Aprio, a Top 50 Firm based in Atlanta, has watched its revenues increase from mergers and organic growth since rebranding over five years ago and plans further M&A activity ahead.
The firm, which
The firm’s name isn’t the only one that changed. The managing partner and CEO legally changed his name to Richard Barry Aprio Kopelman to push through a state-issued license in North Carolina and other states because no one in the company had the name Aprio.
“I couldn’t change my whole name,” he told Accounting Today. “I didn’t think my mom would like that. I did call her ahead of time just to check on it.”
He noted that over the last five years since the firm rebranded, Aprio has grown from a single-office CPA firm in Atlanta with 400 people generating approximately $70 million in revenue to over 950 staff members in 14 offices globally approaching $250 million by July 1 on a run rate basis. Earlier this year, Aprio went through two mergers, with
The firm had been growing rapidly, even before the latest M&A deals, while adding services in newer areas such as cryptocurrency and environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.
“We’ve been very deep in crypto for 12 years,” said Kopelman. “We tend to be very disruptive like our name, and entrepreneurial, from the roots of the firm being founded by three entrepreneurs 70 years ago, and as a result of those roots and our name and behavior, we tend to experiment a lot. We’ll continue to execute our merger and acquisition strategy, looking for opportunities in key markets. Those key markets might be geographic markets. They might be market segments and service capabilities.”
He noted that over the past 15 years the firm has added more than 35 specialty services. “That’s very attractive to our merger partners because now they can solve more client problems and deliver results and greater client impacts,” said Kopelman. “We’ll continue to build out. We are building out many of our segments on a national basis today, regardless of geographic footprint. We have people now in more than 40 states, and 100 people in the Philippines.”
The office in the Philippines is located on the old Clark Air Base that the U.S. Air Force used to occupy until 1991. The firm is also involved in a small joint venture in the U.K. to provide local services.
Since the pandemic, Aprio has been operating in a hybrid mode, with employees working both in the office and remotely. “We actually had an experience where we’ve hired six people in the Raleigh area who actually wanted an office to go to, so we recently added a Raleigh office for the team there in the Research Triangle,” said Kopelman.
Aprio has been expanding its services for clients. “Two fast-growth areas for us in the technology space are in fintech and health care IT, including information assurance services around SOC 1, SOC 2 and ISO 27001,” said Kopelman. “We’re Hitrust certified as well. Those are areas within technology. Other major practices for us are in the real estate area, across all types of markets, rental real estate as well as affordable and public housing, manufacturing and distribution, professional services with a very significant focus on the dental space on a national level and high net worth are major focuses for the firm. We recently added a key leader in our restaurant and hospitality practice, and we’re going to take a more national approach there.”
Aprio’s advisory business has grown from $6 million to $20 million over the past three years, according to Kopelman. “That’s been driven by the addition of a number of different service capabilities, from talent solutions to cyber to digital transformation, the expansion of our transaction advisory practice, mergers and acquisitions, private equity practices and valuation.”
To handle the increasing work, Aprio has also been investing heavily in technology. “We increased our technology spend by more than a third in each of the last few years,” said Kopelman. “We continued to invest in everything from automation to productivity, efficiency enhancement tools, things that can drive the experience of our people, and allow our folks to focus on delivering results for our clients, driving client impacts, and moving away from any kind of data entry and manual tasks. We continue to lean in on technology to create an equitable experience for everybody working, whether they’re in an office or working remotely. Data activation is a big key for us in order to provide an environment where we can work most effectively, and that goes along with being relentless about improvement.”
