Jeffrey Weiner, Managing Partner, Interviewed by Leaders Magazine
Leaders Magazine
Excerpt:
How did this firm come about and how has it evolved since its inception?
Marcum was founded in 1951 in Queens, New York and later became a pioneer of the accounting business on Long Island. For the first 30 years, it was a very small accounting firm. I joined in 1981 after spending a couple of years at Deloitte. When I got here, there were two partners and four accountants billing $300,000 per year.
Our real growth period started in 2000. In 1996, we became a two-office firm by expanding to New York City, and by 2000 we probably had 60 to 70 people doing $10 million in revenue per year.
We chose a couple of areas we wanted to specialize in, which turned out to be the right decision: the first is SEC services – servicing public registrants primarily in the microcap space; the other is private equity and hedge funds.
We grew from 70 or so people in 2000 to about 450 people by the end of 2008.
Did the growth come from acquiring other firms or was it mostly organic?
Mostly organic. Our real national and international growth came about as a result of the recession of 2008, which was the first time we started to contract. Much of the transactional work disappeared; some clients went out of business or reduced the services they needed from us and others needed a price reduction. This created an opportunity for expansion, as we were able to find other firms that had started to contract and were looking for something to differentiate them from their local competition.
