At Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, Aprio CEO Richard Kopelman shares with Seth Cohen, Chief Impact Officer of Forbes, some forward-looking insights on the key trends and opportunities shaping the business landscape in 2025. From leveraging values to navigating emerging markets, Kopelman revealed strategies for leaders to drive success and make a lasting impact in the year ahead.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00My name is Seth Cohen and I'm the chief impact officer of Forbes and the founder
00:06of the Forbes Impact Lab. I'm here in New York City at the Nasdaq market site
00:11today joined with Richard Kopelman, the CEO of Aprio, a business advisory and CPA
00:17firm that is entrepreneurs serving entrepreneurs all around the country.
00:22Richard, thanks for joining me today. Seth, thank you for having me. Great to be
00:26here. So Richard, first tell me a little bit about Aprio. It's had an amazing
00:30trajectory. It was founded in the 50s in its, I guess, headquarter town of Atlanta
00:36but now is over 25 locations and over 15 markets around the country. Tell me what
00:42Aprio is and what it represents in terms of servicing entrepreneurs.
00:47Yeah, we've had some amazing growth over the last few years and I often refer to
00:52the firm as a 72 year old overnight success. Headquartered in Atlanta. We
00:58were in Atlanta only until seven years ago and seven years ago we decided it
01:02was time to take what we had the capabilities of doing and working with
01:07entrepreneurs and helping them scale their businesses and we decided to take
01:11that on the road outside of Atlanta and we've now completed 24 transactions.
01:17Actually at the end of last year was 24 and by the end of this year it'll be 34.
01:21So tell me about that transformation for a moment because that's not a
01:25particularly easy thing to do. I'm assuming there were a lot of partners
01:29that had only known the market of Atlanta and now you presented this idea
01:34of expanding nationally. How did that conversation go? That was an interesting
01:39conversation. If you want to really get into the specifics
01:46of what happened, it was not an easy thing to do to convince accounting
01:50partners that we could transform this business into something much greater and
01:55as a longtime client told me that runs a very successful manufacturing business,
02:01it's one thing to scale something with machines. It's another thing to scale
02:05something with people. So we laid out a plan and
02:11decided to give it a shot. And how big is Aprio now? So how large is the full
02:18consultancy and full business advisory group? So today we're slightly over 2,000
02:22people. We're scattered across the United States up and down the East Coast, West
02:27Coast. We're about to land in the Midwest very shortly and we also have
02:33operations in the Philippines and in Medellin, Colombia. So Aprio really kind
02:37of hit my radar from its growth curve this summer because you had a really big
02:42transaction that looks like it put in a lot of capital to help you grow. Tell me
02:47a little bit about that. Yeah, we're very excited to be partnering with Charles
02:50Bank, headquartered in Boston, an equity fund that often invests in what they
02:55look at as founder-led businesses. Even though we're a 70-year-old business, they
02:59really look at Aprio and the transformation that we've gone through
03:03as really a founder-led, entrepreneurial-led business. What are you
03:07learning from them in terms of new ways to think about growth? Yeah, learning a lot.
03:12As long as I've been in the role of CEO for 12 years, I've always had a coach.
03:16And my newest coach now is a partner at Charles Bank who is the former CEO of GE,
03:22John Flannery. So very excited. That's one element that's pretty transformative, is
03:28to have somebody that has operated in a business much larger than ours, obviously,
03:33and helping coach how we scale and grow the business. They're also working with
03:38us to just move faster. We had a plan, we have a plan, a 2030 strategy plan that we
03:44presented to them during our process of partnering together. And they're showing
03:50us how to accelerate that plan, which is why we wanted to partner with them to
03:55begin with, is to accelerate that strategy and that plan. So it looks like
03:59you and Aprio are on the front end of this trend of private equity coming into
04:03advisory businesses and really supporting this growth. Do you see this
04:07as a trend that's going to be accelerating, or are you a pilot
04:11experiment? How are you seeing yourself in this equity-backed ecosystem of
04:16advisory work? Well, in the advisory space, private equity and permanent
04:20capital has been in place for a number of years across both private and publicly
04:25traded companies. And within the, what I'll call the more traditional accounting
04:29space, we are one of the first 10 that has now completed this type of
04:36transaction. And the trend seems to be continuing. There have been a few
04:40transactions closed in December, and I really don't see that
04:47slowing down much for the next, I would say, six months. And it'll be interesting
04:53to see what happens as a result of that transformation. It's a very
04:58fragmented market. The accounting space is a very fragmented market.
