BOTTOM LINE UPFRONT
In this interview, Accordion Founder & CEO Nick Leopard reflects on the decisions, leadership philosophies, and operating principles that have shaped Accordion’s growth, offering a playbook for building a high-growth company without sacrificing culture.
Some people just have it in their bones—this innate desire to start and run a company. That was always me. At my core, I love building teams. The idea of doing things on your own seems foreign to me; I’ve always been part of teams, and I’ve loved the challenge and camaraderie that comes with it. My dad was a SEAL, and he instilled in me a radical discipline and a belief that you can accomplish things you might not think are possible. That has been a foundational part of my life and professional career.
My first job out of college was at a startup commercial finance company called Capital Source. It was run by a young entrepreneur, and the environment felt highly collaborative. We grew it into a $3 billion market cap company in three years, and as a young 20-something, I thought every company was like that. Then I went to work in investment banking at Bear Stearns in New York, and I quickly realized they are not. I loved the work and the grind, but the culture was different.
After Bear, I was at a mezzanine fund, and the Global Financial Crisis hit in 2008. We ended up owning half the companies in our portfolio, and I was the guy sent in to work with the CFOs of these private equity-backed companies. I saw a clear gap in the market: there was no firm—not McKinsey, not Bain, not the Big Four—that was specifically focused on serving the office of the CFO for these businesses. That was the validation for the business opportunity.
But the real founding vision for Accordion wasn’t just about the market gap. It was about answering a different question: How do you build a firm where culture is a core part of the strategy, not an afterthought? I wanted to create a better way to work in finance. The idea was to bring together great, entrepreneurial people into a collaborative environment to change the industry. By focusing on culture first, we could attract the best talent, which would deliver the best services to the best clients. Culture was our North Star from day one, and it continues to be.
When we started, our model was to find really smart people with similar backgrounds, parachute them into companies, and let them do a good job. We hired well and had the right standards. But at a certain point, we realized we didn’t want to be just a collection of talented individuals. We wanted clients to recognize that there is an “Accordion way” of doing things. I talk a lot about the concept of unreasonable hospitality—that feeling a client has where they might not remember every specific detail of what we did, but they remember the positive feeling of the experience.
To achieve that, we had to solve an internal pain point: consistency. Our clients needed to have the same high-quality experience no matter who they worked with at our firm. I use the analogy of Starbucks. Whether you walk into a Starbucks in London or San Francisco, you expect the same type of coffee, the same cup, the same atmosphere. Our clients deserve that same level of consistency from us.
This meant we had to start industrializing the business. We invested heavily in learning and development to create a common methodology and approach. We developed playbooks to ensure that our outcomes were not just the product of a bunch of smart people, but the result of a unified, proven system. This internal focus on standardization was critical. As we grew, our Net Promoter Scores, which were already high, stayed high, and a real brand began to develop around Accordion. This proves that your external strategy is only as good as your internal execution.
Growing from a founder-run business to an institutional one requires navigating critical inflection points. For us, the first major one came in 2018 when we decided to bring in our first private equity partner, FFL Partners. At the time, professional services wasn’t seen as a typical private equity asset—the thinking was that the “assets ride the elevator every day.” But it’s actually a great model: cash-flow generative, with high retention in a fast-growing space.
Bringing in FFL challenged us to professionalize. We had to double down on our strategy, which meant getting even more radically disciplined about what we would not do. Many firms get to a certain size and think they can do everything. We did the opposite. We decided to get more narrow and be the absolute best at serving the office of the CFO for private equity firms, even though other markets like corporate clients or deeper technology were available.
This inflection point also forced us to make tough decisions about our leadership team. There are management teams that are great from zero to $10 million, others from $10 million to $25 million, and so on. It’s very rare for one leader to transcend all those stages. We had to bring in new people who had the experience to take us to the next level. For example, my COO at the time was one of my best friends; we had built the company on pure grit. But he wasn’t the person to scale us further in that role. We brought in a new COO, a former partner from Bain & Company, who introduced concepts I wasn’t trained on, like operator models, unit economics, and performance-based compensation. That institutionalization was essential. With FFL, we grew from $36 million in revenue to $179 million in just three and a half years.
The second inflection point was our first acquisition in 2021. Getting that first one done was a breakthrough. Since then, we’ve done 11 acquisitions, and I’m happy to say all of them are thriving under Accordion.
