Bob Lewis

Bob is one of Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting. His focus is to grow CPA Firms using a process of mergers and acquisitions, succession planning, capacity expansion, and creation or expansion of a firm’s advisory services capabilities. He helps leaders refine who they want as a client moving forward and how to build the enterprise value of a firm. Bob has been exclusively supporting the CPA profession for 25-plus years and collaborates with firms of any size, including a few of the largest firms in the country.

For firms looking to explore M&A, his team has a search process to identify tuck-ins or platform locations to build upon existing locations. Potential M&A candidates can be CPA firms and non-accounting businesses, such as tech companies, specialty management consultants, VARs, or other businesses. Bob and his team identify practices not up for sale or merger yet and manage the deal cycle from start through negotiations and closure.

Organic growth and firm succession are two areas Bob helps firms navigate. Organically, Bob acts as the Chief Growth or Advisory Officer for CPA firms. In these roles, he helps refine their next steps on how to grow organically and uses M&A as a growth option. He helps firms analyze underperforming clients, teaches value pricing, and shows them how to support the client’s life cycle. Their life cycle changes and so does their need for more advisory services. From a succession perspective, many firms want to preserve their legacy. Bob designs partnership buy-in programs, compensation structures, multi-layered incentive goals, and trains newer partners.

Bob speaks nationally at major accounting industry groups and individual firms. He was an accountant and has a Bachelor of Science in Finance and an MBA, both from DePaul University in Chicago.