In an industry that is seeing its business model shift, one aspect of this shift — the move toward private equity investment — has dominated headlines and rightfully so.

We sat down with Brett Kelly, founder and CEO of Kelly +Partners, and someone who has had a different approach to the industry that predates the most recent disruption. Kelly started a single accounting firm in Australia in 2006; and two decades later, it's a 43-firm group operating across five countries, compounding revenue at roughly 30% a year, every year, without ever selling equity to outside capital. It's a single firm's story, but it's worth exploring.

What is Kelly betting against?

Kelly's argument starts with a distinction he says most of the industry ignores; and that's the difference between a founder who built a firm and a partner who simply rose to the top of one.

“Founders that have poured their heart and soul into the business are likely to prefer our model,” Kelly says. “People that are just employees who floated to the top of businesses they never built and don't care about are happy to sell that firm to anyone for a check — and that's what the boomers are doing.”

For Kelly, that difference isn't just about motivation, it shows up directly in financial performance. “When people join us, they're buying into our model,” he explains. “When people join private equity groups, they're selling out. One's a buy-in, and one's a sellout.” Kelly credits that alignment for the firm's margins he says run roughly three times the industry average, a gap he attributes to partners who are locked in for a decade and thus, behave differently than partners who are counting down to a payout.

How does the model work?

Kelly +Partners, which is publicly traded and independently audited, is structured around a 51%/49% ownership model, with partners making a minimum 10-year commitment and a centralized services team absorbing the operational work that would otherwise sit with individual partners. That structure has run long enough now to produce a genuine track record, not just a pitch. The firm has notched 30% annual revenue growth for two decades. The firm also has a run rate that's consistent enough that private equity firms have reportedly cited Kelly Partners in their own pitch materials as a benchmark.

It's worth being precise about what that track record does and doesn't prove. Kelly's numbers represent just one firm's results, however long-running, aren't a controlled study.

However, the structural logic behind them doesn't depend on trusting Kelly specifically. Any firm can ask the same question of its own model: Does it ask partners to commit for the long term, or does it primarily reward them for exiting? Two decades of compounding at 30% a year is a meaningful data point on which answer tends to work.

The model has real limits, of course, and they're the same limits built into its structure. A 10-year partner commitment is the mechanism that produces Kelly's margins, but it's also the mechanism that rules out any partner who needs cash now rather than equity in a decade, which describes a meaningful share of the firms considering a sale.

The centralized services team that lets Kelly Partners run lean also took years and capital to build, an investment that many smaller firms can't make on their own before they have the scale to justify it. Private equity exists precisely to solve the problems of a partner who can't wait and the firm that can't build central infrastructure yet — and this is a real gap that Kelly's model doesn't close.

Indeed, what his two decades of results actually show is narrower than PE is unnecessary; rather, it shows that for a firm willing to trade near-term liquidity for long-term ownership, the trade has paid off.

Where does this fit into the industry's larger growth problem?

Kelly's model didn't emerge in a vacuum. The Thomson Reuters Institute's 2026 State of Tax Professionals Report found that nearly two-thirds of tax professionals surveyed said their firms expect revenue to grow this year, yet many also said their firms treat growth “not as a strategy, but rather as a goal.” This leads firms to pursue fee increases and new client acquisition without asking whether that growth actually improves long-term margin position. And this is the exact gap Kelly says he built his firm to close from day one, treating ownership structure itself as the growth lever, not an afterthought to it.

That same TRI report found more than half of respondents say their firms expect a partner or firm leader to retire before 2030, with most planning to fill those roles internally. Kelly sees that pressure as opportunity rather than threat.

“The best people in those firms coming through are going to look for an opportunity where they can get the benefits of a scaled firm, but also get the benefits of equity ownership,” he says, arguing that firms treating recruiting struggles as a pure talent shortage are missing the point. “If a man walks into a bar full of women and can't get a date, it might not be the women's fault,” he says. “It might be that the offer isn't the right offer.”

Of course, none of this settles the debate over private equity's role in accounting's future, and Kelly's story alone can't do that. What it does is give firm leaders a second data point to hold against the first one.

Any firm weighing a PE offer can ask the same question Kelly built his firm around: Does this structure ask partners to commit, or does it pay them to leave? Two decades of one firm's answer to that question doesn't decide it for anyone else, but it's now on the table as evidence, not just theory.

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