The annual letter from the crazy guy running four firms
Over the last four weeks, we covered the full arc.
Start-up. Scale-up. Grown-up. Exits and succession.
Every strategy in that series came from somewhere. Not textbooks. Not theory. Experience. Mine.
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A young woman helping me at the Apple Store last week asked what I do. I told her I was a crazy person. Then I gave her the real answer. I'm a CPA and a partner in four businesses.
She's lit up. She is studying accounting at U of H. Looking for internships. She asked me for my best advice.
"Learn AI."
"Oh nooo!" She said.
That reaction has stuck with me.
She's right to be scared. But she's scared of the wrong thing.
She thinks AI is coming for her career. It's here.
She's training to walk into a system that has decided what to do with her, and she can feel it without being able to see it.
I can see it. So here's the long version of the advice, the one I'd have given her if she had the time.
Get a job in accounting - go into debt if you have to.
I never wanted to be an accountant.
I switched my major in 2007 when the global financial crisis hit. A mentor of mine told me, "Accounting is the language of business, and you will always have a job."
The advice rings true, but the road has narrowed.
There is no shortcut to the training and knowledge you get by working for a firm. I worked 80-hour tax season hell weeks when I first started in the profession. I would calculate my hourly rate and get depressed.
The truth was I was getting paid what I was worth, and I was being paid to learn. In my first five years of working for firms I learned more than I would have in 50 years of college.
So if you can, get a Big 4 or small firm job, learn the ropes and build a technical expertise. That will be the building block of your success in the industry.
That part hasn't changed. There's no shortcut to the foundation.
What changed is the ladder you climb once you have it.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THIS PROFESSION
For five years, private equity has been buying CPA firms at record multiples. Standard playbook. Roll up a fragmented industry, standardize it, cut the labor, sell higher in five years. The labor was supposed to come out over time through offshoring and scale.
In 2020, none of the top 30 firms in the country had PE ownership. By the end of 2024, ten did.
EisnerAmper. Citrin Cooperman. Cherry Bekaert. Baker Tilly. Grant Thornton. Aprio. Names every accountant knows. All sold majority stakes inside four years. Allan Koltin, who tracks this for a living, said over a year ago that more than half the top 20 were in "transformative discussions." He was right.
Then AI showed up and broke the math.
The labor PE wanted to offshore over five years now gets replaced by software in thirty-six months. Reconciliations, first-pass returns, anomaly detection, tax research, audit support.
Most of the entry-level pyramid the firms built their economics on.
The senior partners selling to PE know this. The associates inside the firms haven't been told. The managers are figuring it out.
The deal in this profession has been the same for fifty years. You grind. You bill 1,900 hours, take the audits no one wants and the 6 a.m. tax-season starts. Work New Year's Eve.
Year twelve or fifteen, you make partner. You get equity. You spend the next twenty years compounding it into a life, and get bought out by the younger folks.
That deal is dead.
They ate the second marshmallow.
The senior partners aren't passing equity down. They're cashing it out.
The 27-year-old associate killing himself at a firm that sold to PE is on a different ladder than the one he signed up for. He got rugged.
Most associates in the country are working under a covenant that no longer exists. They don't know it yet.
And the work itself is leaving at the same time. The PE math depends on it. The roll-ups aren't buying stable revenue. They're buying margin plays that need the labor that built the revenue to walk out the door.
That's the convergence. AI and PE didn't plan to arrive at the same address. They just did.
The woman at the Apple Store is the person who could win the thing that comes after. She can't see that part yet either.
SO I STARTED FOUR FIRMS
I left BDO in 2014 and hung out my own shingle. No clients, no prospects, nothing. I said yes to everything that came my way and was fortunate to have some great clients and friends work with me. Many of those people work with me to this day.
I decided to partner in all four of these businesses for different reasons.
Big news, in 2022 I partnered with Roger Ledbetter. He had left his partner role and wanted to start a new, better thing. I saw he left and we went out for enchiladas. I realized he's the smartest CPA I know and we started working together that day.
Full-service tax and accounting for real estate investors and business operators with real complexity.
Of the four businesses, this is the hardest one to grow. The work doesn't scale through software. It scales through the people we hire.
Multi-entity, multi-state, equity comp, the whole stack. The work the big firms used to do well and now hand to associates who don't know what they don't know.
We started it because business owners don't know how their offering memorandum, operating agreement, and tax return fit together. Or if they do at all.
Business owners need a partner, not a vendor.
Accounting, tax planning, and filing for solopreneurs and small S-Corps. We launched in 2022 as Better Bookkeeping and changed the name in April. My partners are Connor Allen and my sister and our COO, Evan Baldridge.
About 200 clients and growing fast year over year. The dev team is rebuilding the product for a world where agents are part of the team. It's hard.
Service businesses run on heroics until they're big enough to justify real product. Most bookkeeping products were built for accountants. We built something different on purpose. Visor is for the business owner, not their CPA. Evan and Derek Bungard serve clients well. One of the things I am proudest of: we have near zero churn.
This one started with "my books are a mess and I'm scared to look." We built a system. The system became a service. The service became a company.
Cost segregation studies for real estate investors. Four years ago my friend Nick Huber and I founded this company along with Nick's partner Dan Hagberg.
My wife Melanie ran the company for the first two years, and built an amazing product and a culture of client service.