05:03Yeah, I can imagine. So one of the things that I've always learned, being a
05:08former attorney, I've spent a lot of time looking at how small businesses
05:13really lean in on their advisors, whether it's their accountants or their
05:16attorneys, to help them see opportunities. Right now, we're at a really interesting
05:22moment in our business environment, in our political environment. There's a lot
05:28of people that have a lot of anxiety. There's a bunch of people that have a
05:30lot of optimism. Where do you fall on the anxiety to optimism spectrum? Yeah, we are
05:35super optimistic, not only about our business, we're very optimistic about
05:39what's happening with our clients. And looking across a variety of
05:44industries, from real estate to manufacturing, technology, restaurants,
05:49nonprofits, we're seeing substantial opportunity as deregulation, I think,
05:56will, based on some insider conversations I've had, deregulation,
06:01availability of capital, interest rates. We're already starting to see a
06:05substantial increase in the M&A, the flow of M&A activity. And I think 2025, in
06:12particular, is going to be a very robust and profitable year for many companies.
06:18Well, that will make a lot of people optimistic. Let's dig in for a moment on
06:22manufacturing, in particular. I think this was something that was talked a lot
06:25about over the past election. It's something a lot of people in the Midwest
06:30are particularly interested and excited about, that we're going to be
06:34building back better in America and be building more. So is that what you're
06:39hearing from your manufacturing clients, that they're really gearing up and
06:43excited? And maybe what are some sub-trends that we should be thinking
06:47about, particularly in the manufacturing sector? In the manufacturing sector, I do
06:51think with lowering fuel prices and interest rates, and we'll see what
06:58happens from a tariff perspective, I do think we'll continue to see more
07:01reshoring, especially with the fact that automation is replacing a lot of labor
07:06costs and components within the manufacturing sector. So it is more
07:11affordable. In many, many verticals within manufacturing, it is more
07:16affordable to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. I think that trend will
07:21continue. One of the micro trends that I think is very interesting, and I was
07:25visiting with one of our clients in North Georgia just a few weeks ago, is
07:30manufacturing one at a time. No longer having to manufacture en masse the same
07:37product, but being able to manufacture one-of-a-kind in a manufacturing line
07:44and in a sequential manufacturing process. You mentioned also both real
07:49estate and hospitality. Obviously, we've been seeing a resurgence of money spent
07:55on travel in hospitality. I'm assuming you're seeing that with your clients as
07:59well. What's making them optimistic? Are we going to see more growth in
08:03hospitality, and what should we be optimistic about with that? Yeah, in real
08:07estate, broadly speaking, we could cover a lot of various topics. I think in the
08:11industrial warehouse side, the idea that there's going to be more reshoring and
08:16more complex supply chains with more manufacturing happening in the U.S.,
08:20that's certainly getting them excited. I think office might be getting a little
08:25excited because I think government employees might be going back to work
08:29come January or February. We could see that change in the
08:36general office environment. In multifamily, four and a half million, I
08:41believe, is the statistic. People are turning 18 every year for the next 20
08:46years, with the largest generation in our country coming of age, and so the need
08:52for housing is going to be tremendous. And of course, we have not
08:57had a housing building boom. On the retail side, our retailers, our
09:03hospitality clients, are very excited about what's going on. They're certainly
09:08paying a lot of attention to automation, AI, I guess I would say AI and
09:14technology to transform their businesses and be less people-reliant, lowering
09:22their cost, being able to deliver to consumers. Essentially, you mentioned AI, so
09:26obviously AI is a hot topic of conversation in every sector and in
09:31every leader's mind. When you look at it, both from your own business and those
09:36who you are advising, what's the key pieces of advice you're giving these
09:40days to folks who are thinking about opportunities and are thinking about
09:43technological transformation to help advance and ignite those changes at an
09:47even faster pace? I think founder stage mindset, from a technology standpoint, is
09:53very important for entrepreneurs. Being able to, not being able, but getting down
09:59to the ground level and experimenting and exploring and understanding what the
10:04capabilities are and what the capabilities will be in the future. Too
10:08many people, I think, look at technology innovation and they say it's not ready
10:11for prime time. If you wait for prime time, you'll be behind everybody else.
