Gary Thomson, Founder and Managing Partner For decades, public accounting operated with a degree of predictability. Firms addressed technology upgrades, succession planning, talent shortages, and mergers one challenge at a time. Today, those pressures are colliding simultaneously. CPA firms are navigating AI disruption, rising technology investment demands, partner retirements, changing ownership structures, and accelerating consolidation all at once, forcing a rethink of growth, leadership, capital, and long-term sustainability. As a result, many firms are looking for advisors who understand strategy and have personally operated through those same challenges.
That is the space Thomson Consulting has built itself around. Founded by Gary Thomson, the company serves as advisors to CPA leaders confronting complex strategic, operational, and ownership decisions through the lens of real-world experience. Before launching Thomson Consulting, Gary built his own CPA firm from the ground up into one of the largest in the U.S., an experience that now shapes the company’s advisory approach. Its leadership team has spent decades within CPA firms and understands the realities of running them amid accelerated industry transformation.
“Firms want advisors who understand the industry pressures firsthand, and we excel in that,” says Thomson.
Practice management advisory remains a significant part of the company’s work. Thomson Consulting advises CPA firms on governance structures, partner compensation, succession planning, ownership transitions, profitability strategy, and broader strategic planning initiatives as firms adapt to changing operational and competitive realities. The company works closely with managing partners and CEOs in ongoing advisory relationships, participating in leadership meetings, strategic planning sessions, and board-level discussions throughout the year.
Other engagements are focused on mergers, acquisitions, and independence strategy. As consolidation activity accelerates across public accounting, many firms are reassessing how they fund future investments, scale operations, remain competitive, and prepare for generational transition. Some pursue acquisition opportunities while the rest are equally committed to remaining independent. Thomson Consulting takes both paths from a neutral advisory perspective, helping leadership teams evaluate options without imposing a predetermined direction.
Leadership development has also become increasingly important as firms prepare younger professionals for ownership roles during one of the profession’s most significant periods of change. Thomson Consulting works with firms to help emerging leaders prepare for the strategic, operational, and organizational responsibilities tied to long term leadership.
Firms want advisors who understand the industry pressures firsthand, and we excel in that.
Alongside its advisory engagements, the company maintains a strong presence in industry conversations through public speaking and professional education. Thomson spends a substantial portion of the year speaking at firm retreats, leadership events, and association gatherings across the country, helping CPA leaders interpret how broader industry shifts translate into operational decisions inside their organizations.
While Thomson Consulting works with firms across the profession, its deepest focus is often on firms ranked roughly between 31 and 200 nationally. Those organizations are often trying to grow while simultaneously managing leadership succession, technology investments, hiring shortages, and decisions about whether to remain independent or pursue merger opportunities. Having scaled firms through similar stages himself, Thomson understands the challenges those leadership teams face.
One recent engagement reflected many of those dynamics. Working with a Top 100 CPA firm, Thomson Consulting guided leadership through a strategic process focused on defining the organization’s long-term direction, identifying investment priorities, and evaluating whether independence or merger best aligned with the firm’s future. Over roughly 15 months, the engagement ultimately resulted in a merger with one of the country’s largest firms. Thomson views the transaction as only part of the success. Equally important were the decision-making process, the alignment across leadership and the confidence that every perspective had been heard throughout.
That emphasis on practical experience extends across Thomson Consulting’s broader team, whose backgrounds span leadership development, strategy, governance compensation planning, operational scaling, data analytics, and AI supported capabilities developed through decades inside the accounting profession.
The pressures reshaping public accounting are unlikely to slow anytime soon and are driving firms toward more experienced, operationally grounded advisors. Thomson Consulting sits at that intersection, helping leadership teams make high-stakes decisions with greater alignment, clarity, and confidence about where their firms go next.
CPA Firm Advisory for a Changing Profession
CPA firms are facing a compressed period of decision-making. For decades, public accounting changed at a measured pace; now technology investment, talent scarcity, succession pressure and capital planning are arriving together. That overlap changes what firms should expect from management consulting. Advice that treats each issue as a separate project can miss how governance, partner alignment, growth strategy and capital decisions influence one another. Executives need advisory support that helps leadership groups make clear choices while moving at market pace.
The strongest consulting work in this space begins by understanding how CPA firms make decisions. Partnership structures, compensation expectations, partner buyouts and admission of new owners create dynamics that differ sharply from standard corporate consulting assignments. A sound recommendation can fail if it does not account for owner consensus, generational leadership transition or the economics of professional service firms. The right advisor must be able to read the room, understand the numbers, handle partner sensitivities and guide difficult conversations without pushing the firm toward a predetermined answer.
Strategic planning also needs to be grounded in the firm’s real capacity. Many firms want growth or independence, but those goals require clarity about available funding, leadership commitment, owner support and future-partner readiness. A useful advisory process should link future ambition to priorities and then to funding choices. This matters when firms are deciding whether to remain independent, combine with a larger platform, prepare for succession or pursue acquisitions of their own. The question is rarely whether change is coming; it is whether the firm has enough shared understanding to choose its path deliberately.
Leadership development belongs inside the same conversation. CPA firms often promote technically strong professionals into ownership before they have fully learned governance, client economics, accountability and people leadership at the partner level. Consulting support should help rising leaders understand the responsibilities they are about to assume, not only the status they are about to receive. For managing partners and CEOs, the value is just as practical: an outside advisor can provide perspective during compensation redesign, partner conflict, board deliberations and succession discussions that internal leaders may struggle to frame neutrally.
M&A advice demands particular discipline. A merger, acquisition, sale or private equity conversation should not begin with the transaction itself. It should begin with the firm’s future and the trade-offs involved in funding it independently or through combination. Firms that rush into process without alignment can create confusion among owners and weaken negotiating confidence. Firms that take time to clarify direction can enter discussions with greater control, whether they choose a deal or decide to stay independent.
Thomson Consulting stands out as a premier choice for CPA firms that want advisory support rooted in lived public-accounting leadership. It focuses on partner retreats and facilitation, vision and strategic planning, practice management consulting, M&A and private equity consulting, leadership coaching and development, and speaking for CPA and professional services firms, aligning with the precise decisions leaders face. Its team’s background inside CPA firm growth, governance, compensation, leadership training and transaction work gives the company credibility in rooms where owners need candor, neutrality, context and practical direction. For firms weighing growth, independence, succession or combination, Thomson Consulting offers a focused path forward.
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