This is the biggest and fastest-growing business I am a part of. Over 5,000 studies last year, with a big tailwind from the One Big Beautiful Bill bringing back 100% bonus depreciation.
To hold the pace in 2026 we are building new channels. The plan is partnerships with CPAs and brokers. If you're either, we should talk.
Quality of Earnings reports for buyers of businesses in the $1–30M range. Two months old. Four engagements sold. My partners are Michael Girdley, Will McCurdy as CEO, Robyn Smith, Ty Deemer, and the great Roger Ledbetter.
Will audited at PwC and was a Transaction Advisory Manager at RSM. He's the guy you want reading the numbers before you wire $4M to a seller.
This one came from watching buyers almost overpay because the seller said EBITDA was $1.2M and the real number was $840K. Nobody was serving the $1–30M range with real rigor.
Girdley approached me about starting something new through his venture studio and this was our best idea. So we built it.
Four firms. Over 200 people. One audience.
WHAT THE WORK IS
The brochure answer is that we help business owners keep more of what they make. The real answer, after a decade of this, is simpler.
An accountant tells you the truth about your numbers and what they mean for the rest of your life.
The truth about whether the business is a job or an asset. Whether the tax strategy is real or hope. Whether the deal you're about to close is what the seller says it is.
Read enough founder stories and the accountant is always there. First hire, or the founder himself, or the bookkeeper who became the CFO who ran the place for forty years.
The accountant was the founder's partner because telling the truth about the numbers was what made the rest of the company possible.
Then the work got commodified into compliance and the accountant got pushed into a corner. Most of what most accountants do all day is throughput. It scaled to 200-person firms and it requires no judgment, no relationship, no truth-telling.
That's the part that's leaving. The four firms are my bet on what's left when it's gone.
A kind of truth-telling for a kind of life.
Visor for the solopreneur whose life is a service business.
Baldridge Ledbetter for the operator running a multi-entity stack.
RE Cost Seg for the investor whose life is real estate.
Bedrock for the buyer whose life is about to change shape.
WHAT I LEARNED THIS YEAR
Across thousands of business owners, investors, and buyers, here's what I'd want you to take from the year even if you never become a client.
- Bonus depreciation is back. Use it. The OBBB restored 100%. If you bought rental property in 2023, 2024, or 2025 and never ran a cost seg study, you're leaving five-figure deductions on the table. The easiest win in real estate. Run a study on every property worth more than $250K.
- Don't buy a business without a QoE. Two-thirds of the P&Ls we reviewed for buyers this year had material adjustments. Personal expenses in COGS. Inflated add-backs. Revenue that won't transfer. The seller's $1.2M EBITDA is never $1.2M. Buying in the $1–30M range without a Quality of Earnings report is guessing on the most expensive transaction of your life.
- AI is going to commodify the compliance part of accounting. There's a story going around about Perplexity running its whole finance function on one controller and a stack of agents. Five years ago that was a 12-person team. Inside firms it's the same trade. Reconciliations, first-pass returns, anomaly detection, tax research, diligence prep. Agents do all of it inside five years. If you're paying your CPA for that work, you're paying for the part that's about to be free. The judgment part gets more valuable, not less. Pay for the judgment.
- Solopreneurs are the most over-vendored people in small business. A bookkeeper, a CPA, a tax preparer, a planner, a payroll service. None of them talk to each other. The gap between them is a $10,000 penalty. The fix is one stack and one team that knows your situation.
- The 1950 firm is coming back. Here's the prediction. In five years, more than half the compliance revenue at a typical CPA firm is gone to software. The roll-ups paying record multiples are betting against it. The firms that survive look more like 1950 than 2020. Smaller. Higher-judgment. Built around partners who know the client's business. If you're shopping for a CPA, ask what they're doing about AI. If you don't get a real answer, shop again.
WHAT IT COST, AND WHAT I GOT WRONG
Three boys at home, ages 8, 5, and almost 2. A wife I love. Four firms. Over 200 people.
It's a lot.
The cost doesn't show up where people assume. It shows up in the friends I haven't called and the book on my nightstand I haven't finished. I made the trade on purpose. Family in, business in, everything else out.
The math only works because of the operators and partners I get to work with.
Two things I got wrong.
I was a year late investing in AI tooling at Visor. I should have started rebuilding the product the day ChatGPT could read a bank statement. And I held the Better Bookkeeping name longer than I should have.
A couple of good advisors told me to change it before I bought the domain, but I had to learn on my own.
Same mistake both times. I'm slow to listen when the right person tells me something I don't want to hear.
Working on it.
WHERE YOU FIT
Visor if you're a solopreneur or small S-Corp doing $100K–$2M and you want one team on your books, planning, and filing.
Baldridge Ledbetter if you've got multiple entities, real estate, partners, or equity comp, or you're past $2M with real complexity.
RE Cost Seg if you own rental property and want to create a ton of tax savings.
Bedrock if you're buying or selling a business in the $1–30M range. Email Will at will@bedrockqoe.com.
Not sure which one? Hit reply and we'll point you in the right direction.
It's not what you make. It's what you keep. That hasn't changed since the first issue and it isn't going to.
I needed four firms to make that real. You don't need four vendors. You need one place to call.
It's the most exciting time to be an accountant in fifty years. I'm glad to be one.
Onward and upward!
Mitchell Baldridge, CPA, CFP®
P.S. If you read this far, thank you. Hit reply and tell me what you think. I read every one.