Decimal sold our accounting firm to go all in on franchising. The sale was a great exit, and it proved everything we built works: the operating system, the teams, the playbooks. We're grateful to the team and clients who got us here.
We sold a firm that worked because running a firm and helping other owners run firms are two different jobs. We wanted to focus on the second one.
Running a competitive firm keeps getting harder. The technology, the compliance, the client expectations, the talent market, all of it moves faster than any single owner can keep up with.
The inbox never closes. A client needs a conversation you do not have thirty minutes for. You are three deadlines deep and the new tool you would love to evaluate is still in a browser tab you opened a month ago. You should hire, but you have no time to recruit, onboard, or train. Spring break disappeared into tax season years ago. Workflows live in your head, and whatever you have built dies with you, because nothing is standardized enough to sell.
Why franchise
Small businesses need independent firms. Accounting is a trust business hiding inside spreadsheets, and trust doesn't scale centrally. Every model built to grow a firm has broken on this. Partnerships push partners away from the clients who chose them. Roll-ups strip local ownership and replace the relationship with a logo.
We built Decimal as a franchise because it lets owners share infrastructure without sharing equity.
A Decimal firm is your firm, running on our operating system. You own 100%. You pay a royalty, which funds the shared infrastructure and the network. Because the firm is standardized, it is also sellable, which is rarer in accounting than most owners realize.
The accounting industry is full of talking heads who haven't done it, sort of did it, or swear they know how to do it. We built it, grew it, and sold it at a best-in-class multiple. Our model works.
Inside a Decimal firm
Decimal firm owners get to focus on client relationships and the growth they want. Decimal helps with everything else.
The infrastructure a big firm spends decades building (and never completes) is there on day one. Production teams for bookkeeping, the close, bill pay, invoicing, and payroll. Client billing and collections. Technology, managed IT, security, and compliance. Playbooks for sales, pricing, onboarding, delivery, and quality.
And then there's the part no independent firm can build at all. Software, AI, and delivery teams built against one specific playbook, because every Decimal firm runs the same way: same sales process, same pricing, same onboarding, same close, same billing. AI agents turn discovery calls into scoped proposals. Onboarding documentation is pre-loaded before the kickoff. With one workflow to build against, every week it gets deeper, and every improvement reaches every firm.
A Decimal firm scales by client, not by hire. The recurring work gets absorbed by the operating system, not by you, so adding a client doesn't trigger a hiring decision.
On a Tuesday, that means you're not reconciling books at 11 pm or sending client bills. You're not writing proposals from a blank page. You're not losing Saturday to onboarding. You're not wondering whether your tech stack is right. You're having the client conversations, closing the deals, and going home.
Everyone in the network is building the same kind of firm, so when you hit a problem, someone else has already solved it. You don't do taxes? Another Decimal firm does, and you can offer that to your clients.
An independent firm falls behind a little every day. A Decimal firm gets better while you sleep.
Who this is for
The people who join Decimal as firm owners believe the same things. Their firm should be theirs. They should be able to build the firm they want without giving up their independence and sanity. And running their firm shouldn't require building every piece from scratch. There's a reason former Decimal clients start a franchise. There's also a reason owners who already built and sold their own firms chose Decimal for the next one. They know it works.
Decimal firm owners come from everywhere. Senior managers and other first-timers wanting to start their own firm and skip the years of figuring it out alone. Firm owners transforming a firm they've run for fifteen years. Solo operators who have hit a ceiling. Acquirers who don't know where to start transforming the firm they just bought. In fact, many Decimal firm owners have previously run their own firm and wanted a better foundation.
When independent firms succeed, small businesses do too. Now that's our entire focus. Running a firm and supporting other firms are two different full-time jobs, and they pull in different directions. We didn't want to compete with the firms we were asking to trust us. Too many companies offer support to firm owners while quietly competing for the same clients. That never sat right, but we did think about it.
Accounting is a trust business that's getting consolidated by people who don't understand that. We're building the alternative, one independent firm at a time, with owners who actually run them.
If you're ready to build a firm this way, reach out.
Matt Tait & Jacob Cloran, Founders of Decimal
Thanks to everyone who read drafts of this and pushed back where it mattered: Alex Boswell, Ben Stein, Brad Gustafson, Chris Kauffman, Colin King, Dan Gertrudes, Dan Luthi, Greg Lazarus, Gregory Ugwi, Jason Thompson, Jay Breeden, Joe Van Deman, Joe Woodard, Keith Mueller, Matthew May, Nic Kopp, Omri Mor, Sasha Orloff, Stephanie Valenti, Stephen Hedlund, and Tomer London.