The accounting industry’s talent pool has been experiencing a shrinkage problem of late, and that has caused more and more firms to turn to mergers.
Take the Long Beach-based O&S CPAs and Business Advisors. The five-partner, 36-employee firm recently merged with BPM LLP, one of the largest public accounting and advisory firms in the country. The deal, according to O&S Managing Partner Cynthia Schoelen, came about as the solution to better serve clients and expand the range of O&S’s services.
“We were getting more clients, but we didn’t have the staff to do the work,” Schoelen said. “So, you’re turning clients away and you’re also turning away existing clients who bring in stuff out of our wheelhouse.”
Schoelen’s firm, which provides tax, accounting, advisory and forensic accounting services and specializes in assisting closely held businesses and nonprofits, has worked with clients in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernadino counties for more than 25 years.
Now that O&S and BPM are under the same roof, Schoelen and her employees can refer existing clients to other accountants in the expanded firm. BPM has approximately 70 partners and more than 1,200 employees.
This is the third strategic combination that BPM has carried out in the past six months, following others in Santa Rosa and Sacramento. Those two mergers added Elliott CPA Group Inc. and Avaunt Ltd. CPAs and Consultants. Since 2020, BPM has also expanded in Southern California through mergers in Orange County, Long Beach and Santa Monica.
Tony Gale, a tax partner in BPM’s Long Beach office, said the priority for the mergers was people; he stressed that the accounting industry is in a place where recruiting and retaining employees has become difficult.
Making transitions
O&S had been contemplating a merger for a while before the BPM deal came to fruition, according to Schoelen, who added that her firm had been talking to BPM for several years off and on. She said that the…
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