Thought Leadership

Who owns the firm, and what does that mean in practice?

The ownership question is impossible to avoid right now, particularly in the US, where private equity consolidation is reshaping the profession at pace. Louis Grassi, founder and CEO of Grassi, a top 55 firm in the US, estimates that 65–70% of top 100 US firms will be owned in some form by private equity within the next few years. He wasn't dismissive of the model, but for Grassi, the calculation came down to time horizon. "I do not want the private equity model of short-term thinking," he said.

Instead, the firm moved to an employee stock ownership plan, an ESOP, where a trust holds the company on behalf of the staff.

AAFCPAs, a Boston-based firm that has grown from $16 million to $80 million in revenue over 15 years, faced the same fork in the road and reached the same conclusion through different means. The firm chose not to take private equity and not to sell to a national firm. But staying independent required restructuring the buyout and compensation model, and then leaving profits in the business rather than taking them out, to fund investments that would otherwise have been out of reach.

Larking Gowen, a regional East Anglian practice founded in 1888, approaches ownership through what managing partner Julie Grimmer calls stewardship. The firm doesn't recognize the value of its goodwill: there's no goodwill purchase when someone makes partner, and none on retirement. Capital requirements are low, and what borrowing is needed is secured by the business itself. Partners, in this model, aren't acquiring an asset to sell on, they're holding the firm in trust, with the expectation that they leave it in better shape than they found it. Grimmer believes this also allows the firm to move faster on developing its next generation of leaders: its two most recent partner promotions were internal candidates aged 34 and 35.

Three structures, three geographies, three very different financial arrangements, but the same underlying commitment to keeping the firm's future in the hands of the people building it.

Governance and the question of voice

Independence is one thing. Knowing how decisions actually get made is another.

AAFCPAs used to work the way many partnerships do: everyone around the table, every decision voted on. With 50 partners, that model had long since stopped working. The firm moved to a seven-person executive board that handles most decisions in close coordination with the managing partner, giving it the ability to move quickly on hires and acquisitions without convening a full shareholder vote.

Larking Gowen took a different approach to the same challenge. When the firm launched its updated 2025 strategy, it asked staff to contribute ideas on how to improve. More than 120 submissions came back. The board worked through all of them, acted on what it could, built longer-term projects from others, and explained its reasoning wherever an idea wasn't being taken forward. A network of innovation champions — one per team, all volunteers — emerged from the process, focused on sharing ideas about AI and technology across the firm. "Our proposition to future partners," Grimmer said, "is a seat around the table and a voice."

For Grassi, governance and ownership are inseparable. The ESOP means that staff now come to Grassi proactively about performance, something he said never happened before. "I used to be the only one picking up paper clips off the floor. Now everyone does it." When efficiency translates directly into the value of someone's own shares, it stops being someone else's problem.

Talent, training, and the pipeline that makes it all sustainable

Each firm's approach to ownership and governance is only as durable as the people coming through behind it, and on talent development, all three had concrete things to say.

Larking Gowen's commitment is structural. The firm has been a training practice for decades, taking on school leavers through apprenticeship schemes alongside its graduate intake. Of its 400 employees, 101 are currently in structured training contracts. The 2025 strategy sets a specific target: by 2030, at least half of all new partners should have trained at the firm. To support that, senior staff have written a series of guides aimed at being genuinely honest about what progression through the firm looks like at each stage, sharing, as Grimmer put it, "lessons learned quite often the hard way." Grimmer shares her own story with new trainees: she joined at 19, took two career breaks when her sons were born, worked part-time, became a partner in 2006, and was elected managing partner in 2021. The message is that there isn't one route to the top, and the firm's success doesn't depend on everyone reaching it.

AAFCPAs has invested heavily in the infrastructure around people:

• New graduates are paired with a coach — an audit partner who also taught at university level — to teach them how to study and manage the workload.
• A team of career coaches helps staff who find audit or tax isn't right for them find a better fit elsewhere in the firm, rather than leaving.
• A newly established staff advisory council reports directly to the executive board, giving newer staff a formal channel to raise issues and influence decisions.

The firm's attrition rate was under 10% last year, a figure Buckley attributes in part to a reputation for flexibility that now draws experienced hires away from national firms.

At Grassi, the talent story runs through the ownership model itself. Since the ESOP took effect, retention has improved significantly, and Grassi sees a direct link to how people think about their futures within the firm. When there's a visible stake to grow the firm, staying and developing becomes a more tangible proposition. For a profession that continues to wrestle with how to keep people in the pipeline long enough to become its next generation of leaders, that may be the ESOP's quietest achievement.

What it means to be ready

These are not firms that have solved the same problem in the same way. What they share is the willingness to make structural choices, sometimes at a short-term cost, in the service of a longer-term idea of what the firm should be.

With thanks to:

Louis Grassi, CEO, Grassi Advisory Group (Jericho, New York USA)

John Buckley, Partner, AAFCPAs (Westborough, MA, USA)

Julie Grimmer, Managing Partner, Larking Gowen (Norwich, UK)