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gear up for growth
with jean caragher
for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
aprio ceo richard kopelman offers a behind-the-scenes look at what’s powering his firm’s remarkable trajectory—from a traditional cpa firm to a diversified advisory powerhouse. kopelman credits aprio’s sustained momentum to two key drivers: a relentlessly reinforced culture and a bold leap into private equity.
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since stepping into the ceo role in 2013, kopelman has steered aprio into the ranks of the top 25 u.s. accounting firms. at the heart of that rise? a set of “31 fundamentals” that shape everything from team interactions to client engagements.
“our culture isn’t a tagline or a poster on a wall,” kopelman emphasized. “it’s a daily practice. it’s how we operate, how we serve clients, how we make decisions. it’s real.”
that authentic, values-driven environment has turned aprio into a magnet for top talent, earning the firm accolades on glassdoor and usa today’s lists of best places to work.
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in 2024, aprio took a calculated leap by partnering with charlesbank capital partners—injecting private equity to supercharge the firm’s long-term strategy.
“we recognized that technology and client expectations were evolving fast,” said kopelman. “to stay ahead, we needed to accelerate. this partnership allows us to scale smarter—investing in our people, tech stack, and m&a—without compromising who we are.”
that “who we are” includes a unique equity model. aprio now counts over 850 equity holders—far surpassing the traditional partner track and signaling a shift toward broader ownership and opportunity across the firm.
kopelman’s vision reaches well beyond accounting. with recent expansions into legal services (via radix law), cybersecurity, staffing, and wealth management, aprio is creating a multidisciplinary advisory platform aimed at meeting clients’ evolving needs.
and that evolution is driven by a simple but powerful principle–ask the client. “we’re not here to push services—we’re here to listen, adapt, and grow with our clients,” kopelman said.
aprio’s embrace of value-based pricing, spearheaded by training hundreds of professionals in methodologies championed by expert michelle river, further illustrates its commitment to modernizing every client touchpoint.
asked about his personal leadership strengths, kopelman pointed to “energy, positivity, and a relentless focus on opportunity.” it’s that mindset that has fueled aprio’s transformation and attracted professionals eager to help reshape the future of the profession.
“our goal is to create opportunity—whether that’s financial independence for our team, expanded capabilities for our clients, or a more agile, entrepreneurial business model for the future of accounting,” kopelman concluded.
5 key takeaways
- aprio is moving beyond traditional accounting, adding services like legal (via the acquisition of radix law), cybersecurity, staffing, and wealth management.
- private equity capital is being used for m&a, technology, and lateral partner hiring, with a focus on maintaining partnership and equity culture.
- kopelman identifies his key leadership strengths as energy, positivity, and a relentless focus on opportunity creation for staff and clients.
- a major tenet of aprio’s success has been to “just ask the client” and evolve services based on client needs—emphasizing relationship over transaction.
- hundreds of aprio professionals have been trained in value-based pricing to modernize client billing, influenced by michelle river’s advanced pricing methodology.
more about richard kopelman
richard kopelman joined what was then habif arogeti & wynne as a staff accountant in 1992. he has served as ceo of the firm, now aprio, since 2013. the firm has experienced significant growth under richard’s leadership, with aprio now being the 24th largest firm in the united states. he has been honored twice as the most admired ceo by the atlanta business chronicle and featured in atlanta magazine’s 500 and georgia trend’s 500 most influential leaders.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
jean: hello, and thank you for joining gear up for growth powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m jean caragher, president of capstone marketing, and your host. our guest is richard kopelman, ceo of aprio advisory group. the firm has experienced significant growth under richard’s leadership with aprio now the 24th largest firm in the united states. he has been honored twice as the most admired ceo by the atlanta business chronicle and featured in atlanta magazine’s 500 and georgia trend’s 500 most influential leaders.
richard, welcome to gear up for growth.
richard: jean, it’s a pleasure to be here. thank you for having me. excited to have a great conversation for the next however long you take it.
