Most of the consolidation headlines involve firms in the top 50 acquiring firms in the top 200. Current is aimed somewhere else entirely: the small local practices at the base of the profession.
The platform is backed by Thrive Holdings, which has allocated roughly $1 billion toward rolling up regional and local firms. Its CEO, Steve Stagner, comes from Mattress Firm — a retail business built through acquisition at scale.
Why the pedigree matters
Hiring a retail rollup operator to consolidate CPA firms is a specific bet: that the hard part is not accounting, it is the repeatable machinery of acquiring, integrating and standardizing hundreds of small locations. That is a discipline retail knows well and professional services largely does not.
CPA Trendlines framed the broader market as two competing visions of consolidation: KKR putting $2.5–3 billion into a single top-15 platform in Crowe, and Thrive putting $1 billion into aggregating many small firms through Current. Both are bets on scale, arriving from opposite ends.
What this means if you run a small firm
The immediate effect is that firms with 2 to 20 professionals — historically difficult to sell for anything beyond a modest multiple of fees, often to a local buyer, often seller-financed — now have a buyer class actively looking for them.
If succession has been a live concern, the market just improved. It is worth understanding what these buyers value, because it is not what traditional practice-transition buyers valued:
- Recurring, predictable revenue over one-off engagement work
- Clean, documented processes that survive the owner's departure
- Client relationships that belong to the firm, not to one person
- Delivery that can be standardized onto a common platform
And if you are not selling
That same list is a description of a more valuable, more durable firm regardless of whether it ever changes hands. A practice where the work is documented, standardized and not dependent on one person's memory is easier to staff, easier to review, easier to grow, and easier to take a holiday from.
Firms often reach that state as a byproduct of working with an external preparation partner, because the handoff forces the documentation that internal habit never required. That is a real benefit of the discipline, separate from the capacity it adds.
Whether you eventually sell to a platform like Current or hand the firm to the next generation, the work to prepare is identical. It is worth starting before you need to.
