The succession memo has a year at the top and a blank where the multiple goes.
Cornerstone’s PE-CPA Deal Tracker recorded 104 private equity deals in accounting in 2025.
A decade ago, a buyer looked at your book of business, your client retention rate, and your cash flow. Those still matter. Buyers now pay up for proprietary technology and AI-augmented service offerings that look like intellectual property rather than labor. The two multiples aren’t close.
New Mountain bought Citrin Cooperman at 11× EBITDA in 2021. Blackstone paid 15× for the same firm in 2025.
The book that made the firm worth buying
AI is compressing the revenue model you built your career on. Compliance work is exactly what AI handles best, and it’s the predictable, repeatable revenue that made accounting firms attractive acquisitions in the first place. That revenue base is eroding, and it’ll erode faster every year.
Your exit depends on the next five to ten years of firm performance. If you’re planning to sell to PE, merge, or transition to the next generation of partners, the value of the firm at that moment is the number that matters.
The succession question is already urgent, and AI makes it more so.
What a buyer can carry
PE buyers want the clients to stay when a partner leaves, and they want something competitors can’t copy.
Hourly billing on compliance work is the opposite of that. Any firm can do it. The client relationship sits with individual partners. When those partners retire, the revenue is at risk.
AI-augmented advisory is a different asset. If the firm has built a continuous monitoring product, a proprietary risk assessment methodology, or an AI-driven client reporting platform, a buyer can still run it after the partner leaves, and prices it differently than a book of compliance clients. They won’t pay for advisory a firm claims but has never operationalized.
The years before the sale
Partnerships still put AI strategy and succession on different agendas. A buyer prices them as one number.
Building AI-augmented offerings adds revenue for the next few years, and it sets what the firm is worth when you’re ready to exit. Productized expertise, where partner judgment runs as repeatable AI-assisted delivery, is something a buyer can carry on a balance sheet. AI-assisted hours are still hours.
A cash-flow multiple and an IP multiple on the same firm are different numbers, and the gap runs into the millions. Which one you get comes down to whether the firm built commercial AI offerings or only bought AI tools. PE buyers look at how the firm prices the work.
The arithmetic on a $20M firm makes the spread easy to see.
4× revenue
Sell hours. Cash-flow multiple.
7× revenue
Sell productized AI advisory. IP multiple.
Commercialization can be a sequence of bets when the exit is twenty years out. When it’s five to ten, the firm is already inside the years a buyer will look at.
New offerings in market now arrive at the exit with several years of revenue data behind them. That data is what PE buyers use to model future performance. Miss the track record, and the firm on offer is one whose best revenue is in the past.