Enter, Anders When we were initially approached by Anders, selling or merging wasn’t anywhere on my to-do list. I didn’t have any real interest; our business was growing at a rapid pace. But Adam always appreciated the exercise of having conversations with potential buyers, because it helps you better understand what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what needs improvement. Having such conversations can help make your company more marketable if or when you do want to go to market.
As we’ve blazed the trail in so many areas, we’ve had plenty of people call us crazy. On the flipside, we’ve also had many firms approach us with an interest in acquiring us. We’ve always pushed back; we’ve listened, but no one ever really turned our head.
As I mentioned previously, I started Summit knowing what I didn’t want my company to be. In the same way, I’ve always thought of a merger in terms of what I didn’t want. To me, culture is huge. Even though we are fully distributed, our culture at Summit is strong, and our employees are drawn to (and stay at) Summit for that reason. We lead with humor—and Hawaiian shirts. We weren’t willing to button up our personality or bottle up our values to merge with another firm.
Change is hard, especially for accountants. One of the things that has made us different is that at Summit, one of our core values is that we embrace change (adaptability); however, we don’t change for the sake of change. There always needs to be a good reason behind it. A merger represents one of the biggest possible changes for any company, so Adam and I were only open to a situation that would allow us to change for the better—and to maintain the unique aspects of our company that we’ve been developing from day one.
of the work we were doing, but it started to feel a little rinse-and-repeat. And then someone put the $50 million figure in front of me, and I thought, “Yeah, we could probably do $50 million”—but I hadn’t quite figured out how. Until Anders came along. We were limited when it came to hiring new people. We were focused on being highly profitable, but in order to get to $50 million, we knew we had to have a bigger bench, people trained on the sideline, ready to take on new clients and not at capacity. So when Anders showed up, we realized this could be the perfect scenario. A traditional accounting firm never takes down their job postings, because they can utilize their people different ways. With that pipeline in place, I thought, “We can truly get that $50 million mark at a very quick pace, if we had somebody that had the same philosophy, ideals, core values and wasn’t worried about the billable hour requirement all the time.” When we met Robert and the team, we realized this could be the thing that would get us there, something new and challenging. And that got me excited.
As more and more companies started showing interest, we began to see some themes: Our Virtual CFO services, our diverse approach to client relations, and our cutting-edge use of technology were turning the heads of potential buyers. We had made a bet, and it was paying off. Those services were also turning the heads of potential clients, which meant we were feeling some growing pains with our hiring. We needed to onboard new Virtual CFOs to keep our current employees from being overworked tomorrow; but we had to time our hiring process carefully so that we didn’t hurt our bottom line today. That got us thinking maybe it was the right time; maybe there was an opportunity to find a strategic partner, not just a financial one, that could help us accelerate our growth trajectory.
IT SEEMED LIKE A TALL ORDER—UNTIL WE MET ANDERS CPAS + ADVISORS.
The truth is, I had gotten bored.
I hate to say it. I felt we had already accomplished everything. Since 2010 we’ve doubled our revenue every three years. Five, ten, twenty million seemed like easily attainable goals… I was proud
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