A lot of people ask me how we’ve built Accordion into what it is today. My answer often comes back to a concept Bain & Company calls the “founder’s mentality.” They studied hundreds of companies that were great at one point and either lost their way or successfully scaled. They found there are four main pitfalls that cause companies to stumble as they grow. If you deliberately build your organization to avoid these, you can be a great company at $30 million, $500 million, or a billion dollars.
The four pitfalls are:
- The Unscalable Founder. This is when the founder remains in the middle of every decision, which inevitably slows the organization down as it gets bigger.
- A Loss of Accountability. As a company grows, it becomes easier for people to hide and assume the organization will take care of them. You need systems that foster both accountability and entrepreneurship.
- A Loss of Radical Focus on the Front Lines. This happens when the management team starts making decisions from an ivory tower and loses its connection to clients and employees.
- Letting Revenue Grow Faster Than Talent. In the pursuit of growth, many companies just aggregate revenue without ensuring they have the top-tier talent to deliver.
These four principles guide how we operate. Sometimes they can be at odds. For example, empowering a leadership team to avoid being an unscalable founder might risk losing that radical focus on the front lines. You have to find the right rhythms to balance them. I constantly go back to these four things and ask, “What are we doing to avoid the pitfalls of scale?”
One of the core tenets of our founder’s mentality is that we will not let revenue grow faster than talent. For us, this means being incredibly disciplined, especially with M&A. When we look at an acquisition, we meet with the founders and management team first. The primary question is: Would you want to be in a battle with these people? We have to find the right cultural fit before anything else. We’ve found great teams this way, and their founders and leaders are all still intact and thriving here. We stay within our strategy instead of just buying companies for the sake of revenue aggregation.
Internally, we’ve invested heavily in our talent team—and I don’t just mean HR. We have HR business partners dedicated to each of our practices, a robust learning and development function, and a commitment to patience. When someone is six months in and hasn’t hit the curve we expected, many firms would give up. We choose to invest more in them. We put support systems around them and give them opportunities to succeed, maybe by letting them take a discount on a new client to help them get off the ground. That patience has allowed people to become real stars in the long run.
This approach is different from many other private equity-backed firms. That’s why, before we did any deal, I was very clear with our sponsors: this is a people-centric business. People can be the most productive and also the most volatile assets on the planet. You need to manage them delicately and truly invest in that asset. If it means slower growth to ensure we have the absolute best talent focused on the brand and doing the right thing, that’s the path we’ll take. The financial outcomes will be a byproduct of that focus, not the primary driver we chase.
As your company gets bigger, it’s easy for leadership to become disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the business. To avoid this, every leader needs to understand their superpowers and their non-talents. I worked with a performance coach who helped me identify that my superpowers are being in front of clients, thinking about strategy, and talking to our people. So, I try to spend 40% to 50% of my week doing just that, because it directly informs our strategy in a way that sitting in a conference room never could. I then build a team around me to handle the things that are my non-talents, like the operational specifics of a compensation plan or an account management strategy.
Staying connected to the front lines requires deliberate effort. I used to know everyone in the firm, but at 1,700 people, that’s impossible. Now, I do town halls with our managing directors. I prefer to do them in a very unscripted way. It’s not authentic for me to stand up with a slide presentation. Instead, I tell them, “Submit your questions anonymously. Ask me anything.” I’ll get on a monologue and tell them what’s on my mind, but the real value is in the Q&A. I’ll talk about politics, what’s going on at the firm, the Fed—anything. This allows me to stay connected, and it lets them see my energy and passion for the business and my handle on where we’re going.
This also ties back to my personal operating system, which is crucial for any executive. I spend an hour on the train every morning coming into the city. That hour is sacred time. I’ll read the paper for 20 minutes to understand what’s going on in the world, and then I’ll spend the rest of the time prepping for the day, making sure I’m totally plugged into our team. I walk in feeling prepared for the most productive meetings. I have that same hour on the way home to respond to emails. Knowing I have that dedicated time allows me to be more present during the day when a million things are coming at me.
Working with private equity firms—both as clients and as partners—requires a specific mindset and a level of discipline that is unique to the industry. As big as the PE market is, the people network within it is tight. If you do great work, you can become a household name. But if you screw up, word travels fast, and you can get boxed out.