jean: oh, gosh. i am too. and, you know, for those, you know, listening and watching, richard and i have known each other for a very long time, probably longer than we’d actually like to admit. but, we haven’t caught up in quite a while, so i’m equally excited, to have this chat with you today.
richard: excellent.
jean: so i’d like to start by looking back. when you joined habif arogeti & wynne as a staff accountant in 1992, a local atlanta firm generating less than 10 million in revenue. could you imagine the firm, now aprio, would be the 24th largest firm in the country with revenue of over $485 million?
richard: it’s been a wild ride. it’s been a lot of fun, and, yeah, we just keep looking forward.
jean: so i’ve got a lot of questions surrounding that because you are almost making it seem like it was easy, which we all know it wasn’t. so you’ve served as the ceo since 2013, and i’ve already mentioned the significant growth that’s happened in that time. i believe it might be the latest number, 36 strategic mergers and acquisitions.
richard: in the last…
jean: it’s close.
richard: since 2013. i think that’s the right number.
jean: okay. thirty-one…
richard: and we have eight more in the pipe that are getting closed in the next four months.
jean: oh, boy. okay. and this growth also includes 31 us offices and locations in the philippines and colombia. what strategies have been most effective in guiding this expansion?
richard: so from a strategy standpoint that’s guided the, i would say guided the business overall, one of them has been just a mindset of abundancy and what we’ve called the growth mindset at aprio. so i’m a big fan of, you know, culture will eat strategy every day for lunch, as they say. although we’ve had a strategic plan for the last… we wrote our first strategic plan in 2014, 2015. and it was to our 2020 strategy. we wrote one for 2025 and 2030. so having a north star has definitely been very key. and ensuring that, you know, we have the right people on the bus and in the right seats has certainly been very important to us. and continuing to look forward and being true to ourselves and who we are, and being in business for i was sitting at lunch yesterday with someone. they said, what’s your why? and why are you doing all this? it’s not, you know, separate from the financial aspects of it. what’s the reason why? why do you get up every morning? why are you excited? and ultimately, it’s about creating opportunities for people. it’s creating opportunities for our clients and opportunities for the team here at aprio. and that’s what we’re focused on. we’re focused on being entrepreneurs, serving entrepreneurs.
jean: so, which of your personal strengths has helped you guide the firm’s leadership to go on this ride with you in creating this extremely large firm?
richard: i think i’ll just answer it, and i think it’s energy. i think it’s excitement and positivity. i view myself as the chief cheerleader. and i always say never believe your own bs. and you’ve got to, you know, you gotta have a great attitude and be willing to overcome all sorts of obstacles. you said at the beginning, it’s not easy. and it definitely has not been easy. and we’ve had plenty of times we’ve been kicked in the teeth, and we’ve been, you know, hit hard over the last twelve years. and it’s been fun. you learn more from your mistakes and things that go wrong than you do for the things that go right every day. and so we look to learn from those and keep a really just positive attitude. and again, growth mindset. and just focus on a world of abundancy. i think too often in our profession, everybody’s focused on the hat of risk management. and that’s very important. risk management. so i’m not saying risk management is not something we could do. but they’re running the business from that perspective and running it from the no perspective. let me say no first, and then figure out is there a possibility of yes down the road? we’re more focused on how do we say yes and then figure out a way to do it, providing that it meets our standards and it meets our culture, and it meets obviously the professional standards. our 31 fundamentals, jean, that back up the aprio brand, number one, is act with integrity, and we start there every day.
jean: yeah. thirty-one sounds like a lot.
richard: thirty-one fundamentals. i get asked that a lot. they’re like, why 31 and why so many? why can’t it be five or six? and my answer is because they’re not sitting on a wall. they’re not looked at once a year. they’re not something that no one pays attention to. the 31 fundamentals is how we actually start every meeting, every week, every day. it started with, let’s just spend a minute at the beginning of every meeting that we have. even with clients, with vendors, let’s spend a minute talking about what does it mean to act with integrity. and one of our fundamentals is confidentiality. respect confidentiality, which paramount to the profession.
