Bob Lewis

Bob is one of Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People. He has been exclusively supporting the CPA profession for 25 plus years and collaborates with practices of a few million dollars to the Top 20 firms. His focus is to grow CPA Firms using a blend of mergers and acquisitions, succession planning, capacity expansion, and the development or expansion of a firm’s advisory services capabilities. He helps firms refine who they want as a client moving forward and how to build the enterprise value of a firm.

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 the 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 both organically and using M&A as a growth option. He helps firms upscale clients, implement value pricing, and build an advisory services group without using CPAs to deliver these solutions. From a succession perspective, firms often want to preserve their legacy. Bob designs partnership buy-in programs, compensation structures, and 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.