When serving private equity funds as customers, you have to understand their world. There is a pace, a rigor, and a vernacular that is expected. More than anything, there is an insane focus on the quantifiable. If a fund asks you to do something, you need to be able to explain exactly how it’s going to improve EBITDA or increase the multiple at which they’ll exit the investment. You have to be laser-focused on that.
Being private equity-backed ourselves has also taught me important lessons. You need to maintain discipline around investments and profitability, especially if you have debt and covenants to consider. There can be a conflict between investing in something because you feel it’s the right long-term move versus hitting short-term profitability targets. You have to be able to parse through those conflicts to make the best decision for the business.
When we exited our first PE partnership, we had returned 4.7 times their money in three and a half years, which put us in their hall of fame. At their annual meeting, they said, “We always pushed back on Nick, telling him you can’t have all three: high growth, high profitability, and a great culture. You have to give on one.” But we proved you can. I believe that if you do the right things by your people and focus on delivering great outcomes for your clients, the revenue growth will come. And with a sound operating system, you can be profitable. You can achieve all three, but it takes an incredible amount of discipline.
As a leader, one of the most critical things you can do is fix friction and drive clarity. I’ve found that a lot of stress and anxiety in an organization, and even in your personal life, stems from a lack of decision. When there’s something brewing in the background and a decision hasn’t been made, it creates a point of stress, even if you can’t immediately pinpoint it.
Whenever I sense friction or stress in the organization, I try to diagnose where a decision hasn’t been made. I force that issue to the surface. In meetings, I’ll ask, “What is the prize here? What decision are we trying to make, and are we going to exit this room without making it?” Don’t let things swirl. Focus on the decision, how it ties to your strategy and value creation plan, and drive it to a conclusion. Without that clarity, people can run rudderless.
Accountability is also key to reducing friction. As a leader, I’ve had to get more comfortable having tough conversations. It’s not natural for a culture like ours that is so focused on teaming and being nice to everyone. But holding someone accountable is actually a form of being nice. You have to be able to say, “Hey, you didn’t show up here.” The challenge is finding the right balance between team goals and individual goals and ensuring everyone is delivering on both.
Finally, as a founder, you realize that small decisions and behaviors can drive the entire culture. For me, things like having a beautiful office space and walking through it to spend time with the team create energy. It’s not for my own benefit; it’s to set an example for other leaders and for our most junior people. It shows that leaders are accessible. Those deliberate actions are how you make sure that even as the company gets bigger, it still feels small.
Effective dialogue and communication are skills that have to be learned. I used to hate public speaking, podcasts, and even town halls. I was always an extrovert in small settings, comfortable with relationships. I’ve learned that most introverts are actually phenomenal public speakers because they stress over it and they prepare. Extroverts often think they can just wing it because they’re good with people. That doesn’t work.
Now, before I go in front of a team, I get very deliberate. I think about the one message I want to land and what I want them to take away. Whether it’s in a meeting or a broad communication, I am very clear about the point I am trying to make.
One of the most important things I’ve realized about communicating as a leader is the power of repetition. There’s a notion that when you are sick of hearing yourself talk, that is precisely when other people are just starting to listen. You have to find the key principles or points you want to make and then repeat them over and over again in different forums. That’s how the message starts to land and permeate through the organization.
At the end of the day, building a great company is about building great people. It’s not a trade-off between culture and performance. You can get the best out of people, perform at an incredibly high level, and foster a great culture all at the same time. I believe every entrepreneur should think about this. Don’t just focus on the financial gain; put that to the side. Build great teams first, build great people first, and the rest will follow.
This philosophy is deeply personal for me. It’s what gets me to show up every day—the chance to work alongside some of my closest friends, to be challenged by them, and to accomplish incredible things together. That, to me, is the true sign of success.
It also extends beyond our company walls. I sit on the board of the SEAL Future Foundation, which helps Navy SEALs transition from active duty to civilian life. It’s an extremely hard transition for them and their families. Supporting our troops, who have done so much for this country in the shadows, is incredibly important. They’ve made it possible for us to have the freedom to build companies and pursue our dreams. That spirit of optimism, that belief that you can be anything you want, is the foundation of what makes this country great, and it’s what allows entrepreneurs to declare the unreasonable reasonable and then go make it happen.