and one of the first mega mergers in the profession
05:43 – Running for sole CEO in 2015 and serving a four-year term with mandatory retirement at 65
06:01 – What the CEO years were really like: navigating the compliance-to-advisory shift and people challenges
07:01 – What Frank learned from wearing every hat at a small firm that big firm leaders never experience
07:27 – Strategic planning, partner coaching, and the reality of 1,500 to 1,600 charge hours a year
08:13 – Managing expectations during busy season: communicating with clients and keeping the team motivated
09:13 – The biggest challenges in growing from startup to $14.5 million
10:35 – Client service intensity and keeping good people for the long term as the two main growth drivers
11:07 – Home-grown partners and the value of developing talent from within the CPA firm
11:57 – The biggest mistake: hating to part ways with any client, including a $400 1040
12:13 – What managing at scale taught Frank about the discipline of bringing in the right accounting clients
12:31 – How difficult clients affect team morale and why post-Covid firms have gotten better at weeding them out
13:14 – Why technical CPAs struggle to let go and why letting go is how firms scale
13:46 – How to transfer client relationships to the next generation: patience, coaching, and making it a two-year process
14:42 – Clients belong to the firm, not the partner: why that mindset shift matters for CPA firm succession
15:27 – How Frank developed next-generation leaders by helping them build on their own strengths
16:17 – The partnership model: what works, what does not, and why 270 partners makes decision-making complex
17:26 – Why accounting has become capital-intensive and what that means for the traditional profit distribution model
18:01 – Retaining 5% of revenue inside the firm: why Frank pushed for it and why partners pushed back
18:35 – Why private equity entered accounting: capital needs, governance limitations, and the cost of M&A
19:25 – How accounting firm M&A economics shifted from deferred retirement payments to cash-heavy PE deals
20:05 – The profession is changing faster than ever: AI, private equity, and what that means for CPA firms
20:28 – Frank’s post-retirement path: offshoring advisory, private equity diligence, and board seats
21:03 – Working with an offshoring firm post-Covid and watching augmentation services boom, then normalize
22:32 – The build-operate-transfer model for offshore accounting centers in India and South Africa
23:05 – The most critical principle in offshoring: treat the offshore team like any other office
23:40 – Consulting for private equity firms evaluating accounting acquisitions: 8 to 10 diligence projects
24:34 – Board seats at a PE-backed accounting firm in Rochester and a CAS firm in Salt Lake City
25:02 – What Frank has observed about how private equity grows organizations from the inside
25:34 – AI as the biggest trigger for change in the accounting profession over the next 3 to 5 years
26:08 – How AI will affect assurance, tax, advisory, hiring, and training in CPA firms
26:52 – The shift from a pyramid to a diamond: why mid-level technology and analytics talent will matter most
27:32 – Why AI is creating an opportunity to add more value to clients than ever before
28:25 – Accounting enrollment is increasing for the third year in a row: why that matters
28:50 – Starting salaries need to be competitive with private equity and investment banking to attract top talent
29:33 – Book recommendations: “The One Minute Manager” and “Who Moved My Cheese?” and a note on EOS
30:56 – Living your values as a leader: calling people out when they exhibit them, not just stating them
32:06 – Where to connect with Frank: LinkedIn and frank.p.longo@gmail.com
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.
Welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. I have a very exciting guest today. This is Frank Longobardi. He is a respected leader in the accounting industry and the former CEO of CohnReznick, which is a firm that now has over 4,000 people. A little bit smaller when you were CEO, right? I had a conversation with Frank about a month ago and went over his career. He has so much to share, and I am really delighted to have him on. Welcome, Frank.
Frank: Thanks, Brannon. I am really happy to be here. It has been a fun ride over a lot of years in the profession.
Brannon: You are still going strong. Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you choose accounting?