and i’m sitting with somebody on tuesday this past week, and they’re not in the accounting profession. so not not directly, you know, tied right into our space, but a professional. and he probably spent 45 minutes talking about a client. and i actually thought about our fundamentals the whole time i was sitting listening to this. that’s just not something we’re gonna do. and we have had partners tell many of stories about how we’ve picked up business because another cpa was talking about one of their clients at a party. and another client’s like, well, if they’re talking about this client, then they’re probably talking about me. what am i doing here?
jean: right. oh my goodness.
richard: yeah. it’s how we talk to each other. it’s our language within the firm. it’s our culture.
jean: what happens when someone is not following those 31 guidelines?
richard: one of our fundamentals is speak straight. so when someone’s not following the fundamentals, someone’s gonna say to them, you’re not following this fundamental. so assume we’re implementing a piece of software and someone is not up for the change. they’re not excited about the change. one of the fundamentals is embrace change. another one is be relentless about improvement. and so we will… someone will say, you’re not embracing change. you’re not being relentless about improvement. and we’ll have that discussion and bring that out. the other thing that we have found is people will pull the rip cord. when someone doesn’t fit into your culture, they know it. and they’ll get off the bus because how can you come to work every day and be interacting with people who are embracing change and you’re not? as an example.
jean: i mean, that’s really being knowledgeable about your own style, right, and beliefs that they could be in your firm and realize this isn’t for me and prevent, you know, i guess, not requiring you to get rid of them. i mean, they’ve self-identified.
richard: they’ve self-identified, and they check out themselves.
jean: right. so interesting. right? so you’ve been quoted as saying you’re building the business advisory firm of the future. what does that look like?
richard: you know, we’re still figuring that out. and we’re on this journey, and i’m a firm believer that, you know, the journey is gonna have lots of twists and turns along the way, and it definitely is not gonna be a straight line from a to b. what we do know is that it’s much broader of a set of services than what we’ve offered in the past, and we’re certainly signaling that with the acquisition and the first cpa firm in the country with an operating law firm, serving entrepreneurs.i
jean: i was gonna ask you about that.
richard: so that’s an example. it’s a combination of new services, new approach, stellar client service, and technology-integrated and talking about something we spoke about offline before hitting record, pricing. so we’ll give a shout out to michelle since…
jean: michelle will love that.
richard: michelle will love that we’re talking about pricing.
jean: yes. she said… so okay. so, we’ve entered this, so she’ll be particularly happy with me. so, for those information, we’re talking about michelle river with advanced pricing methods. and she tells me that hundreds of your folks have gone through the training to price differently. how is that working?
richard: you know, we’re still on that journey. we have lots of clients that have been with our firm for 73 years in some cases. i’ve worked with some of those families. and, you know, some of the, as michelle would say, some of the older clients are harder to change than newer clients. so we’re very much focused on, you know, just reimagining what the client experience is like, including invoicing and pricing and engagement letters and all those things that are part of the process and touch points with a client. and so we’re focused on delivering value and pricing that accordingly.
jean: so you mentioned, aprio legal. how does that align with your overall strategy?
richard: entrepreneurs every day, in fact, i was with a client on tuesday, where it was right after… i was actually with this client right after we signed our definitive agreement with radix law. well, end of this month will be aprio law, headquartered in scottsdale, arizona. and he turned to me and he said, does this mean now that you can not just advise me, but you can produce the documents? and i said, that’s true.
now in states where the practice of law under the alternative business structure is not permitted, we will collaborate and operate and do work in conjunction with the many law firms that we represent and we work with today. so i think this is going to strengthen the relationships we have with the law firms that we work with today at a superior level, within the business community. and he looked at me, and he’s like, that’s brilliant. he said, i don’t have to be the go-between.
