By Drew Bernstein
November is a month of transition and gratitude. The first day of November 2024 marked the end of Marcum LLP as an independent brand of auditors and advisors, with the closing of its acquisition by CBIZ to create a $2.8 billion goliath.
Jeffrey Weiner, the architect of this deal, has had one of the most impressive and improbable career trajectories of anyone in the accounting industry. In his early 20s, Jeff became the seventh employee at an obscure little accounting firm on Long Island called Marcum & Kliegman. Over 43 years, Jeff expanded Marcum into a nationwide firm with over 4,000 employees. Jeff was an M&A machine, absorbing dozens of his former competitors before engineering the firm’s sale for $2.3 billion.
I first met Jeff 14 years ago when my partner and I decided we needed to be affiliated with a more prominent accounting firm to meet the needs of Asian companies listing on the U.S. stock markets. We explained that we weren’t ready to be bought out and that managing employees and clients based in Asia required a particular approach.
“How about this? You keep running your business, we will give you the brand and systems you need to grow, and we will operate as a joint venture,” he proposed. And with that and some assistance from the lawyers, a deal was struck, and a new firm, MarcumAsia, was born.
In our years of partnership, we gained an invaluable education about what is required for outsized success in the professional services industry.
- Rule by Fiat – Jeff was the undisputed leader of the firm. He set the rules and expectations everyone had to follow, including him. Whenever a conflict was brought to Jeff’s attention, he would settle it quickly, cutting through the cant and personalities with a single focus – what would advance the health and profitability of Marcum? Jeff’s management style allowed him to make deals quickly; those on the other side of the table knew he had the authority to negotiate terms, and they knew who they would report to the day after the deal closed.
- Betting on People – Jeff was savvy enough to recognize the limits of his expertise and sought out the smartest, hardest-working people he could find to lead each functional area. He knew acquisition-driven growth is a formula for disaster without the people and infrastructure to weld each disparate piece into a single firm. He could juggle multiple deals continually by confidently handing them off to seasoned integration teams.
- Clarity of Decision-making – Jeff continually evaluated the firm’s health according to a model he referred to as the matrix. The matrix told Jeff which parts of the practice were healthy and which had become flabby or diseased. By abstracting personnel decisions from personalities, he could make hard decisions quickly, even when they impacted those close to him. And while Jeff worked off a well-thought-out acquisition framework, he insisted on never setting financial targets that would drive M&A decisions. He felt that revenue and profit, while important, should be the outcome of good choices, never the driver of marginal decisions.
- Leaders Run Toward Risk – Jeff did not often immerse himself in the firm’s daily operations, with one exception: if a transaction entailed an unusual level of risk. From him, I learned that while weak leaders push risk to their underlings to avoid being blamed, strong leaders home in on risk as if their professional lives depended on it – as in fact they often do.
Today, the accounting and advisory industry is changing again as private equity firms take stakes in many storied names and seek to build them up for sale three to five years later. How will the private equity model change the incentives and culture of these former partnerships? Will they be able to attract the next generation of talent? Time will tell.
While Jeff entertained a potential private equity deal for Marcum, he ultimately decided that it made more sense to “cut out the middleman” and sell the practice to the public company most likely to be the ultimate buyer when the PE owners sought to dispose of it. This is another example of cutting to the heart to find a solution others might have overlooked.
The Marcum name will live on through the middle of 2025 in the name of our firm, MarcumAsia CPAs LLP, until we transition to a new brand and start a new chapter in our independent firm’s history. However, the lessons I learned from Jeff and the legacy he built in the lives of thousands of Marcum employees who grew up with the firm he built will live on for decades to come.
Drew Bernstein is co-founder and co-chairman of Marcum Asia CPAs LLP, a PCAOB-registered accounting firm, formerly Marcum Bernstein & Pinchuk (MBP), founded in 2010, and Bernstein Pinchuk, founded in 1983.
