Private-equity backed accounting firm Ascend has added Florida Regional Leader firm Saltmarsh, Cleaveland & Gund and California-based Glenn Burdette to its platform, effective June 1.

Saltmarsh, Cleaveland & Gund, based in Pensacola and Tampa, Florida, and Glenn Burdette, in San Luis Obispo, California, are the latest firms to join Arlington, Virginia-based Ascend, which is backed by private equity firm Alpine Investors and ranked No. 29 on Accounting Today‘s 2025 Top 100 Firms list, alongside some of its member firms.

Glenn Burdette formerly operated under an employee stock ownership plan and adds a central California presence to Ascend along with a team of 75 and seven partners, while Saltmarsh marks Ascend’s first Florida footprint and adds a team of 16 partners and 178 total team members to the firm. 

Ascend reported $314.74 million in revenue and 1,464 employees in 2024.

Terms of both deals were not disclosed.

“These are two monumental partnerships for Ascend,” said Ascend president Nishaad in a statement. “Glenn Burdette was founded 60 years ago, and in 2000 became the first CPA firm in California to form an ESOP. That decision marked the firm’s commitment to a set of core values that they still wear on their sleeve today – a desire to provide opportunity for their people, a focus on shared ownership as an enabler of success, and a fierce commitment to hold the pen on their own story.”

Glenn Burdette provides tax, audit, bookkeeping, business consulting and financial management services, primarily to mid­dle-mar­ket and small own­er-man­aged busi­ness­es.

“Partnering with Ascend is the right move at the right time for Glenn Burdette,” said the firm’s CEO David Merlo. “Their forward-thinking approach and shared values make them a natural fit for our next chapter. We chose Ascend because of their strong commitment to reimagining what’s possible — for both our clients and our people.”

Saltmarsh, Cleaveland and Gund is a full-service accounting and advisory firm offering expertise and specialized consulting for many industries and high-net-worth individuals.

“Saltmarsh has an equally proud history, with an 80-year legacy in Florida’s panhandle and central cities,” said Ruparel in a statement. “The firm is synonymous with quality, is a longstanding best-place-to-work, and has a dynamic group of partners that are seen as trusted advisors across disciplines. Less than a year ago, Lee Bell and the Saltmarsh leadership team took the time they needed to articulate a strategic vision that would carry the firm into the next decade and enumerate a plan for achieving that vision. We feel privileged that they decided Ascend is best positioned to help them fulfill those ideals.”

“The success of our business is entirely about putting our people first so they can do what they love, which is helping our clients achieve success,” said Saltmarsh Advisors CEO Lee Bell in a statement. “Ascend’s intense focus on people and their unique concentration on supporting our more than 80-year legacy as Saltmarsh is why we made the decision to partner with them.”

Both Glenn Burdette and Saltmarsh are independent members of the BDO Alliance.

Since Ascend was launched in early 2023, it has made a significant number of investments, including including Opsahl Dawson in Vancouver, Washington, in January 2023; ATKG in San Antonio in May; LMC in New York City in June; Sentient Solutions for Accounting, an offshore services provider in India and Mexico, in July; Goering & Granatino in Overland Park, Kansas, in October; Wilson Lewis in Atlanta in November; LevitZacks in San Diego in March 2024; North Carolina’s Blackman & Sloop and New Hampshire’s TSS in May; and Lucas Horsfall in Pasadena, California, in October; Walter Shuffain in Boston in January 2025; and McGee, Hearne & Paiz in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in February 2025.

Intuit has reported strong third quarter growth, with the company reporting total revenue of $7.8 billion, an increase of 15 percent. Within this revenue growth, Intuit’s Credit Karma grew the most, raking in $579 million during the third quarter, a 31 percent increase, driven by credit cards, personal loans and car insurance. 

With this growth in mind, Intuit is optimistic about its future prospects and has raised its full year guidance for FY2025 as a result. The company now expects to end the year with $18.760 billion, which would represent a roughly 15% annual growth, higher than the previously expected 12-13% growth. GAAP operating income is expected now to grow 35% versus the previously-anticipated 28-30%; non-GAAP income, similarly, is anticipated to grow 18% versus 13-14%. 

Business solutions revenue is expected now to grow about 16%, the consumer group is expected to grow about 10% (versus 7-8% previously), the ProTax group is expected to grow 3-4% and Credit Karma is expected to grow 28% (versus 5-8% previously). 