i think a lot of our entrepreneurial clients are looking for a holistic approach and an approach where their team can advise them and give them the answers that they need and not pontificate forever about theories and focus in on exactly what the answer is and solution is and go execute it. and it’s gonna give us that opportunity for the first time to partner together with other professionals in other areas. no different than we have in cybersecurity or in software implementation or in staffing. we have fast-growing businesses in all those areas. wealth management is another area that is fast-growing here at aprio. and, just as another leg to that stool to best serve, again, entrepreneurs serving entrepreneurs. and i think every day about how i wanna be taken care of by professionals i work with.
and we ask our clients every day. and you’re asking earlier about, you know, some of the strategies that have guided us. one of our primary strategies has been just ask the client. and just do what they want done. it’s just follow the breadcrumbs from the client, and everything will work itself out.
jean: right. right. and that goes back to basic, you know, relationship building. right? asking good questions, really listening to what they’re telling you. you’re right. your clients will guide you into what services they need. and, richard, this also reminds me of the days when we used to talk about the one-stop shop. right? remember the classic one-stop shop, let’s offer clients, you know, just more than this regular, you know, tax and, you know, audit compliance? and that’s exactly what you’re doing. and, of course, a lot of other firms are as well. but this leap into legal is, i believe you’re the first firm to do that, or was that kpmg?
richard: we were the first firm licensed. we were licensed nine months ago.
jean: okay. nice.
richard: and we are the first firm to make an acquisition in arizona of a law firm as a cpa firm, and we’ll be the first operating firm serving entrepreneurial clients across many facets of the legal community.
jean: right. and there you know, there’s only so many times that you could be first to market, so i think you would be particularly proud to be first to market for legal.
richard: it’s fun. and, also, you know, we’re still navigating and figuring it out. so, you know, we’re early in crossing the chasm.
jean: right. right. now you’ve mentioned culture a couple of times already. aprio emphasizes what you call a people-first and client-focused culture. how difficult is this to maintain as you are just growing exponentially?
richard: i like to say, as we talked earlier about our 31 fundamentals, our culture is defined and it’s practiced every day. it is part of who we are. it’s part of what we do every single day. it does take work, effort, and it costs money.
i believe it’s paying dividends, and our people are attuned to every single day. what our fundamental of the week is, whether it’s act with integrity, be kind, keep things fun, walk in the client’s shoes, are some of our fundamentals. some of our other fundamentals, i talked about some earlier. and so we’re talking about it every day. it’s the language that we use with inside of the firm and how we communicate with one another.
jean: i can see how that would be infectious because what i’m hearing is that this is the way the firm operates, and this is not just a pocket of folks trying to get everybody all revved up. you know, that this is… what’s the right word? this is just throughout aprio and how you operate.
richard: so, jean, i think about it this way. client relationships can be one of two different relationships. one is transactional, where i view the client as i’m having a transaction with them. and i’m gonna do this today, and maybe i’m gonna do something in six months with from now with them. or it can be relational, as you were talking about earlier. and we know each other, and we know what we’re about, and why we’re helping one another, and how we work together. and it’s a different… you’re on a different plane in terms of how you talk to one another, and how you communicate with one another, and how you’re emotionally connected. i believe it’s the same thing as you’re describing from a cultural perspective. you can throw six values on the wall and talk about them every three months. that’s transactional. you can talk about one every day and have a deep relationship with it. and now you have a relationship with your culture, and you have a relationship that the people internally have a different kind of relationship because of how they’re communicating and practicing something at the same time together over and over and over again.
so we’re in our, i think, eighth or ninth cycle through the 31 fundamentals right now. which is very exciting that we’ve sustained this through this time period. it’s just how we, like you said, it’s how we operate. it landed us on usa today’s best places to work list, for the last three years running. national list, we’re best places to work in almost every market we’re in. and the ones that we’re not in, we’re highly focused on getting there. you know, it’s probably a new market for us. and we were named to glassdoor’s best places to work. we have been, you know, i think one of very few accounting firms that have ever made that list.
jean: wow. okay.
