How to Choose a PR agency for Accounting firms

By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026

Accounting firms once grew the way churches do, by inheritance. A client arrived through a partner, a banker or a golf game, and stayed for thirty years. That pipeline is thinning in the open: the AICPA Trends report (2025) counted 55,152 accounting degrees awarded in the 2023 to 2024 academic year, down 6.6 percent and the lowest level in roughly two decades. Fewer accountants, hungrier consolidators, and clients who now research firms the way they research surgeons. This guide shows how to pick an agency for a market where referrals still close deals but no longer start enough of them.

55,152: accounting degrees awarded in 2023 to 2024, the lowest in about twenty years (AICPA Trends, 2025) 11,985: new graduates hired by public accounting firms in 2024 (AICPA Trends, 2025) 1 billion dollars: approximate equity cheque behind the Baker Tilly deal of February 2024 (Global Finance, 2024)

I Tabulae

Your ledger is impeccable and your market cannot read it

Here is the distinction most firms miss. Technical excellence is audited every year by regulators and peers. Market reputation is never audited at all, so it drifts on whatever partners said at conferences a decade ago.

A managing partner believes the firm stands for sophisticated tax planning. Prospects believe the firm stands for whatever the first two search results say. PR, done properly, closes that gap with evidence: named expertise, published analysis, cited partners.

A firm is worth what strangers believe before the first meeting. Everything else is billing.

II Structura

Private equity rebuilt the chessboard while you were closing the audit

In February 2024, Baker Tilly announced an investment of roughly 1 billion dollars from Hellman and Friedman and Valeas Capital Partners, then the largest private equity deal in the United States CPA profession. Grant Thornton took New Mountain Capital the same year, and Citrin Cooperman used its own sponsor backing to complete 17 acquisitions on the way to becoming a firm of about 600 million dollars in revenue.

Each deal runs on an alternative practice structure. The licensed CPA firm keeps attest work. A separate entity holds tax, advisory and everything reputational.

That separation is why this guide exists. The entity that can market aggressively is newly funded, newly branded and newly hungry, and it will happily recruit your clients and your seniors while your partnership debates a website refresh. For the full map of what a modern programme includes, start with the resources library and count how many topics your current firm has published nothing about.

III Exemplum

Baker Tilly sells a future, not a compliance history

Watch what the consolidators actually bought. Baker Tilly then combined with Moss Adams in 2025, emerging with more than 11,000 employees and over 3 billion dollars in revenue, under one name, in one story, told everywhere at once.

The lesson is not that independents must merge. The lesson is that the combined firm behaves like a media company with an accounting licence: constant commentary, constant research, constant presence in the Journal of Accountancy and Accounting Today when owners are deciding whom to call.

An independent firm of eighty people cannot match that volume. It can, however, own three topics completely, such as construction tax, dental practice transitions or state credits for manufacturers, and be the inevitable quote inside them.

Copy the consolidators selectively, because their playbook contains one poisoned item. What transfers: the cadence, the research habit, the discipline of announcing growth with evidence attached. What does not transfer: the voice. Platform firms speak in the flattened optimism of companies perpetually preparing for an exit, and clients can hear it. An independent firm's advantage is that its partners still sound like owners, with opinions, local knowledge and the occasional unfashionable position stated plainly. An agency that sands that voice down to corporate smoothness has deleted your only structural edge. The brief should say so in writing: sharpen the partners, never embalm them.

IV Onus

Silence now costs recruiting classes, not just clients

The AICPA Trends report (2025) found that firms hired 11,985 new graduates in 2024, and 75 percent of firms that hired expected to hire the same number or more the following year, while the graduate supply shrank to a twenty year low.

In a market that tight, employer reputation is a bidding asset. A graduate comparing two offers searches both firms. One returns partner profiles, commentary and community presence. The other returns a careers page and a stock photo of a skyline.

The cost of weak PR therefore shows up in your offer acceptance rate before it shows up in revenue. When the senior you needed signs with a louder firm, the client work you cannot staff quietly follows her.

The lateral market above the graduate level is even more reputation sensitive. Experienced seniors and young partners move for platform and profile as much as for money, and their moves are chronicled in trade titles and state society news. A firm known for publishing its people becomes the default destination when a rainmaker's current platform disappoints her, because she can already see the next five years of her own public record there. Agencies that map these moves, and brief your partners before the recruiter's call rather than after the announcement, can earn a year's retainer in a single placement.