Frank: Great question. I was really the first in my family to go to college. We grew up in a very blue-collar family. My family was in the restaurant business, and I worked at the restaurant from a very young age doing all sorts of things, which was great experience. Then I decided to take an accounting course in high school and really liked it. I ended up attending the University of Connecticut, majoring in accounting. I never dreamed where that would take me. Here we are 40-plus years after graduation and I have been in public accounting my entire life. It has been a really good ride.
Brannon: I want to follow your path from where you started to ending up as CEO of a really large CPA firm. Give us a quick summary.
Frank: When I look back, I think it was a combination of being in the right place at the right time and working hard. I started with a regional firm out of college. They subsequently merged with Coopers and Lybrand, so I was part of the Big Eight for a couple of years. Then on November 1st of 1984, a good friend who I had worked with at my previous job and I decided to start our own firm, Longobardi and Company, in Hartford, Connecticut. We were a firm of about five people to start.
We put together our first business plan. Our goal for 1985 was to gross $300,000. That would cover our expenses and give each of us around a $40,000 salary. From that point forward, for 23 straight years, our firm grew both top and bottom line, every single year. We got up to about $14 to $14.5 million in revenue. Back then that was a big firm, not by today’s standards, but it was significant. We had 100-plus people and about ten partners.
I was in my early fifties, my partner was a couple of years older than me, and we felt like we were at a crossroads. We decided that merging up made sense. There were services we wanted to be able to provide to clients that were hard to offer at our size. You had to try to recruit people from the Big Four and convince them to come to a much smaller firm. We decided it was easier to merge up. On June 1st, 2007, we merged into J.H. Cohn. The predecessor of CohnReznick, J.H. Cohn at the time, was doing probably about $210 million in revenue. We joined them as their entree into Connecticut.
I was running the Connecticut office as part of that arrangement. I got a board seat on the J.H. Cohn board. They then asked me to run the industry groups, which is how the firm was going to market. I started to run the industry groups alongside the Connecticut operation.
Then in 2012, we decided to merge J.H. Cohn with Reznick Group and became CohnReznick. At that time, Cohn was doing about $240 million and Reznick was doing about $190 million. We combined the firms on October 1st, 2012 and became a $430 million firm overnight. It was really one of the first mega mergers in the profession. I was asked to be on the board of the new entity.
We had co-CEOs for a three-year period. Then in 2015, when they stepped down, I threw my hat in the ring along with a couple of other board members to be the sole CEO of CohnReznick. I ended up being elected. The one limitation was that we had a mandatory retirement age of 65, and when I took over I was 60, so I knew I could only serve one term. The term lasted four years and four months due to a year-end change, and it was a great ride.
It was a challenging time in the profession. Firms were trying to figure out how to move from a compliance shop to an advisory model, what services to offer, how to go to market with an industry focus, and how to hold on to good people. People was a big issue back then and still is.
Brannon: What I love about your career path is that you started from a true startup. You had to be scrappy, wear every hat, go through every phase. Very few leaders in this industry have seen it all the way from the beginning.
Frank: What I learned from having my own firm is that you had to be versatile. My partner handled a lot of the internal management, and I did much of the strategic planning, partner coaching, manager coaching, and business development. Growing a firm for 23 straight years means being in the marketplace consistently, identifying opportunities, and working hard to close them. I was also doing technical tax and consulting work because back in the eighties, that was just what you did. I was probably working 3,000-plus hours a year. Nobody is going to do that today, and those days are largely gone. But that was the nature of the profession then.
Brannon: What were some of the biggest challenges in growing from that startup to the $14.5 million firm?
Frank: A couple of things drove it. One was an intense focus on client service. We made sure clients were taken care of at every level. I did a lot of coaching with our partners on this and had regular conversations with clients about how we could improve. The second was hiring good people and keeping them for a long time. The partners we made were mostly home-grown, people we trained over the years. We did bring in a couple from the Big Four, including one who became our head of tax and another who is now the head of tax for all of CohnReznick. We brought him into a $13 million firm and he grew with us.