richard: jean, if you think about glassdoor, that’s the stuff that goes in the internet, their algorithm
jean: right.
richard: you can’t play with that one.
jean: right. and i love the analogy that you just made there. i think that’s so appropriate. and with every firm looking for more people, the fact that you have the evidence there that the culture is genuine and that potential employees can really learn about what their life would be like at aprio, has to help. it has to give you an advantage when you’re searching for people and for clients, for that matter.
richard: i think it strongly matters in both cases. and if you saw our recent press release, i think it was earlier this week, we announced, you know, four new leaders in our leadership team, that have either been promoted internally or joined from the outside. and we have been a destination firm for, especially, i would say, younger partners looking for an organization that has meaning. and aprio in and of itself means head and heart, so it has a definition. and it was a manufactured developed name, you know, for a purpose.
and they wanna be part of a team that has a north star and that has a why behind it and has a meaning behind its name and a purpose.
jean: right. yeah. there’s a few folks working with you that i used to work with at various firms, so i follow them along too. so it really it reminds me of my days in atlanta, which makes me happy.
so aprio received some investment from charles bank capital partners. right? this was not quite a year ago. right? back in august?
richard: august 1st, 2024.
jean: okay. how did you make the decision to go after private equity?
richard: well, i’m quoting an article in 2022 saying private equity is not for us, and we’re not gonna do it. we saw changes in the landscape happening. we wanted to accelerate our growth in the light of significant changes that i know you’re talking about regularly in our profession around technology, people, client needs, and demands. and we wanted to accelerate our 2030 strategy. we conducted a fairly, you know, significant search and executed a process. we spent time thinking about what is that we want and need in a partner and what we were looking for, and how we wanted to operate the business going forward.
for example, we wanted to remain a partnership. and we didn’t wanna go to a c-corp with w2s for the partners. we want everybody, you know, continue to have that ownership mindset, feel entrepreneurship, and get that k1. and so that was one of the things we accomplished during our process. we believe very much in our 2030 strategy. and we partnered with charles bank because they believe, one of the reasons was they they believe in our strategy, and we are executing that strategy, and we own the strategy relative to our agreement with them. and those are, you know, two points that i’ll focus on.
jean: right. okay. so how…
richard: you can probably have a whole hour about this.
jean: i know. i told you i had a lot of questions.
so, how are you using this capital? now, obviously, part of it has to be this m&a strategy because you’ve just said you’ve got however many firms in the pipeline. are you using it in other ways?
richard: so we’re using it around people and technology, m&a as we’ve talked about. and, just to emphasize on the people side, we’ve also made a significant number of lateral partner hires into aprio. we spoke about that a few minutes ago. so those are the ways that we continue to use the capital. one of the board members that joined us from charles bank is a gentleman by the name of john flannery, who is now my personal coach. and he… i’ve always had a coach. i’ve had a coach for 15, 20 years. actually, really throughout my whole career, but formal coach is the last 15 years.
and john texted me right after we closed the transaction, and he’s the former ceo of ge. so if you’d asked me 33 years ago in 1992 if we’d be running the business and it would be this big and i’d be getting coached by the ceo of… you know, former ceo of ge, i probably definitely would have said no, if that was the storyline. and john’s great. and he texted me right after we closed the transaction with them. and he said, we at aprio will be judged on our ability to create opportunities for our young people. and that’s, in a nutshell, the cultural alignment that we found with our partner because we view they view aprio, and aprio is a platform firm, and it is an independent firm with a financial sponsor.
jean: that just struck a chord with me because we both know that there are still firms that operate, with leadership that says, this is the way we did it. this is the way you need to do it because that’s, like, how we did it. and if you stay around long enough, you know, maybe 13, 14 years, whatever that might be, you’ll get to pay into, you know, the partnership, and that’s when you’re gonna get your reward, you know, so to speak. and these younger generations, they don’t wanna wait that long for that kind of recognition, i’ll say, or the ability, to generate money and to support themselves and their families or whatever, you know, their interests are in their lives. so that has to be another key talking point for you when it comes to recruiting.
