The accounting profession has spent the past few years debating whether private equity represents an opportunity or a threat. The market may now be offering an opinion — and it deserves more attention than it has received.
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CBIZ’s stock has declined significantly from its 2025 highs, yet the conversation in our profession has been relatively muted. For a profession in the middle of the most consequential capital influx in its history, that silence warrants examination.
Every firm should keep an eye on CBIZ as a valuable data point. I also suggest every firm follow Andrew Nichols at William Blair, and his comprehensive and astute dissection of the industry.
The data
When CBIZ closed its acquisition of Marcum on Nov. 1, 2024, the stock was trading around $78 per share. By early 2025, it had climbed to approximately $90 — a market endorsement of the deal’s strategic logic? However, by March 27, 2026, it had closed at $26.66 per share — a 70% drop from the stock’s all-time highs.
The reasons behind this are well-documented: missed earnings projections, challenges integrating Marcum, and broader market concerns about the CPA profession, over-levered, slow organic growth and small market cap. CBIZ’s
Andersen Group (NYSE: ANDG) — the tax and advisory firm that went public on Dec. 17, 2025 — offers a second data point, though a more nuanced one. The stock priced at $16, surged to an all-time high of $27.51 shortly after its debut, declined through early February to a low of $18.12, and has since recovered to the mid-$20s as of this writing. It is probably too early to draw firm conclusions from ANDG’s short trading history, but the volatility alone is instructive. The public market’s appetite for accounting firm equity is still being discovered in real time.
What PE is saying — and what the data shows
When I speak with private equity investors about the CBIZ situation, the immediate reaction is consistent: They are not concerned. Their reasoning is sound — they are invested for the medium term, so the short-term performance of a publicly traded peer has limited bearing on their underlying plan, and PE firms are neither naïve nor inexperienced. Many are already adjusting strategy in real time, and they may well navigate this successfully.
That said, the CBIZ story represents something that merits honest assessment. CBIZ is the only publicly traded accounting firm with a meaningful operating history. Its strategy — acquiring a major firm, realizing synergies at scale, and expanding market position — shares important characteristics with the investment models that have driven billions of dollars into our profession over the past three years. Marcum itself was in serious discussions with private equity before the CBIZ transaction closed. The same thesis that attracted institutional capital to our profession is the one now being evaluated in public markets for the first time.
What investors are pricing is execution risk — something that, in the early enthusiasm of the land-grab phase, was widely treated as manageable almost by assumption.
The exit strategy question
Several PE-backed platforms have publicly positioned an initial public offering as their preferred exit. That path is now more complicated. If institutional investors are discounting the sector’s only established public comparable as sharply as they have, the IPO window for accounting platforms requires a meaningfully different market environment to reopen.
The practical consequence is likely an extended hold period — which introduces its own set of strategic pressures. Many firms entered the PE ecosystem under a three-to-five-year timeline in which rapid accumulation of scale was the central objective. Encouragingly, many PE firms also planned from the outset for a longer hold, with a deliberate focus on integration and platform maturation. Given what we are seeing with CBIZ, that more patient approach looks considerably more defensible today.
But here is the tension: Firms that grew rapidly through acquisition without proportional investment in integration infrastructure will find an extended hold increasingly demanding. Integration is hard, time-intensive work that requires strong leadership, sustained capital commitment, and disciplined execution. It cannot simply be deferred.
An uneven distribution of risk
The consequences of a more challenging valuation environment are not evenly distributed across the profession.
Partners who transacted at or near the market’s peak captured meaningful liquidity and transferred execution risk to their PE partners. That outcome, whatever follows, stands on its own terms.
Rising partners are in a structurally different position. Their value creation thesis — equity appreciation over a compressed timeline, followed by a near-term liquidity event — depends on platform valuations appreciating from today’s starting point. If the CBIZ situation has introduced a durable discount to how the market views accounting firm investments, the path to the returns they were promised becomes longer and, in some cases, less certain.
The broader M&A pricing environment reflects two competing forces: a late-stage supply constraint, as the pool of quality independent firms continues to shrink, and downward pressure on valuation assumptions driven by the sector’s first major public performance data. On balance, firms in the market today are likely worth somewhat less than they would have been a year ago.
A thesis under examination
I could be wrong about this — and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if I am. The flow of private equity capital into our profession is genuinely new territory, and none of us, myself included, came equipped with a perfect map. What started as a structurally compelling case — recurring revenues, a generational succession crisis creating motivated sellers, significant fragmentation offering roll-up arbitrage — now carries execution risk that is visible and, for the first time, reflected in public market valuations.
PE firms are experienced, resourceful operators, and many are recalibrating thoughtfully. The profession should not read this as evidence that the PE model has failed. It should read it as a signal that the original thesis is being tested, and that the outcome remains open.
For firm leaders still navigating the question of independence, PE partnership, or strategic merger, the environment has shifted. The decisions made in the next 12 to 24 months will be shaped by a more honest accounting of where the model actually stands — and that clarity, difficult as it is, may ultimately serve the profession well.
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