How This CPA Firm Built a 250 Employee Practice | Toby Kommer Video
Growing Your Firm | Strategies for Accountants, CPA's, Bookkeepers , and Tax ProfessionalsShow Notes
What if the secret to building a highly scalable, multi-million dollar practice isn't just growing an accounting firm, but surrounding it with banking, legal, wealth management, and insurance services? In this episode of Growing Your Firm, host David Cristello sits down with Tobby Kommer, CEO of Haga Kommer and President of Aspire Bank and Aspire Insurance. Tobby brings a unique background from the banking and M&A sectors, rather than traditional public accounting, allowing him to rethink the entire accounting firm business model. Over the last decade, Tobby has led over 35 acquisitions of CPA firms, growing his practice from a 12-person team to over 250 employees across 15 locations. He shares his exact framework for running an acquisitive firm, restructuring partner and staff compensation around production instead of billable hours, and preparing his company for a 100% Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) transition. In this episode, we explore: The Integrated One-Stop Shop: Why bringing banking, legal, wealth management, insurance, and CPA services under one umbrella creates the ultimate client retention engine.
The CPA as the "Center of the Universe": Why Tobby originally thought banking would lead the client relationship—and why CPAs actually hold far more client trust.
Acquiring 5 to 8 CPA Firms Annually: How Haga Kommer positions itself as the "acquirer of choice" for 1M–2M firms looking for an alternative to private equity.
Replacing Billable Hours with Production Pay: How Tobby structures salary increases and trimester reviews based on output rather than time logged.
Eliminating Firm Hierarchy: Why Haga Kommer dropped traditional titles (Associate, Senior, Manager, Partner) in favor of transparent, production-based compensation.
The Internal Leadership Academy: How Tobby uses quarterly 2-day offsites, book reviews (like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team), and sports documentary studies (like The Last Dance) to train emerging leaders.
Transitioning to an ESOP: Why Tobby is transitioning his 100% single-owner equity model into an employee-owned firm.
Key Metrics & Operational Frameworks: Scale Benchmark: 250+ employees across 15 offices, with a target client size of $10M and under in revenue.
Office Structure: Hub-and-spoke model keeping individual locations small and personal (10–20 employees) with back-office corporate support.
Culture Alignment: Open P&Ls shared down to administrative assistants to align performance with overall firm health.
Featured Guest: Toby Kommer
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