Built My Accounting Firm for 20 Years Here's What Selling It Taught Me

The day I handed over the keys to my accountancy practice, I expected to feel relief. What I didn't expect was how unprepared I was not for the paperwork, not for the legal process, but for everything else. The conversations I hadn't had. The decisions I'd left too late. The things I simply didn't know. If you're thinking about how to sell your accountancy practice, this is the story I wish someone had told me twenty years ago or even five.

I started my practice from scratch. One client, a spare bedroom, and a secondhand copy of accounting software that kept crashing. Over two decades, I built something I was genuinely proud of a team of eight, a loyal client base, a reputation in the local business community, and a steady income that had supported my family through everything life threw at us. But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself a question that turned out to be critically important: what happens when I want to stop?

The answer, it turned out, was complicated. And the lessons I learned in the process of deciding to sell your accountancy practice are ones I now wish every practice owner would hear early long before they ever think they're ready to leave.

Lesson One: You'll Never Feel Ready and That's Okay

I told myself for years that I'd sell "when the time was right." When revenues were a bit higher. When I'd hired that extra senior member of staff. When the new software was bedded in. When the kids had finished university. There was always a reason to wait.

What I eventually realised is that the right time rarely announces itself. It doesn't arrive with a fanfare or a convenient gap in your diary. More often, it creeps up in the form of tiredness, a health scare, a change in the market, or simply the quiet realisation that your enthusiasm for the work has quietly faded while you weren't looking.

The founders who get the best outcomes when they sell your accountancy practice are almost always the ones who started planning early three, four, sometimes five years before they actually went to market. Not because they were desperate to leave, but because they understood that preparation takes time, and that a well-prepared practice commands a significantly higher price than one sold in a hurry.

I didn't start planning early enough. That's lesson one.

Lesson Two: Your Practice Is Worth More Than You Think If You Do the Work

For years, I had a vague sense of what my practice was worth. I'd heard the rule of thumb roughly one times recurring fees and assumed that was the number I'd get. What I didn't appreciate was how much variation there is around that number, and how much of it is within your control.

Buyers don't just pay for revenue. They pay for certainty. They want to know that the clients will stay, that the team will hold together, that the income is genuinely recurring, and that they're not buying a business that falls apart the moment the original owner walks out the door. Every one of those things can be improved and every improvement moves the multiple upward.

In the eighteen months before I went to market, I worked with advisors to tighten up our engagement letters, move more clients onto recurring service packages, introduce my senior team members more formally into client relationships, and clean up years of slightly chaotic financial records. The difference in the offers I received compared to what I'd have got two years earlier was significant. Not life-changing, but significant. And it was almost entirely down to preparation.

Lesson two: the value of your practice is not fixed. You have more control over it than you realise.

Lesson Three: Client Relationships Are Everything and That's Both Your Strength and Your Risk

My clients liked me. Many of them had been with me for ten, fifteen, even twenty years. We'd been through their business growth, their divorces, their bereavements, their retirements. I knew their families. I knew their numbers better than they did. And for most of my career, I saw that depth of relationship as one of my greatest assets.

When I came to sell your accountancy practice, I saw it differently. All those deep, personal, long-standing relationships built around me were also a risk. A risk that buyers had to price in. What happened if those clients didn't take to the new owner? What if they decided a change of ownership was a good moment to shop around? What if they'd only stayed loyal because of me personally, and had no particular affinity for the practice itself?

These were uncomfortable questions. And the honest answer was that I didn't fully know. I'd never really invested in making sure clients felt connected to the practice as a whole to my team, to our processes, to our brand. It had always been about the relationship between me and them.

The practices that command the highest prices are those where clients have relationships with multiple team members where the departure of the founder is a transition, not a loss. Building that takes time. It took me years to understand it, and not quite enough time to fully fix it before I sold.

Lesson three: start sharing your client relationships with your team long before you plan to leave.

Lesson Four: The Due Diligence Process Will Test Your Patience and Your Records

I've done due diligence on clients' businesses many times over the years. I thought I understood it. What I didn't fully appreciate was how it feels to be on the receiving end of it particularly when the business being scrutinised is something you've poured two decades of your life into.

Buyers are thorough. They should be. They're about to hand over a significant sum of money, and they want to be sure they know what they're getting. That means going through your financial records in detail, reviewing every client engagement letter, examining your compliance procedures, assessing your staff contracts, and asking questions that sometimes felt, to me, unnecessarily forensic.

