Setting the tone for accountancy’s new finance trend, Norwich-based practice Farnell Clarke last week anncounced the appointment of Louise Kingston as its new non-executive director. Kingston joined the firm after a career that started in EY’s audit department, then its technology and media M&A team, followed by 12 years in the private equity industry. Her new role is to help Farnell Clarke through its next phase of growth, said founder Will Farnell.
Farnell expanded on the increasing attraction of accountancy for private investors during a webinar at the end of the week on technology and innovation within the profession. “The innovations that leading firms have made have suddenly made it compelling for private equity. If we look at then challenges of consolidators of years gone by, they were buying a traditional partnership model. It was relationships wholly owned by principals and a lack of any ability to scale because of the way the model worked,” he said.
“We’ve been on subscription-based pricing from day one. We’re growing at 30% organically a year, we’ve got recurring revenue and an average lifetime value of at least seven years. Why are people not bashing my door down saying we want a piece of that?”
Technology crossover
Ad Valorem’s Nigel Adams also sat in on the webinar and entertained a few overtures from private investors. He agreed with Farnell’s analysis that investors were beginning to move from owning a chunk of the accounting technology industry to controlling service delivery too.
“We’re starting to see private equity – the money people – look at smaller firms they otherwise wouldn’t have countenanced,” said Adams.
“The firms working in this space have more of a technology feel than a traditional accountant feel. [They’ve got] access to lots of data, are scalable and subscription-led – not a million miles away from a technology company. There certainly seems to be a lot of appetite at the moment for practices that are adopting this approach.”
Tip of the iceberg
The examples cited are the tip of an investment iceberg, according to Norman Younger, founder and director of the accountancy practice brokerage Maximiti.
In February, he blogged that private equity has been circling the profession in recent years. “These new kids on the block are smaller and more loosely structured and their investors are unwilling to invest further in frothy and uncertain equity markets. They will pay more for access to a cash cow in the form of a staid and stable business model that is easy to understand and underpinned by compliance requirements.”
Since then, Younger has seen the trickle of pre-pandemic enquiries get a lot busier: “We’re now being approached by so-called private equity investors who want to look at what we’ve got.”
The latest wave of accountancy investors appear to have been inspired by financiers such as Hg Capital, which over the past five years has broadened its portfolio from accountancy software houses such as IRIS, Dext and Access Group to include Azets, a conglomerate of more than 60 UK accountancy firms.
Accounting cash cows
It may have taken the money people a while to realise the potential opportunity, but when you look at the returns, “an accountancy firm is like a cash machine – you can make money so quickly,” Younger said.
“A lot of them want to put together a mini-conglomerate of, say, eight firms, slap a fancy logo on it and come up with a few new terms for accountancy.”
The phrase “private equity” has brought a dash of dazzle to the market and has boosted multiples to more than 1x gross recurring fees, though insiders suggest that multiples are now more likely to be calculated based on earnings before tax, interest and amortisation (EBITDA) in the region of 8-12x. However, this activity is nearing the point of “overexuberance” that could lead to bum deals for some sellers, Younger warned.
“Some of these people have a background in accountancy and know what they’re looking for, but others may have got wind of the trend and put together a syndicate to try their hands in the accounting market,” he said. “You need to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
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