V Penuria

Scarcity is the variable that changes what coverage is for

Most firm marketing was designed for a world of surplus partners and patient clients. Scarcity rewrites the brief. Your scarcest resources are experienced staff and partner attention, and coverage should be bought only where it returns one of those.

That means weighing every story idea against two questions. Does this piece help a specific service line win defined work? Does it make a specific recruit want to work here? A profile that does neither is entertainment, and entertainment is not a line item a partnership should fund.

The agency you want thinks this way natively. Ask candidates how they would spend a small budget if it could only chase one service line and one recruiting class. Vague answers predict vague years. The service scope behind a serious engagement is laid out on this public relations services overview; hold candidates to that standard of specificity.

VI Segmenta

A local firm, a regional firm and a platform firm need different megaphones

VII Occasio

The profession is being re explained in public, and the explainers are hiring

Between 150 hour rule reforms moving through state legislatures, artificial intelligence eating entry level tasks, and sponsors rewriting firm ownership, accounting is being re explained to students, clients and regulators simultaneously. Almost every explainer seat on television panels, podcasts and conference stages is currently filled by the same dozen voices.

That is the opening for your partners. A firm that publishes a clear, defensible position on the pipeline problem, with its own hiring data attached, gets invited to explain the profession. Explaining the profession, it turns out, is the finest client development ever invented.

Plant a flag while the seats are still being assigned. Topics get owners quickly, and second owners get nothing.

Underneath the headline topics sits the workhorse asset almost every firm underuses: its own client data, anonymised and aggregated. A regional firm sees the real economy of its market before any statistics office does, in payrolls, order books and hiring plans across hundreds of private companies. Turned into an annual survey of local business owners, properly sampled and honestly presented, that view becomes the single most quoted document the firm owns, the one journalists call about and prospects forward to each other. Building it is a research exercise with a communications wrapper, which is precisely the kind of work that separates an agency with a publishing mind from one with a pitching habit.

VIII Vox

A twenty person firm with a point of view sounds larger than a silent giant

Prospects cannot inspect your workpapers. They inspect your words. A small firm whose partners publish sharp, specific analysis reads as confident and current, while a large firm publishing nothing reads as a rumour.

This is the equaliser the consolidators understand and most independents refuse to use. Citrin Cooperman did not complete 17 acquisitions on audit quality alone. It arrived in each new market already sounding like the future owner.

Give your agency one partner with genuine opinions and a monthly cadence, and you will be surprised how often the phone rings with your name already pronounced correctly.

IX Consilium

Choose for judgment under independence rules, not for enthusiasm

Accounting punishes sloppy promotion. Independence requirements, state board advertising rules and attest client sensitivities all limit what can be said, and a careless agency can create a compliance headache out of a press release.

Governance decides whether any of this survives contact with a partnership. Set up a two partner editorial board with authority to approve within pre agreed topic lanes, a standing forty five minute monthly slot that survives busy season by being scheduled before it, and a rule that any partner may kill a piece but none may rewrite one by committee. Agencies fail inside firms far more often than firms fail inside agencies: the drafts die in inboxes, the cadence slips a quarter, and the retainer becomes a donation. The right agency will propose this machinery itself, because it has buried enough programmes to know where the bodies are interred.

X Quaesita

Questions managing partners actually ask

Will PR conflict with our independence obligations?

It can, if run carelessly. Testimonials from attest clients, performance claims and certain fee promotions are all restricted territory. A specialist agency knows the map before drafting, which is why independence literacy carries the heaviest weight in the scorecard above.

How do we get partners to participate?

You do not ask the partnership. You recruit two partners with something to say, give them an editor who interviews them for twenty minutes a month, and let envy do the recruiting when their pieces start circulating. Participation follows applause in every firm I have ever seen described.

Should a local firm bother with national coverage?

Almost never as a goal in itself. National mentions are useful as credibility furniture on your site and in proposals. The work itself is won in regional and trade outlets. Buy the coverage your buyers read, which for most firms is listed plainly in the industry resources index.

What does a realistic first year deliver?

Expect a functioning commentary rhythm, two or three genuine trade placements per quarter, a defensible position on one profession wide topic, and a recruiting story with evidence behind it. Anyone promising a cover story a month is selling you a calendar, not a reputation.