The aspects of the process that slowed us down were almost entirely things I could have addressed in advance. Missing or out-of-date engagement letters for several long-standing clients. A couple of years where the practice accounts were less cleanly presented than they should have been. A reliance on informal arrangements with staff that looked fine in practice but weren't properly documented.

None of it was catastrophic. But it created delays, it gave the buyer's team things to flag, and it introduced uncertainty at a stage of the process where you really want everything to feel clean and straightforward. If you're planning to sell your accountancy practice, get your records in order long before any buyer ever asks to see them.

Lesson four: due diligence rewards preparation and punishes procrastination.

Lesson Five: The Right Buyer Matters More Than the Highest Offer

When offers started coming in, my instinct like most sellers, I suspect was to focus on the number. Higher is better. Obviously. But the more I thought about it, and the more conversations I had with my advisors, the more I realised that the number was only part of the story.

The structure of the deal matters enormously. How much is paid upfront versus deferred? Is there an earnout where part of the payment is tied to client retention after the sale? What are the conditions? How long is the handover period? A higher headline figure with a large earnout tied to unrealistic retention targets can end up being worth considerably less than a lower offer with clean, certain payment terms.

But beyond the financials, there's something else. Who is this person, and what are they going to do with what I've spent twenty years building? That might sound sentimental, and perhaps it is. But your clients are real people. Your staff have lives and mortgages and career aspirations. The buyer who acquires your practice will have a significant impact on all of them.

I turned down the highest offer I received. I don't regret it. The buyer I chose was a better cultural fit, had a track record of treating acquired practices and their clients with genuine care, and offered deal terms that felt fair and clean. Two years on, virtually all of my former clients are still with the practice. That outcome matters to me perhaps more than I expected it to.

Lesson five: choose the right buyer, not just the highest bidder.

Lesson Six: Get Specialist Help Not Just Any Help

I made the mistake, early on, of assuming that because I was an accountant, I understood enough about the transaction to manage large parts of it myself. I also initially approached a general business broker, on the basis that a sale is a sale.

Both of those assumptions cost me time and, I believe, money. Accountancy practice sales are a genuinely specialist area. The valuation methods, the buyer pool, the due diligence expectations, the deal structures all of it is specific to this sector in ways that a general business broker simply doesn't understand at the same depth.

Working with specialists who focus exclusively on accountancy practices made a material difference to my experience and, I believe, to my outcome. They knew the market. They knew what buyers expected. They knew how to position my practice in the most favourable light without overpromising. And they managed the process with a level of structure and confidentiality that I couldn't have replicated on my own.

If you're serious about getting the best outcome when you sell your accountancy practice, work with people who do this every day not people who do it occasionally alongside everything else.

Lesson six: specialist advice pays for itself many times over.

Lesson Seven: Life After the Sale Takes Adjustment

This one surprised me most of all. I thought I knew what I wanted post-sale: time. Freedom. The ability to travel, to read, to spend more time with people I'd neglected while building the business. And I do have those things now. But the transition was harder than I expected.

For twenty years, my identity was bound up in the practice. I was the person my clients called. I was the boss my team looked to. I was the one who worried about cash flow and staffing and regulatory changes. Taking all of that away even willingly leaves a gap that takes time to fill.

I say this not to discourage anyone from selling, but to encourage honest reflection about what comes next. The most content sellers I've spoken to since my own sale are those who had a clear sense of what they were moving towards, not just what they were leaving behind. Whether that's a portfolio career, mentoring other founders, a new venture, or a genuine retirement having a plan for your next chapter makes the transition significantly easier.

Lesson seven: plan for life after the sale, not just the sale itself.

What I'd Tell Anyone Thinking About Selling Their Practice Today

Twenty years is a long time to build something. The process of letting go doing it well, on your own terms, in a way that's fair to your clients, your staff, and yourself deserves as much care and thought as any other major decision you'll make in your professional life.

Start earlier than you think you need to. Get your records in order. Reduce your personal dependency on the practice. Build your team's relationships with clients. Understand what your practice is worth and what you can do to increase that value. Choose advisors who truly understand this market. And think carefully about who you want to sell to, not just what you want them to pay.

The decision to sell your accountancy practice is one of the biggest you'll make. Make it with the information, preparation, and support it deserves. I wish I had.