I sold my firm to hedge against AI. Here's what I learned.

I sat in a room in London at an event most of the top twenty five UK firms attended. Senior partners on one side. Senior IT people on the other. The roundtable question was how much each firm was spending on AI. Every firm had a number. Mine was zero. I gave my closing keynote at The Firm's AI in Practice Summit on what happened next, and I want to lay the argument out again here because the decision I made is being framed as a technology decision. Read it as a business model decision.

Onside is a UK practice specialising in venture capital backed tech startups. We are five years old and about fifty people. Our clients are the exact demographic that expects their accountant to be modern, automated, and using the best tech on the market. They get irritated by manual work. Falling behind on AI, for us specifically, shows up as a client retention risk. Our clients notice, and they will move. That varies from firm to firm, and I want to be clear about that before I get into what I did.

Sit and wait is a real option

If you run a practice serving tradesmen, restaurants, cafes, and other paper-heavy industries, you have time. Those clients prefer paper. If you asked a tradesman to invoice from a phone app tomorrow, you would meet resistance you do not need. For that client base, your competitors' AI moves sit outside the threat window this year and next.

I have spoken to practice owners who have been building for two years and watched most of that early work become redundant as the models jumped. The people who waited are, in some cases, in a better position than the people who moved first, because they get to build on infrastructure that actually holds together.

The urgency for Onside is specific to our client base. It carries across to your firm only if your clients look like ours.

What I actually did

I met a US technology company called Multiplier Holdings, with tier one VC backing. They wanted accounting practices with a real growth curve and founders who wanted to keep running the business. I wanted three things. I wanted to hedge my technology risk. I wanted access to tech talent I could not hire in-house, because a fifty-person UK accounting firm cannot compete with a Silicon Valley salary for a senior engineer. And I wanted to be paid for what I had built while keeping meaningful upside tied to future growth.

Multiplier gave me all three. I sold Onside to them. They gave me the engineering team. I kept the day job, and my payout is heavily weighted toward what we build together over the next several years. I am working harder now than I ever have. The model suits founders who want to stay in and grow.

This is worth writing down because a lot of practice owners have asked me about it since. Most of them assumed the private equity route was the only path. Other options exist now. The AI roll-ups now emerging, of which Multiplier is one example, are a different kind of deal, and worth understanding before you make any decision about the next five years of your firm.

The three questions before you do anything

If you are trying to work out where you sit, start here.

The first is what your clients actually expect. What they will notice. What they will start asking for. What will make them look elsewhere. Those are the actual signals to read, ahead of assumptions about what they should expect. If they are tech founders, the bar is high and the timeline is short. If they are tradesmen, both loosen considerably.

The second is how much of the equity you want to keep. This is the question most founders skip. If you keep everything, you finance the AI transition yourself, out of a business that probably cannot afford the tech talent to do it well. If you give some up, you get partners who can carry the risk with you. There is a version of this trade that works well for founders who want to stay in, and a very different version that suits founders who want to leave. Know which one you are before you take a call from anyone.

The third is whether you want to be in the business in ten years. Think about the ten-year picture rather than the five-year one. The AI transition is going to take longer and be harder than most people think, and the founders who come out of it well are the ones who genuinely want to be there. If you do not, this may be the moment to think about a clean exit rather than a hybrid one.

Timing is the biggest lever

The regret I hear most from practice owners is holding on to something for too long. Watching the value of the asset deteriorate. Waiting for a better market that does not come. Timing is the founder's most underappreciated lever, and this is a moment when it matters. If you have built something valuable and you know you do not have the fight for another decade of disruption, that is a serious business decision to make now, not later.

Be honest, especially with yourself

The last thing I want to say is about honesty. I hear a lot of practice owners telling the world they are using AI. When I ask them to show me the conversation, it usually falls a bit dead. There is nothing wrong with being early. There is a lot wrong with pretending you are further along than you are.

Your staff are watching too. Employees are worried about their jobs in a way they have not been before, and they are choosing where to work partly on how well they think a firm has thought about the next ten years. If you are pretending, they will see through it. If you are being honest, and giving them clarity, that is worth more than a polished AI strategy that does not survive contact with a real client engagement.

The AI decision is a business model decision. Treat it like one.

You can watch the full session here.