The biggest mistake I made early on was hating to part ways with any client. A $400 1040 leaving would make me upset. What working at a larger scale taught me is that you have to be disciplined about bringing in the right clients. You cannot just take any client that comes along. Some do not have the same principles or integrity you hold. Some treat your people poorly. Some complain about fees no matter the arrangement. When you encounter those clients, you have to be willing to say that this is not the right fit. A lot of firms, especially the larger ones, have gotten much better post-Covid at parting ways with unprofitable or unreasonable clients. Those clients can affect your team. Your staff notice and appreciate it when you protect them.
Brannon: A lot of accountants are very good at the technical work, but their biggest obstacle is letting go of it as they try to build. They want to hold on to everything. How do you advise owners to learn to let go in order to grow?
Frank: The most important thing is to bring the people underneath you into the client relationship and gradually transfer that relationship. It may not happen in three months or six months. It might take a year or two. But you have to let the client get used to working with that manager or senior manager. When you do that, you are developing your next partner. I can point to two or three partners we made at Longobardi that I personally invested in, moved them along, gave them more, coached them, helped evaluate them, and ultimately they took over the relationship. You know you have done your job when the client is calling them and not calling you. That is a genuinely good feeling.
I always told my partners: it is not your account. It is not my account. It is the firm’s account. You have to treat clients as firm clients. Too many small firms operate with a possessive mindset: this is my client, I decide who touches them. You really have to shift that to: what is best for the client and what is best for the firm and the people we are developing?
Brannon: What about your team? As a leader, your team gets attached to your style, just as clients do. How do you transfer those internal relationships to the next generation of leaders?
Frank: Everybody is a little different. You cannot take a senior manager with an entirely different skill set and expect them to operate the way you do. You have to help them develop what they are genuinely good at and how they build relationships in their own way. They might have excellent technical skills and need some help with communication and business development. That is part of the training process. As you identify younger talent, your job as a leader is to bring them along by understanding their strengths and working on the gaps.
Brannon: Do you like the partnership model? Is it the right model for CPA firms?
Frank: It is a great question. At a smaller firm, my partner and I made decisions together. We could drive to the office, make a call in the car, and implement it that afternoon. At a large firm like CohnReznick, I was managing 270 partners at the peak. Every partner is different. Their ages, demographics, and objectives span a very wide range. As a leader you have to understand where everyone is coming from while still being purposeful about the direction.
What I do not like about the partnership model at scale is that it creates a board structure that can make decision-making cumbersome. Some partners want to invest, some do not. And accounting has become extremely capital-intensive. Between technology, acquisitions, and people, you need significant capital. When I took over as CEO, one of my first board meeting discussions was that we needed to start retaining at least 5% of revenue inside the firm rather than distributing everything to partners. In a partnership, that is a harder ask because partners are still taxed on allocated income they are not receiving as cash. It is not an easy conversation. But when you look at what you need to spend on technology, AI, and acquisitions, the math becomes clearer.
That is part of why private equity entered the accounting profession. Firms realized the governance model of a large partnership was not always appropriate for running a fast-moving organization, and that PE brings both a more streamlined decision-making structure and the capital needed to invest. Before Covid, most CPA firm acquisitions were nearly all deferred: retirement payments paid out over ten or twelve years with no interest, which was great for buyers and not so great for sellers. Then some cash started entering deals, maybe 20% or 30%. Then private equity came in and changed the whole model.
Brannon: The profession really is changing faster than I have ever seen it. What are you excited about when you look at the future?
Frank: AI is clearly going to be the biggest driver of change in the profession. It touches everything: assurance, tax, advisory, and most importantly how we hire and train our people. It is coming faster than I would have expected. I sit on an AI committee for one of the companies I am on the board of, and what we are looking at in terms of operational efficiency and eliminating mundane work is striking. It is also going to show us very clearly what kind of talent we need to be bringing in.
