BPM, a Top 50 Firm based in San Francisco, recently
Steiner previously worked as BPM's chief growth officer and is a longtime partner in the firm's assurance and advisory business. During his time as advisory practice group leader, the California CPA grew the practice from under $10 million to nearly $100 million while helping position BPM as a leader in technology‑forward advisory services.
He has plans to grow the firm even further. "If we think about our priorities, there's the focus on the basics that any good accounting firm needs to to focus on," he told Accounting Today. "We want to make sure that we're continuing to attract the best and brightest, continuing to build our talent pool and make sure we're taking really good care of our clients. Those are table stakes, but even though they're table stakes, they're really important for us to continue to focus on."
He sees this as a time of change in the accounting profession. "If you look at the last three or four years, there's been the emergence of private equity in our space," said Steiner. "We're seeing even more recently the emergence of AI and some of the impacts that's having on the space. Our world is quite a bit different than it was."
Staying independent
He pointed out that BPM has been operating for about 40 years, but has probably changed more in the last four years than in the 36 years before that. But despite the growth of PE, he plans to keep BPM independent while continuing to compete with PE-funded firms.
"We've got a very young, active partner group, and that partner group is strongly biased toward maintaining our independence," said Steiner. "We've got to continue to earn the right to remain independent, and that means doing things a little bit differently than we've done for the last 40 years. It means embracing technology a little bit more, running the firm more like a professional business, doing some of the things that our competitors that are working with private equity are doing, and really investing in AI technology. It's a really exciting time to be in our profession, but it's quite a bit different than it's been for most of our history."
He has heard much about how private equity operates. "We're certainly learning a lot about the dynamics," said Steiner. "There are some really good firms that have taken private equity, so it's something that we feel obligated to be in the know on, but our partner group desires to remain independent, so that's the course that we're taking."
Steiner joined BPM in 2006 and brings more than 25 years of experience across public accounting and private industry. Before becoming chief growth officer, he was the advisory practice group leader and co‑led BPM's Technology Industry Group. His experience includes advising clients across semiconductor, SaaS, software, life sciences, networking, and manufacturing sectors. He has guided companies through initial public offerings, business combinations, financing arrangements and complex SEC reporting and compliance matters.
"Nick is the right leader for BPM's next chapter," said BPM chairman Sandy Murray in a statement. "He brings deep institutional knowledge, a proven record of growth, and a genuine commitment to our people and clients. His leadership reflects the values that define BPM, and I am confident he will guide the Firm forward with clarity, integrity and vision."
AI consulting
As with many accounting firms, BPM is experimenting with using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot. "Like most of our peers, we're very far along in terms of Copilot usage," said Steiner.
"Everybody's ingraining that in their day-to-day to take some of the monotony out of some work and make sure our documentation's a little bit tighter. But the next phase is more around automation. I think that's where all of the accounting firms are spending a lot of time right now, and we're doing the same thing. The idea is really to try to automate a lot of the more basic work, free our team up to spend more time with clients, to focus on more complicated issues, to really focus more on the judgment areas, and free them up from some of the the day-to-day ticking and tying that goes along with being a staff auditor and staff in the tax department."
BPM recently began an AI consulting service line where it's helping clients with their AI adoption. "That's been very well received by our clients," said Steiner. "As far as we can tell, there's not a lot of firms our size doing it. Some of the biggest firms, the Big Four and a couple of the other national firms, are focused on that. But what we're finding is our clients really want help in that space. They need help, and we're well positioned to be able to offer that to them. It's early days, but we've seen a lot of good traction on that front."
Expanding BPM
He plans to expand the firm's reach in some parts of the country through M&A deals.
"For us, inorganic growth, business combinations, lateral talent, things like that, have always been an important part of our growth strategy," said Steiner. "We always want to maintain a balance between organic and inorganic growth. And for us, over a series of years, if you're driving 70% of your growth organically and 30% of your growth inorganically, that's a pretty good mix for us, and that's something that we target."
He noted that BPM already has a strong presence up and down the West Coast. "We'd like to continue to focus on a couple of markets, Seattle and San Diego, where we've got a bit of a toehold, but less of a critical mass," said Steiner. "And then we're looking at markets that are really complementary to the markets that we serve today. Our two biggest markets are Northern California and Southern California, so related markets for Northern California would include Austin, Denver and Salt Lake City, which have a tech concentration that would be complementary to our Silicon Valley roots. Then in Southern California, it's similar. The major financial markets we're looking at are New York and maybe Chicago. We've got a group in London that joined us about 18 months ago. They're doing great work and are off to a really good start."
Advisory services have continued to drive growth at the firm. "That's where I came from before," said Steiner. "I spent a brief period of time as our chief growth officer before I took the CEO role, but before that I led our advisory group for about 10 years, and we were able to grow from less than $10 million in revenue to close to $100 million in revenue over that time. It's been a really good growth driver, so we continue to look for opportunities to expand our advisory services, whether that's just adding talent to some of our existing service lines or looking at new lines altogether."
Along with the new AI consulting service, he is seeing growth in BPM's technology implementation group. "That's our group that does ERP and CRM implementations, things like NetSuite, Salesforce and Sage Intacct," said Steiner. "They're already looking to adopt a new system and to become more sophisticated in how they generate their financials and numbers. This is a natural extension."
So far, the firm has been successful at continuing to recruit young talent, despite the lingering shortages. "What we're seeing industrywide is there is a continuing shortage of talent," said Steiner. "The number of grads in the accounting space continues to decline. We've been very blessed to be able to attract really good people to the firm, and we do that through a combination of bringing people in straight out of college, like most firms do, and growing them, but also looking at opportunities to attract talent from bigger firms where they're just looking for maybe a more entrepreneurial culture."
The firm is able to capitalize on the Silicon Valley culture. "We have our roots in Silicon Valley," said Steiner. "The Bay Area is where the firm was started, and we've really tried to embrace that. We're an accounting firm, so there's a certain level of conservatism when it comes to that. But being in Silicon Valley, we want to make sure that we're on the cutting edge of our peers in terms of embracing technology, working with a lot of IPO companies. We're willing to try new things. We're willing to give people the opportunity to build something, and that's really compelling for folks that are at another firm who feel like things are getting a little bit stale. We've had a lot of success bringing in folks from other firms and giving them a little bit more latitude to go out and build something, and that's paid very good dividends for the firm. It's a really exciting stage that we're entering into. There's a lot of change in the world, but we're excited to see where we take things."
