Jason Delles

A $1.8 billion accounting firm just told the market exactly what it is buying with PE money. Not growth. Not margin. Speed. Eide Bailly agreed to sell a majority stake to Reverence Capital and co-investors this week, valuing the firm at roughly $1.8 billion, with a close expected in the 3rd quarter. The firm reported about $840MM in revenue for the year ended in April, up from $780MM. COO Andy Spillum expects revenue to double in 3-4 years. Read the rationale carefully, because it is the part that matters. The capital is meant to implement AI faster, for the firm and for its clients. Not someday. Faster than the firm could fund on its own. That is the whole story of professional services right now compressed into one sentence. For two decades the constraint in this industry was people. You grew by adding bodies, and last decade’s boom taught a lot of firms that headcount was the same thing as capacity. It was never the same thing. Capacity is throughput. People were just the only way we knew how to buy it. AI changes the unit you are buying. The question stops being how many seniors can I hire this year and becomes how fast can I rebuild the work so the senior is no longer the bottleneck. That rebuild costs real money up front. It costs partner attention, which is scarcer than money. And it pays back on a curve most partnerships are structurally unwilling to wait for, because the partners voting on the investment are the ones whose comp it depresses in year 1. PE solves a governance problem before it solves a technology problem. It lets a firm spend ahead of the payback without asking 200 partners to vote down their own distributions. That is why these deals keep happening. Baker Tilly, Grant Thornton, now Eide Bailly. The pattern is not partners cashing out. The pattern is partnerships discovering they cannot self-fund the transition their own clients are about to demand. Here is the part nobody says out loud. The clients are the real reason. "For itself and its clients" is doing enormous work in that announcement. The mid-market companies these firms serve are about to expect their advisors to deliver AI-enabled work, and the firm that shows up with the same hourly model in 2028 loses them quietly. Reverence is not betting on Eide Bailly's tax practice. It is betting that the firms which industrialize this first take share from the firms that waited. I have written before that our profession produces beautiful strategy documents and commercializes them slowly. This deal is a firm paying $1.8 billion worth of outside capital to remove the slow part. That is the actual product being purchased. Doubling revenue by adding people is the old game and it compresses margin. Doubling revenue while AI absorbs the throughput is the new one, and it is the only version that justifies the price. The firms that win the next decade are not the ones with the best AI strategy. They are the ones who removed whatever was stopping them from shipping it.

Top 20 Firm Eide Bailly will receive a significant investment from private equity firm Reverence Capital. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. Upon its completion, the firm will operate in an alternative structure, separating its attest and nonattest services into Eide Bailly LLP and Eide Bailly Advisory, respectively. The capital will be used to continue the firm's strategy, which has included expansion through both organic growth and acquisitions.

This weekend – Father’s Day, no less – marked one year since my dad passed away. At the time, I was on a flight home from Amsterdam, coming back from India. Over the past year, I’ve spent time thinking about that, and more broadly about the reality of working and traveling globally. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are trade-offs and risks in everything we do. You can plan carefully. You can put guardrails in place. You can try to mitigate as much as possible. But you can’t eliminate risk entirely. So at some point, you have to decide what's worth doing anyway. That’s influenced how I think about the work I do, the travel that comes with it, and how intentional I try to be with the time in between.

We’re proud to recognize our newly appointed Market Leaders. These individuals play an important role in how we support our clients and contribute to the local markets we serve. Their leadership helps build strong relationships, strengthen community connections, and drive long-term growth for businesses and the people behind them. Please join us in congratulating them on this well‑deserved recognition. #InsideEB

Last week, I had the honor of being inducted into the Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM) Hall of Fame. The #AAM Hall of Fame, founded in 2001, is a distinguished honor bestowed upon a growth leader in the accounting profession and within the association. AAM has allowed me to gain the knowledge to shape my organization’s growth and build meaningful relationships with friends that have advanced my career. Thank you to the team that nominated me for this award, Julie Tucek, Jamie DeGroot, and Neil Fauerbach. Their kind words at the #AAMSummit and long-term friendships are heartwarming. Thank you to AMM for this recognition and for all you have done to shape my professional career and elevate accounting growth professionals. Thank you also to my organization, CBIZ, for supporting my participation in AAM. #AAMSummit #HallOfFame #AccountingMarketing #CBIZ #AAMKT #AMMHQ #AAMSummit2026