How is this different from what our marketing director does?

Your director manages the machine: events, proposals, the website, the CRM. An agency adds outside assets you cannot hire economically, namely editor relationships, senior drafting speed and an external view of which of your stories are actually interesting. The two roles multiply each other when the brief is clear.

Can PR help us sell the firm one day?

Buyers pay for transferable reputation. A firm whose name means something in two niches, independent of any single partner, is simply worth more than an identical firm held together by personal goodwill. That is an argument your partners can price, and it is the same argument that makes diligence teams study how you present your own people, starting with the team page.

What role should rankings and awards play in the plan?

A supporting one, and any agency that leads with them has told you its ceiling. The profession's rankings, Top 100 lists, best firms to work for programmes and regional business journal honours function as verification furniture: useful on a proposal page, reassuring to a recruit, worthless as a strategy. They are also increasingly pay to play adjacent, and sophisticated clients can smell the difference. Budget the hours to enter the legitimate ones well. Spend the money you save by ignoring the rest on commentary that a prospect reads before the shortlist exists, which is where rankings stop mattering entirely.

Which firms should not hire an agency yet?

A firm under twenty professionals with no defined niche and no partner willing to be quoted should fix those three things first. Money spent amplifying an undefined firm buys louder vagueness. A useful comparison is the diligence expected in neighbouring regulated trades, covered in the guide to choosing a PR agency for tax advisory firms.

XI Methodus

How this guide was built, and its limits

The guide draws on the AICPA Trends report (2025) for supply and hiring figures, on Global Finance (2024) and CPA Practice Advisor reporting for the ownership deals, and on Bureau of Labor Statistics outlook data for occupational context. Figures were checked against the publishers own releases where available.

Limits worth naming. The Trends survey depends on firm responses and the AICPA itself cautions that its 2024 hiring total could not be projected with full confidence. Deal values for private transactions are reported figures, not audited ones. Advice here is calibrated to United States firms; the ownership wave is moving differently in the United Kingdom and Australia.

The calibration by size matters as much as the one by country. This guide is written for firms between roughly fifteen and five hundred professionals, where partner visibility is both possible and decisive. The global networks operate under brand architectures and independence constraints of a different order, and the sole practitioner faces a simpler problem, being findable at all, which a website and a state society presence mostly solve. Between those poles sits the contested ground this guide maps, and it is where the next decade of the profession will be decided. Read the scorecard with your own firm's position in that ground honestly located, because the correct agency for a firm defending independence is a different animal from the correct agency for a firm preparing to be acquired.

XII Incipe

Where Frontier Industries fits

Frontier Industries writes for regulated, partner led businesses, and accounting is the home fixture: independence safe drafting, partner handling, trade titles first. If your firm is watching consolidators buy attention in your market, the counter is not outrage. It is a publishing rhythm with your name on it.

Call 401-219-4207 or send the brief your partners would actually approve through the campaign page, and we will tell you honestly whether your firm is ready to be louder.

Sources

1. AICPA, Trends in the Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits, 2025, coverage by the Ohio Society of CPAs. https://ohiocpa.com/for-the-public/news/2025/11/06/2025-aicpa-trends-report--accounting-firms-report-strong-hiring-outlook 2. CFO Brew, Demand for accounting grads still outstrips supply, 2025. https://www.cfobrew.com/stories/2025/10/28/demand-for-accounting-grads-still-outstrips-supply 3. Global Finance, Accounting Firms Find New Ways To Finance Growth, 2024. https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/accounting-firms-growth/ 4. CPA Practice Advisor, Grant Thornton alternative practice structure reporting, 2025. https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2025/08/25/grant-thornton-to-add-strategy-consulting-firm-stax/167819/ 5. Journal of Accountancy, news and profession coverage. https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/ 6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Accountants and Auditors. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/accountants-and-auditors.htm 7. AICPA and CIMA, profession resources. https://www.aicpa-cima.com/ 8. Accounting Today, accounting profession news. https://www.accountingtoday.com/ 9. NASBA, National Association of State Boards of Accountancy. https://nasba.org/ 10. Treasury Today, Will auditors pay the price, private equity in accounting analysis. https://treasurytoday.com/insight-and-analysis/will-auditors-pay-the-price/