State of Our CPA Profession: Client Considerations of Private Equity.
(Full Transcript)
Welcome to Weinberg Partners. I’m Jennifer Farrington, a business development director at the firm. Today we welcome Paul Weinberg, the founder and CEO of Weinberg Partners, a full-service CPA firm that provides client advisory and taxation services around the US and world. Thank you for coming.
Hi, Jennifer, how are you?
I’m doing good. Can you talk with me a little bit about the history of Weinberg Partners and how you got started and kind of where the firm stands today?
Sure. I founded the firm in 1986 with an idea marketing, idea to market to higher end executives or mid-market executives at Fortune 100 companies in the Chicago area. And we got a lot of clients that way in the pharmaceutical industry. And that really kick-started Weinberg Partners.
In 1999 I became a chartered accountant in Canada and was able to offer international services. The firm moved along, and in 2012 we primarily relocated in Las Vegas to serve the private equity business and venture capital business that was presently in Las Vegas.
Today, we’re a thriving firm with about 10 full time employees. We’re completely remote, and we have verticals in taxation. We offer CFO services. We have a non-profit practice, and we offer public company support services where we work with the company’s auditors on the 10k providing those types of services, we write the memos for their further annual reports.
So that’s it, in a nutshell. That’s where we’re very busy, very busy firm.
Given the merger and private equity activity we’re seeing today in the marketplace, can you kind of speak to some of the changes that you’re seeing and how it’s really impacting your firm?
Great question, the private equity and merger and acquisition activity. I just want to say, overall, for the profession, is probably good. I think there’s a lot of confusion with a lot of firms, maybe our size, maybe a little bigger, whether they should stay independent or not, whether they can stay independent.
We were going to stay independent. We employ AI. The younger generation is demanding it. So, we use AI for financial statement prep. We use AI for research.
You when you worked at a big, big CPA firm, there’s a lot of politics, and there was a lot of focus on the hierarchical structure of those firms, Partners, Senior Manager, Manager, we have a flat organization, and we feel that benefits us.
I think what’s happening in private equity is partners are running into each other. I don’t think that the focus is necessarily on the client.
As a matter of fact, I know it’s not on the client, but we haven’t heard from the clients yet regarding private equity or the bigger mergers and acquisitions.
All we hear from are the firms and the consultants about how great it was, and when a partner is getting a big check, it was great when a consultant makes a commission off it. It was great.
We haven’t heard from the clients, and I can tell you that in our firm, over the past year, two years, the clients that we’re getting are from large CPA firms, all of whom you know, that have gone through mergers and acquisitions.
And I don’t think it’s coincidental, and it’s not to disparage any of these bigger firms. They have great resources, they have great people, and I think that, you know, our focus is on the client and solving clients’ problems in real time.
And there’s a huge opportunity for firms our size, that are that have already adapted technology, that don’t need capital to grow. All these private equity deals are, is capital to the companies.
The private equity firm knows nothing about public accounting. I they’re banking on the CPA firm.
Like I said, I think private equity is good, but I think that there’s an opportunity for independent firms to grow their businesses from clients who maybe aren’t getting the attention that they otherwise did before there’s a lot more than meets the eye. So, we’re trying to grow this well.
Thank you for sitting down with me.
Today, and if anyone would like to talk about any accounting or tax issues, please reach out to me at jennifer@weinbergpartners.com.
Thank you. Thanks, Jennifer, have a nice day.
