Carlin Charron & Rosen to merge with UHY Advisors
Combined firm will be 5th largest national firm in N.E.
Westboro-based Carlin Charron & Rosen LLP, the region’s largest independent CPA and business advisory firm, will merge with UHY Advisors effective May 1.
The deal follows the merger, two months ago, of Brown & Brown and UHY. Anthony Scillia, CEO OF UHY Advisors’ New England practice, and Robert Charron, managing partner of CCR, say the combinations are mergers, not acquisitions.
As Charron tells it, CCR had made a merger offer to Brown & Brown at about the same time UHY was in discussion with the firm. As CCR’s banker prepared a proposal, Charron waited a few months before calling the former managing partner at Brown & Brown to find out how the combination was working out. He candidly says he was looking for a negative response, but instead, got what he calls "a glowing report." Just over half an hour later, he says, he met with Scillia in Boston.
With the Big Four accounting firms increasingly moving away from middle-market customers and gravitating toward multi-million-dollar fee accounts, Charron says, "the middle market has had to take a back seat and they’re the ones demanding the type of merger that UHY and CCR are doing right now."
"The middle market business today is more complicated than it was 10 to 20 years ago," Scillia says. "Clients need more expertise. CCR has local expertise we didn’t have."
UHY was formed in 1986 by the combination of two companies, one in New York and the other in London. Considered the founder firms of this international advising company, they are New York City-based UHY Advisors and London-based UHY Hacker Young. In the U.S., UHY Advisors Inc. and its subsidiary entities have more than 20 offices and 1,200 staffers, and the company is ranked as the 14th largest professional services firm providing tax and business consulting in the country by Public Accounting Report. Attest services are performed through an alternative practice structure with UHY LLP, a licensed CPA firm.
The merged entity will operate as UHY LLP for audit work, and UHY Advisors for tax and business consulting. It will absorb CCR’s more than 280 employees, bringing the New England headcount to more than 400 employees, among them 30 equity partners, 130 CPAs, located in Boston and Westboro, Providence, RI and Glaston-bury, Hartford, New Haven and Stamford, CT, and combined 2007 billings of approximately $65 million. No layoffs are planned as a result of the merger. "We need more people," Charron says.
Scillia and Charron say the increased size of the merged entity and its national footprint will make it more attractive to young CPAs just out of school, who want to gain initial experience in a larger firm. Scillia says he expects the newer recruits to have more client variety than they would working for a Big Four firm.
UHY Advisors will focus on companies with sales of between $50 million and $500 million, but both Scillia and Charron say they expect they’ll keep the smaller customers who signed on with CCR. "I don’t want to lose any of them," Charron says. "I expect they’ll continue to remain UHY clients."
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