Aiming for the billion-dollar revenue club

In November 2024, PKF O’Connor Davies, an accounting firm with a 135-year legacy, accepted investment from private equity firms Investcorp and Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments. A year later, it announced a goal of reaching $1 billion a year in revenue. It also restructured much of its leadership, keeping CEO Kevin Keane but bringing in Philip Comerford, an exec with a lengthy PE resume focused on business services investments, as CFO.

These moves might cause a traditionalist to worry that the firm would soon change beyond recognition: Many PE-backed accounting firms have embarked on aggressive plans for expansion, pursuing multiple acquisitions, upgrading their technology, and increasing revenues with astonishing speed.

PKF O’Connor Davies, the nation’s 25th-largest accounting firm, has seen its revenue rise 41% since 2024, going from $380 million to $535 million, and its partner ranks grew a little more than 10% year over year. Reaching $1 billion in revenue would, as of Accounting Today’s 2026 list of the top 100 firms, move it about to the 15th-largest firm. However, PKF O’Connor Davies’s strategy is more tried-and-true than expand-at-all-costs, Comerford told CFO Brew.

Complex role. Previously a principal with PE firm Warburg Pincus and a VP at Investcorp, Comerford has enjoyed the move to operations. “I’d always gravitated more toward the portfolio management side of investing, partnering with management teams,” he said. It’s “much more rewarding of a career, in my mind.”

Running a business, Comerford has found, is challenging. For one thing, there are far more stakeholders. “In private equity, you typically just interact with the management team,” he said. Now, he’s helping to manage a firm with over 200 partners, over 1,700 employees, a board, and many clients.

The numbers side is more complex as well. In private equity, “you get all these really great, clean outputs…and data that looks great,” Comerford said, but as a CFO, “you kind of realize that the data is never going to be perfect.” Now, instead of examining initiatives that “look great in Excel,” he said, he’s “responsible for actually delivering [them].”

He also appreciates the fact that accounting firms work on a different time frame than many PE investments. “The horizon’s a lot longer, where you’re building a business for the long term, rather than the immediate deal sprint,” he said.

PE funds boost. At PKF O’Connor Davies, Comerford doesn’t see much tension between generating revenue and providing good client services. The PE investment, he said, was “an accelerant rather than a fundamental change in strategy.” The firm’s recipe for growth, which predates its PE deal, is a familiar one: Sell existing clients more services. “We kind of wrap our arms around the client by offering a holistic suite of services that they potentially need,” he said. Partners have “multiple touchpoints with the client,” which “creates additional stickiness with our customers,” Comerford said, and ideally leads to increased revenue per client as well as more referrals.

The PE capital has allowed the firm to “be flexible as we think about making specific investments,” Comerford said, such as technology—especially AI—and employee compensation and rewards. It’s also pursuing M&A, and has made three acquisitions so far this year.

The right deals. PKF O’Connor Davies is very deliberate about its acquisitions, Comerford said. “Overall, we pass on a lot more deals than we ultimately end up doing,” he said. In his experience, he said, making acquisitions for the sake of scaling, without paying attention to alignment, leads to poor deals.

The firm looks for acquisition targets that can help it “build density” in its traditional stronghold of the East Coast, Comerford said. In a few years, it might look to expand nationally, or add more service lines. But the target’s cultural fit is the most important element: “Ultimately, it starts and stops with culture,” he said. The firms it acquires have often “run into capacity constraints on their end,” he said. By joining PKF O’Connor Davies, they can continue to serve the same clients while tapping into the larger firm’s technology and resources.

Comerford doesn’t see the trend toward greater consolidation in accounting changing any time soon. “The independent [firms] have a really important decision to make over the next, probably, 18 months” as to whether to become part of a larger firm or go it alone, he said. But the client-centered firm won’t disappear. “I think there is a role to play, in our size and sweet spot, where we still have that kind of local feel,” he said. “That client touchpoint is so critical and will continue to exist.”