Bennett Thrasher grows beyond Atlanta roots

Bennett Thrasher, a Top 100 company based in Atlanta, has increased its headcount and footprint despite the talent shortage, growing 17% in the first quarter of the year.

The company ranked 64th on Accounting today2024 Top 100 Firms list, with annual revenue of $102.79 million in fiscal year 2023. Under the leadership of Managing Partner Jeff Call, the firm has become the sixth largest accounting firm of Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, and experienced 23% growth in its workforce while opening new locations in Dallas and Denver.

“We were lucky,” Call said. “Atlanta has been a great market, and then we launched into Dallas and Denver, which are also great markets. The advantage we have is we have a very entrepreneurial culture. Our partners have that mindset and this allowed us to launch a lot of different advisory groups.

The company launched a BT Finance and Executive Search group this year and is in the process of establishing a private funds accounting administration practice. “For private equity funds, they often prefer to outsource the accounting administration of their private funds,” Call said. “We brought someone in here who was working with a large local private equity firm, and she started the practice for us.”

The firm is also relaunching a bankruptcy restructuring practice. During the pandemic, Bennett Thrasher has focused more on COVID-related relief services, such as employee retention credits and the Paycheck Protection Program. After the partner specializing in those services retired, BT hired two people in Dallas who now focus on bankruptcy restructuring and CFO advisory work.

Last year, BT grew by just over 17%, surpassing the average growth rate of 12.88% among the 100 largest companies. Call pointed out that BT achieved much of this growth organically. “You have a number of companies that are making a lot of acquisitions and experiencing very significant growth,” he said. “If you look at the average organic growth, it’s probably closer to 10% or less. But for us, being able to grow 17% last year was a good thing, and we’re currently at 17% growth. in the first three months of the year this year We have not finalized our April financial results, but I believe we will be on the same path this year.

Much of this is driven by BT’s consulting practices. “We have seen considerable growth in these advisory practices and the lower middle market that we operate in has not been as impacted as the Big Four advisory practices,” Call said. “We’ve seen them make some layoffs.”

Within this market, Bennett Thrasher assists private equity-backed and other privately held companies in need of advisory assistance. “Our transaction advisory services group is experiencing tremendous growth,” Call said. “We work a lot on the quality of earnings and M&A deals. This is an area where some of the larger companies are struggling because the high end of the market is more negatively impacted by rising interest rates , which impacts their ability to do debt financing on these transactions. But in the area that we are in, there is much less leverage on these middle market transactions. $50 (million) to $200 million probably often has less leverage, so it doesn’t impact the client space that we’re in as much.

BT did it a small acquisition last September from a specialty Denver-area tax assessment company called Intrinsic, but Call noted that the deal closed toward the end of the year and likely had less than a 1 percent impact on its numbers. He estimates that 16% of the company’s growth was entirely organic last year.

He expects further growth despite the rise of private equity firms in the accounting profession, which would result in some competing firms losing clients and employees.

“We saw that as a little benefit for us, because as some private equity deals happen, they disenfranchise some of their clients because they’re pushing for higher fees, and that’s an opportunity for us,” says Appel. “We also find that some people who have worked at these companies don’t want to work for a private equity-backed company because it’s much more about numbers, and the culture could be negatively affected. We’ve seen talented people working for these other companies looking for a company like ours that has a people-first culture, and that’s created opportunities for us because there’s been some market disruption.

He sees private equity firms as being more focused on revenue, financial results and stock value. “They’re trying to make sure that the next bite at the apple in three, five, seven years is substantial, so they have to go really hard on the financial economy,” Call said. “We want to be very profitable and have a strong financial economy as well, but I think we have more of a people-first mentality. If we do the right thing for our employees and take care of them, they will do a job by taking care of them take care of our customers and our business will prosper financially.

Call has been with Bennett Thrasher for nearly 22 years after working at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte, but he prefers the approach his company takes. “We always say we lead with culture and growth will come, and it has,” he said. “We hire great people, we give them the right tools to do their jobs well, we train them, we develop them, we care about them. And when we do that, they take great care of our customers and our business develops as a result.”