Profit Patterns

Accounting firm advisory services are growing as a market category and shrinking as an internal priority. The gap is in the operating model, well before skills or software enter the conversation. Compliance and advisory run on incompatible operating logics, and most firms are trying to run both on the same machine.

The buy-build growth strategy has a strong track record across sectors and rate cycles. What fails is sequencing. This piece breaks down the 70-20-10 integration framework, the five deal-gate questions, and the KPIs that tell you whether your build phase is compounding.

The Federal Reserve hit the lights, and the era of free money ended. Interest rates, once an afterthought, are now a primary obstacle, and the cost of debt service is eating into the returns that were once considered guaranteed.

The post-ZIRP era not only changed interest rates, it exposed which GPs built real value creation infrastructure and which relied on multiple expansions. Here's what sophisticated LP due diligence now evaluates, and what it reveals about operational discipline.

Private equity's favorite growth strategy has a dirty secret: most firms can't execute it. Buy-and-build promises elegant multiple arbitrage—acquire a platform at 8x earnings, bolt on competitors at 5x, sell the consolidated entity at 10-12x. The spreadsheet math is flawless. The operational execution is not.

Companies enforcing Tuesday-Thursday office attendance are watching productivity fall. Companies giving teams autonomy over coordination are watching it rise. The data on hybrid work productivity points to the same variable every time, and it is not the building.