Within the consumer group specifically, TurboTax Live is expected to grow 47%, to $2 billion; TurboTax Online is expected to grow about 6% on share gains and average revenue per return is expected to grow 13% as more customers choose assisted offerings. Meanwhile, the number of customers who use TurboTax for free is expected to go down from 10 million last year to 8 million this year. 

Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi attributed this rapid growth to its AI investments. 

“We have exceptional momentum with outstanding performance across our platform. We’re redefining what’s possible with AI by becoming a one-stop shop of AI-agents and AI-enabled human experts to fuel the success of consumers and small and mid-market businesses,” said Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit’s chief executive officer. “We had an outstanding year in tax, including a significant acceleration in TurboTax Live revenue growth as we disrupt the assisted tax category.”

The news comes after the announcement that the IRS Direct File program is likely shutting down after just one year in existence. The program had been the subject of intense criticism from both conservative lawmakers as well as tax prep software companies (via their Coalition for Taxpayer Rights, which represents retail tax preparation and tax software companies and financial institutions) on the basis that the program was unnecessary in light of free file programs offered by public entities, as well as a general distrust of the IRS. Direct File had the potential to undermine software like TurboTax by offering a free service that could have competed with Intuit.

The first wave of private equity investments in the accounting space are coming to the end of their terms, and it’s time to see what direction they will take.

Private equity has enabled rapid rates of profitability and growth in the profession, and for firms with aging partners looking for liquidity, it offers multiples that are double, triple or even quadruple what they could take home on their own, and the ability to take cash off the table much earlier than expected.

The trend kicked off in August 2021 when Top 25 Firm EisnerAmper took a PE investment from TowerBrook Capital Partners. Later that year in October, Citrin Cooperman, another Top 25 Firm, took an investment from New Mountain Capital. 

Then, in January of this year, Citrin Cooperman announced it would receive an investment from Blackstone, which would acquire a majority stake in the firm from New Mountain. The deal was the first instance of an accounting firm transferring private equity ownership from one group to another in the U.S. Experts expect EisnerAmper to follow suit with an exit in late 2025 or early 2026.

“They’ll go down in the history books as grand-slam home runs. What they thought would take five to seven years got accomplished in three to four,” said Allan Koltin, CEO of Koltin Consulting Group, who has advised many of these large PE deals. “What they underestimated — everyone did, me included — was how fast this industry would take off.”

“I’ve watched, now, over 16 of these transactions go on. Every one of them is hitting or exceeding their numbers,” he continued. “I’m not seeing the kind of stereotypical heavyhandedness or micromanaging that we always talk about when we talk about private equity.”

(Read more: “Staying independent in the age of private equity.“)

While the wave of PE is unprecedented in the accounting profession, investments in the broader professional and financial services are not. Just look at insurance firms, brokerage advisory firms, consulting firms, appraisal firms, valuation firms, forensic firms, outsourcing firms and recruiting firms.

“Many of those firms are already on their second, third, fourth, fifth flip, so there’s a whole industry already with professional financial services,” Koltin said. “They’re all people businesses, so people seem surprised sometimes at how fast this has moved and question whether they’ll actually be flipped. I don’t think we have to look too far to see that this has actually been going on for multiple decades already, and it’s working.”

Jongkyu – stock.adobe.com

David Wurtzbacher, CEO of Ascend, echoed the sentiment: “There are deep capital markets for great companies and great industries.”

Ascend is a platform firm launched in January 2023 by Alpine Investors. It ranked No. 29 on Accounting Today‘s 2025 Top 100 Firms list, with $314 million in revenue and over 1,400 employees.

“I have found that the profession questions who would want to own a big accounting firm, and that is a pretty uninformed view,” Wurtzbacher said. “Having come from finance and investing, what I can tell you is that investors exist in all shapes and sizes, and some of them are very, very large investors that can own very, very large companies. From a starting point, there’s going to be a market because this is a great profession. It’s an essential service. It’s very steady revenue; investors call that high revenue quality. It’s quite profitable; a significant portion of the profit is actual cash flow, which is not true in every business. And it’s an industry that’s growing. So for all those reasons, there will always be demand in general for businesses in this space, no matter their scale.”