10:17Acting like a founder and exploring and learning and watching the
10:24development of the technology and using it in small use cases will get you going
10:30maybe 25 or 30 miles an hour, so that when it's time to go a hundred, you can
10:34get there relatively quickly. But if you're at zero and you haven't even put
10:38your foot on the gas, it's going to be a problem. I think it's critical that
10:41people get excited and interested and look forward to the future and be
10:46investigating those technologies now. I couldn't agree more, by the way. I
10:51think what we're seeing both in media, what we're seeing in the way professionals
10:56are acquiring skills and deploying skills has a lot to do with how clever
11:01and smart they are in experimenting and being playful with AI. I know that you
11:05were recently recognized by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as one of
11:10the most people-focused CEOs in your home base of Atlanta and around all of
11:17your offices. How are you bringing that people-centered focus alongside of that
11:24entrepreneurial and founder mindset with AI? How are these two things
11:27developing together in Aprio? They first started, they first are developing
11:35following our 31 fundamentals of behavior at Aprio, which back up our
11:39brand because Aprio stands for head and heart. Let me interrupt for a
11:44second. You have 31 fundamentals, fundamental principles. What are a few
11:48examples of that? Act with integrity, do what's right for the client, embrace
11:53change, be kind, keep things fun, speak straight. Those are just some of our
11:5931 fundamentals. And that was created by the professional team in conversations
12:05with all of your folks or is this something that's part of the legacy of
12:08that 70 plus year old organization? So we transformed the business from back in
12:13the day, H, A, and W. Nice. We transformed from H, A, and W, alphabet soup, to Aprio
12:20about seven years ago. Meaning head and heart. Meaning head and heart. It's the
12:24one thing to say you're going to change your name to something that means head
12:29and heart. It's another thing to operationalize it. And we decided the
12:34best way to operationalize it was to create these 31 fundamentals. And we
12:39practice one every week. And we do that for 31 weeks and then we start over. And
12:45we practice it through a variety of venues and daily rituals with inside the
12:51organization. That's really cool. So it's really become the culture. It allows for
12:56story time. You love to tell stories. This is about people's opportunities
13:01internally to tell stories about how they're working with one another, working
13:05in their communities, working with clients, working with our entrepreneurial
13:10owners, and helping them, you know, just share those stories around the
13:15organization. Richard, I feel like we could have a conversation about so many
13:19things we haven't covered with nonprofits, some of the other trends
13:22around remote workforce. But before I let you go, I do want to, you seem like a
13:27really optimistic guy. And it seems you're obviously very bullish about not
13:31only the future of Aprio, but the future of your clients as well. What's making
13:34you most optimistic right now as a business leader in America?
13:38I would say what makes me most optimistic is when I sit down with
13:44entrepreneurs and I sit down with our partners at Aprio and the people with
13:49inside of our firm, they're highly focused on where they are going and how
13:56they're going to change their little corner of the world, whatever that might
14:00be, and not just change their corner of the world in their company or in their
14:06industry or profession, but transform, transform their communities as a part of
14:13those, of those business activities. The outcomes ultimately will help them
14:18transform their, their communities, whatever that might be.
14:21Richard, thank you for spending time with us today. It really has been an
14:25uplifting conversation at the end of the year in a timely, in a timely moment for
14:30us to look ahead. Thank you.
14:31Seth, thank you.