Bennett Thrasher grows beyond Atlanta roots

Bennett Thrasher, a Top 100 Firm based in Atlanta, has been increasing its workforce and footprint despite talent shortages, growing 17% in the first quarter of the year.

The firm ranked No. 64 on Accounting Today‘s 2024 list of the Top 100 Firms, with $102.79 million in annual revenue in fiscal year 2023. Under managing partner Jeff Call, the firm has grown to the sixth largest accounting firm in Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, and experienced 23% growth in its workforce while opening new locations in Dallas and Denver.

“We’ve been fortunate,” said Call. “Atlanta has been a great market, and then we launched into Dallas and Denver, which are also both great markets to be in. The benefit we have is we have a very entrepreneurial culture. Our partners have that mindset and it’s allowed us to launch a lot of different advisory groups.”

The firm launched a BT Finance and Executive Search group this year and it’s in the process of establishing a private fund accounting administration practice. “For private investment funds, a lot of times they like to outsource their private fund accounting administration,” said Call. “We brought in somebody that worked with a large local private equity firm here, and she’s launched the practice for us.”

The firm is also relaunching a bankruptcy restructuring practice. During the pandemic, Bennett Thrasher focused more on COVID relief services such as Employee Retention Credits and the Paycheck Protection Program. After the partner who specialized in those services retired, BT hired two people in Dallas who now focus on bankruptcy restructuring and CFO advisory work. 

Last year, BT grew a little over 17%, beating the average growth rate of 12.88% among the Top 100 Firms. Call pointed out that BT did much of that growth organically. “You have a number of firms that are doing lots of acquisitions and growing at really large numbers,” he said. “If you look at the average organic growth, it’s probably closer to 10% or less. But for us to be able to grow 17% last year was strong, and right now we’re at 17% growth through the first three months of this year. We haven’t finalized our April financials, but I think we’ll be on that same pathway this year.”

Much of it is driven by BT’s advisory practices. “We’ve had tremendous growth in those advisory practices and that lower middle market where we play hasn’t been quite as impacted as the Big Four advisory practices,” said Call. “We’ve seen them having some layoffs.”

Within that market, Bennett Thrasher has been helping private equity-backed companies and other privately held companies that need advisory assistance. “Our transaction advisory services group is growing gangbusters,” said Call. “We’re doing a lot of work around quality of earnings and M&A transactions. That’s an area where some of the big firms are struggling because the top end of the market is more negatively impacted by rising interest rates that are impacting the ability to do debt financing on these deals. But in the space we’re in, there’s a lot less debt leverage on those middle-market deals. Probably the $50 [million] to $200 million transactions have less leverage a lot of times, so it’s not impacting the client space that we’re in quite as much.”

BT did one small acquisition last September of a boutique tax valuation firm in the Denver area called Intrinsic, but Call noted that the deal came in the latter part of the year and probably had less than a 1% impact on its numbers. He estimates 16% of the firm’s growth was completely organic last year. 

He anticipates further growth despite private equity firms making further inroads in the accounting profession, with some competing firms losing clients and employees as a result.

“We’ve seen that as a benefit to us a little bit because as some of the private equity deals are happening, they’re disenfranchising some of their clients because they’re pushing for higher fees, and it’s an opportunity for us,” said Call. “We also see some people that have worked in those firms, they don’t want to work for a private equity-backed firm because it’s much more just about the numbers, and the culture might be negatively impacted. We’ve seen some talented people that work for these other firms that are looking for a firm like ours that has kind of a very much a people-first culture, and it’s created opportunity for us as there’s been some market disruption.”

He views private equity firms as being more focused on top-line revenue, the bottom line and the value of the stock. “They’re trying to have that next bite at the apple at the three-, five- or seven-year mark be substantial, so they have to drive really hard on the financial economics,” said Call. “We want to be very profitable and to have strong financial economics as well, but I think we have more of a people-first mindset. If we do the right thing for our people and take care of them, they will do a job taking care of our clients, and our business will thrive financially.”

Call has worked at Bennett Thrasher for nearly 22 years after working at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte, but he prefers the approach taken by his firm. “We always say we lead with culture, and the growth will come, and it has,” he said. “We hire great people, we give them the right tools to do their job well, we train them, we develop them, we care about them. And when we do that, they take great care of our clients and our business grows as a result.”