Scale in professional services is usually treated as a one-way good: more offices, more service lines, more capital, more global reach. The 2025 Top Firms survey complicates that picture. The Big Four posted combined fee income growth of 5.7 percent, while 17 PE-backed firms on the same list collectively grew 19.8 percent and Grant Thornton grew 7.2 percent. PE-backed growth includes acquisitions, so the gap is not all organic, but the comparison still suggests being the largest firm and being the fastest-growing one are not the same thing.

For middle-market firms, the more useful question is where to invest in advantages that larger firms find harder to execute at scale.

What scale brings, and where it falls short 

Larger firms have real structural advantages. Global reach matters for multinational clients with operations across many jurisdictions. Brand recognition matters at large public companies, where audit committees often default to recognizable names. Methodology infrastructure, internal quality review, and research libraries are expensive to build, and the Big Four spread those costs across a very large revenue base.

Scale also brings costs. Larger firms carry coordination overhead, partnership governance, and conflict-checking processes that smaller firms do not. Multi-office firms can struggle with consistency across locations. Senior partner attention is often allocated toward the largest clients, which can leave middle-market accounts feeling underserved. These trade-offs are not universal, but they show up often enough to shape where smaller firms have room to compete.

The talent picture is a shared constraint

One pressure every firm faces, regardless of size, is a contracting CPA pipeline. The U.S. has 653,408 licensed accountants as of August 2025, down from a peak of roughly 1.9 million in 2019, and CPA exam participation is at its lowest level since 2006. Larger firms can offer higher compensation and clearer career paths, which helps with recruiting, but they cannot hire people who do not exist. The operating model question, how much leveraged output a firm can produce per CPA, has become more important than headcount for firms across the size spectrum. Smaller firms can sometimes move faster on operating model changes because they have fewer stakeholders to coordinate.

Four areas where middle-market firms can build leverage

These compound when run together, and the right mix depends on a firm’s existing client base and capital position.

• Industry specialization. Going deeper into a specific vertical makes marketing more efficient, workflows more repeatable, and advisory work easier to deliver. As one Accounting Today contributor noted, specificity makes a firm more memorable and more referable. For most Top 100 firms, breadth is a business requirement, which leaves room for middle-market firms to build deeper expertise in industries the larger players treat as one of many.

• Client experience as a deliverable. What clients actually want from their accountant has shifted. The 2025 Niche Business Accounting Report covered by CPA Practice Advisor found 57 percent of businesses found their current accountant through a peer referral, and 98 percent of clients who leave a specialist firm move to another specialist rather than back to a generalist. Word of mouth and depth of fit drive both acquisition and retention, and both reward firms that can deliver consistent senior attention. The structure of a middle-market firm, a single P&L and a smaller partner group, makes that easier to deliver than at firms with dozens of offices and hundreds of partners.

• Advisory services with real structure. Wolters Kluwer’s 2025 U.S. Future Ready Accountant report shows advisory now accounts for an average of 13 percent of firm revenue, up from 10 percent in 2024. Firms growing on advisory have packaged offerings, defined outcomes, and a workflow behind each one. Treating advisory as ad hoc work tacked onto compliance engagements makes it hard to staff, price, or scale.

• Integrated technology and selective AI. The same Wolters Kluwer research found firms with highly integrated tech stacks are 53 percent more likely to report high growth. The approach that tends to produce results is narrow and deep: a few well-defined workflows like research, document summarization, first-pass reconciliations, or audit sampling, rather than a broad set of tools used lightly.

A note on sequencing

Most firms cannot run all four plays at once. Specialization tends to make subsequent decisions easier, since tech integration is cheaper across a narrower client base, advisory packaging is easier when client data is comparable, and marketing is easier when the firm has a clear story to tell.
Client experience improvements tend to produce retention and referral effects relatively quickly, often without new hires or new capital. The work is unglamorous: shorter response cycles, fewer portals, cleaner engagement letters, faster onboarding.
Advisory and AI investments tend to return more once the operating model can support them. A firm running fragmented systems that adds an AI tool will see marginal efficiency. A firm that has cleaned up workflows and packaged its advisory work has somewhere meaningful to deploy the technology.

The private equity consolidation cycle adds context

Private equity has taken ownership stakes in roughly 24 of the top 100 CPA firms, including at least 10 of the top 30, and the first wave is now reaching the end of typical PE hold periods. Several of these firms are being sold from one PE owner to another, a transaction the industry calls a “flip.” Citrin Cooperman moved from New Mountain Capital to Blackstone in early 2025, and Schellman moved from Lightyear Capital to Goldman Sachs Alternatives. A December 2025 Accounting Today survey found 35 percent of accountants are not at all open to PE ownership, with many others either receptive or already working under it.
All four of the areas above are investment-intensive, and funding them organically takes time. What has changed in the last few years is the range of capital options between staying fully independent and selling to a traditional PE roll-up. Operating-partner models, minority investments, and long-term capital partners focused on specific verticals or service models all exist now in ways they did not five years ago. The strategic question for managing partners is less about whether to take capital and more about matching the type of capital to the firm’s plan. A firm that wants to consolidate quickly across geographies has different needs than one building vertical depth and AI-enabled service delivery in its existing markets.

Three things worth being careful about

• Adding service lines before the core practice runs smoothly. Wealth management, valuation, and transaction advisory can be strong additions once the foundation is in place. Earlier than that, they tend to stretch management attention thin and produce mediocre versions of several services rather than a strong version of the core practice.
• Adopting AI faster than the firm can operationalize it. A few well-implemented workflows produce more value than a longer list of partially-used tools.
• Geographic expansion as a default growth strategy. New offices in adjacent markets can work, but they often produce less cross-sell revenue and slower payback than going deeper in existing markets and verticals.

What this means for the next few years

The talent picture and the consolidation cycle are likely to keep shaping the competitive environment for several years. For middle-market firms, the most productive use of this period is probably building defensible positioning in the areas where scale offers little leverage: vertical depth, client experience, structured advisory, and integrated technology. The firms that come out of this period stronger will mostly be the ones that picked a clear strategy, matched the right capital structure to it, and made real investments in running it.

Working with Count

Count partners with accounting firms working through these kinds of strategic questions. Our core investment thesis spans AI development and enablement, shared services capacity, strategy consulting for firms thinking about positioning or service mix, and M&A support for firms considering succession or ownership transitions. If your firm is working through any of these areas, reach out.