Meet the players

There are two main camps of firms with private equity money: the “motherships” and the “roll-ups.” Motherships are when large firms, like Top 10 Firm Grant Thornton or Top 25 Firm Aprio (or EisnerAmper and Citrin Cooperman, for that matter), sell a majority stake to PE, and then use the capital that comes with the deal to acquire smaller firms. Roll-ups are when platforms, often PE-owned, acquire smaller regional players, who may often retain more autonomy than in a traditional acquisition — think Ascend and Springline Advisory. 

Experts say private-equity backed firms have four main exit routes: Sell to a strategic investor (like Marcum selling to CBIZ), sell to a larger PE firm (like Citrin selling to Blackstone), trade into a continuation fund, or go public through an initial public offering. 

CBIZ is currently the only publicly traded accounting firm. But in 2023, Ernst & Young proposed and then abandoned a plan to split its audit and consulting divisions, and take the consulting business public. In April of this year, Reuters reported that Andersen Group confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.

(Read more: “Picking the right PE partner.”)

“The Big Four, ultimately, in the next two to three years — I think they’re too big for private equity, [so] I think they’ll all go the way of IPOs.” Koltin said.

He also sees third-party buyers entering the space, like large family offices, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and international buyers from Canada and Europe. 

“One thing I do not think we will see is the exits of the PE firms in the roll-ups,” Koltin said. “I do not see them going to what we’ll call the ‘mothership’ CPA firm. I see them, rather, just going to the next PE firm that comes into the deal. The reason is, there’s a level of autonomy that those firms wanted, and if they wanted to go into one of these big mothership firms, they would have done it the first time.”

Myths, fears and truths

There are two sides to every story. While there is much conversation about the upsides of PE, there is also discussion of its downsides. The business model of private equity relies on return on investment, so some experts worry that the hyperfocus on scale and profitability may mean compromising firm culture, talent and values. Others worry that private equity does not have accounting firms’ interests in mind, and, in the extreme, will load their books with debt and leave them high and dry.

“I think the myth or the fallacy is that the PE firms are running these accounting firms,” Koltin said. “When I talk to the firms that have gone the way of PE, what they say to me is they’re an independent firm with a financial sponsor. For many of these firms, they’re still running their firms. The PE partner — which could be a minority partner, it could be a majority partner — what they’ve done is select firms that have really good leadership, and as the story goes, they’ve said, ‘Listen, we have day jobs, too. The last thing we want to do is micromanage your business, so we’re going to find the best in class, and you go run it. If you have a major capital or strategic issue, get us involved.'” 

Firms have warmed up to the presence of PE in the accounting space. 

In the beginning, “I don’t even think people were really that open to having discussions,” said Tim Brackney, CEO of Springline Advisory, a Top 100 Firm with $89 million in revenue and 365 employees. Springline is a platform firm formed in January 2024 by Trinity Hunt Partners. 

(Listen: “The new deal: The evolving landscape of M&A and PE“)

“It was more of a struggle to even try to have a discussion because the perception of private equity — some of it earned, some of it out of the zeitgeist — was, ‘Hey, you’ve got barbarians at the gate. They’re going to come in, and they’re going to destroy your culture.’ So a lot of that first phase was helping people understand that PE is not a monolith,” Brackney said. “We spent a fair amount of time educating people about the different models within PE so that they would be at least open to having a discussion if the word ‘PE’ was in the sentence.”

To be sure, there are potentially negative side effects to firms’ long-term relationships with PE, particularly to firm culture.

“There are some firms who are going to take PE money and who will lose some of their identity and have some degradation to their culture,” Brackney said. “The soul of any company is the culture, which is the fabric of the operating norms of the people there. That has to be a lens through which you’re making decisions. If you’re not, you will lose that.”

Private equity is also changing the market landscape as we know it. As large PE-backed firms eat up smaller and midsized firms, the middle hollows out.

“I think that there are national firms right now who ostensibly are focused on the middle market, or taking in PE money, and that PE money is going to drive them upstream to hunt bigger game,” Brackney explained. The issue there is that when PE-backed firms begin to scale, they try to take on the big firms and miss out on the client opportunity they’re leaving behind. 

Additionally, as more private equity firms chomp at the bit to get their piece of the accounting pie, firm valuations soar and PE firms overpay, Brackney said. Then, at the turn, they are stretched too thin. “Their time frame and their methods for extracting value are going to be under pressure,” he said.

At the end of the day, the pros and cons come down to the unique partnership of the two parties involved.