The traditional firm structure has been a pyramid: lots of staff at the base, narrowing all the way up to a small partner layer at the top. What you are going to see evolve is more of a diamond shape. The middle layer is going to grow because firms will need more people with strong technology and analytical skills, people who can work between the AI-driven entry-level work and the senior advisory work at the top. Data analytics, forecasting, benchmarking, fraud detection, compliance monitoring: there are going to be so many new ways to add value to clients.
I actually saw a statistic recently that for the third year in a row, bachelor’s degree enrollment in accounting has started to increase. I think accounting is going to offer some remarkable opportunities for people who want to make a real difference for the clients they serve, in ways the profession has never been able to before. One thing that does need to happen is that starting salaries need to come up. For too many years, firms were raising starting pay by $1,000 or $1,500. To attract strong talent now, you have to be competitive with private equity firms, investment banks, and financial services broadly. The good news is that since firms will need fewer people overall, they can afford to pay the ones they bring in more.
Brannon: Since retirement, you have stayed pretty active. Can you tell us about some of what you have been doing?
Frank: I retired January 31st, 2021, which will actually be five years in a few days. When I retired I had nothing specifically lined up. I just figured something would come along. The first thing that came along was a company in the offshoring space that had been a vendor of CohnReznick. They had offices in South Africa and India and provided what I would call staff augmentation services. Post-Covid, during the Great Resignation, those services exploded in demand. Firms could not find people and turnover was out of control. Fast forward two or three years and things have normalized. Now that company is pivoting more toward a build-operate-transfer model, where they help a firm set up its own offshore center, hire and train the staff, operate it, and then transfer it back to the firm over a two or three year period. The most critical principle in offshoring is treating that offshore team exactly like any other office. Same standards for compensation, training, career development, and progression. They do not want to sit and do the same work year after year any more than anyone else does.
The second thing I got into was consulting for private equity firms doing diligence on accounting acquisitions. I have probably spoken with 30 firms over the last several years, talking through what makes a good accounting firm and what to watch out for. Some of those turned into active diligence projects where I would sit alongside the PE team, help analyze data, and advise on pricing and structure. I have done about 8 to 10 transactions in that capacity.
Today I am on the boards of two companies: a PE-backed accounting firm in Rochester, New York, and a client accounting services firm out of Salt Lake City, Utah. It has been great because it keeps me active in the profession, and I genuinely enjoy it.
Brannon: Are you a reader? Any book recommendations for our audience?
Frank: I have to be honest that since retiring I have become more of a fiction reader. At night I like to pick up a novel and just enjoy it. That said, the business books I always went back to and used to buy for my whole management team are the classics: “The One Minute Manager” by Ken Blanchard and “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson. I know they are older books, but they hold up. I actually have a book coming to me next week about EOS and how to cascade it through a firm. I know private equity firms use it with some of their acquisitions and I am curious to dig in.
Brannon: We have actually been running on EOS here for about four years now. It is a great structure.
Frank: I believe it. You know, when I took over as CEO, the thing I always came back to is that as a leader you have to really focus on your vision, your mission, and your core values. A lot of firms go through that exercise and then stick it in a drawer. You have to start your meetings with those values, even if it’s just five minutes. And when you see your people exhibiting those values, you have to call it out. It does not always have to be financial. It can just be a public acknowledgment. We worked hard at CohnReznick to make sure our people understood what was important to the firm and what it took to be successful there. You cannot just write it down. You have to live it and breathe it and recognize it when you see it.
Brannon: Frank, I really appreciate everything you shared today. This has been so valuable. Thank you for coming on.
Frank: I am glad you had me. I love this profession. It has given me and my family so much, and I could talk about it for hours.
Brannon: For anyone who wants to connect with Frank, he is on LinkedIn, and you can also reach him directly at frank.p.longo@gmail.com. He checks his email every day and is happy to chat with anyone who has questions.
Frank: Absolutely. Happy to help however I can. Take care, Brannon.
