Global staffing, outside capital and advisory expansion have moved beyond experimentation at many of the nation’s largest accounting firms. The bigger question now is how deliberately firms are building around them.
In the latest episode of the INSIDE Public Accounting Podcast, hosts Chelsea Summers and Rob Brown return to IPA’s August 2026 Insights report to explore three forces changing how leading firms operate: the continued expansion of global staffing, the differences emerging between PE-backed and independent firms and the economics of advisory-dominant firms.
Global Staffing Becomes Part of the Infrastructure
Offshoring continues to expand across the IPA 100, with the largest firms both more likely to use offshore talent and more likely to integrate it deeply into their workforce.
But the data complicates the idea that offshoring is simply an efficiency play. Firms using offshore staff also tend to be those facing greater capacity and turnover pressures.
For Summers, that suggests global staffing is increasingly a response to the profession’s persistent talent challenges. Combined with technology, it has given some firms more flexibility to be selective about domestic hiring rather than focusing primarily on filling open seats.
And the trend has plenty of room to run: 70% of IPA 100 firms plan to increase outsourcing and offshoring this year.
Different Ownership Models, Different Priorities
The conversation then turns to a surprising finding from earlier in the season: PE-backed and independent firms posted identical organic growth of 7%.
Look beyond growth, however, and meaningful differences emerge.
Independent firms currently deliver stronger partner compensation and distribute more of their earnings. PE-backed firms retain more capital for reinvestment and tend to show greater operating discipline in areas such as realization, profitability and utilization. They also make greater use of offshore staffing and are moving more quickly away from traditional hourly billing.
The differences extend to talent. PE-backed firms pay professional staff more on average and have been more aggressive in adding equity partners, but they also report higher professional staff turnover.
Rather than showing that one model is outperforming the other, Summers sees the data as evidence of two increasingly distinct approaches to building an accounting firm.
Advisory Requires More Than Adding Services
The final segment looks at firms generating the majority of their revenue from advisory work.
These firms aren’t simply offering more advisory services. Their economics, talent models and approaches to pricing look different from those of the typical IPA 100 firm.
Advisory-dominant firms generate more revenue and net income per work hour, rely less heavily on hourly billing and employ a larger share of paraprofessionals and specialists. They are also much more likely to be PE-backed and active acquirers.
That distinction matters because advisory has become nearly universal as an ambition across the profession. The strategic question is no longer whether firms should offer it.
Instead, Summers argues that firms need to consider whether they are willing to make the changes in pricing, capital allocation and talent strategy necessary for advisory to meaningfully change the business.
From Experiment to Execution
Taken together, the three trends point toward the same conclusion. Global staffing, outside capital and advisory expansion are becoming embedded in how many leading firms operate. As those strategies become more common, simply adopting them will do less to differentiate one firm from another.
The greater divide may be between firms that make deliberate choices about how these strategies fit together and those that allow individual initiatives to accumulate without a clear direction.
“Are they leading their own strategy,” Summers asked, “or letting their strategy lead them?”