richard: i’ll put it in numbers. 850 people at aprio today. managers, senior managers and directors, in addition to the partners, 850 people have an equity interest in aprio today. can’t do that under the old methods. under the old operating model. that can’t be done. that was another thing. so i agree with you, by the way.
one of our partners, kayla, who is our regional leader in the mid-atlantic region, she joined through a merger in 2023, and she is a leader within the business. she was a leader before she was, you know, promoted into that role. and when we went through our transaction last summer and we were going through the transaction, kayla said, and i quote, “you’re finally getting rid of our bougie social security system.”
and i think that is how our young people in the profession today view the historical partnership deferred compensation model, and this is an opportunity to change it. and if we’re gonna expand what we offer and how we… if we’re gonna just think about what we do offer, if we’re gonna expand what we offer to our clients in a meaningful way, stretching way beyond the profession. those businesses are valued completely differently. and we have to evolve. i believe we have to evolve.
jean: yeah. yeah. so what would your advice be for leadership at other accounting firms considering private equity?
richard: well, that could also be an hour-long conversation. i think you have to decide who you are, what you wanna be when you grow up, how you wanna treat all of the people within the organization, and you have to understand the quality of the organization, the culture of the organization, and the quality of the equity that you’re gonna be partnering with. because there’s lots of different flavors. so i’ve worked with many clients that have been private equity, you know, have had investments from private equity over the years. and there’s all sorts of flavors out there. there’s deals that have preferred equity. there’s deals that have a preferred return. there are preferences of all different types that come in, and then there’s those transactions that are pair of pursue in common. there are people that overvalue equity during transactions and people who undervalue equity during transactions. and so what is your equity really going to be worth when it’s all said and done?
there are some that are very focused on, well, i want to reduce income to the lowest possible level possible to transact today. well, that’s gonna be very damaging to the people in the future coming up in the business. and so there has to be a healthy balance between what’s happening today from a transaction perspective, what’s gonna happen in the future, and how are we gonna pay people along that journey. and why do they wanna come to work in the morning? why are they gonna get up and come in? are they being rewarded appropriately so that they feel valued for their current contribution? and so building something for the long run is difficult. and i think our culture and our fundamentals really play into this. and, you know, we have, as you know, closed many transactions since august. actually, we started closing them in november. so just in five months, we’ve closed a number of transactions. i mentioned we have a lot we’re closing, and we have a lot of people we’re having conversations with today. and there are sometimes things that just aren’t a fit because their desire is what can i do now to maximize the outcome for us a few versus we’re gonna make sure that everybody’s treated reasonably, you know, treated well? and we’re going to partner with somebody that’s in this for the long haul.
so that would be my, i don’t know if that was a soapbox or what people should be thinking about. hopefully, i answered the question for you, and it’s helpful to some who, you know, listen to this segment.
jean: yeah. and the thing that you just described is part of your people-first thinking. you know? so it does, you know, permeate, you know, through everything you’re doing.
richard: well, we did our transaction. we thought about there’s three ways to do it. one was pure capitalist, where a lot goes in the hands of a few, socialist, which is peanut butter, and then maybe in the middle, there’s democratic. and how do you transact in a way that creates… that wins the hearts and minds of the team and engages them in a future that will create financial independence for many. it will create wealth for some and financial independence for many, many people. and that’s our goal, and we’ve designed our model even for people who are coming up. i mean, we just made 12 partners on january 1 that got promoted within the firm, natural promotions. and we have an ongoing pipeline. and our model is set up in a way to create financial independence for the same partners we were creating financial independence for in the past. we’re just doing it differently. we’re doing it faster. and i think in a more meaningful way.
jean: right. absolutely. so i’ve got a couple more questions. so aprio also has the aprio firm alliance, and i know you just merged in, you know, the rsm network firms. right?
richard: effective may 1.
jean: okay. effective may 1. so, clearly, this is another way that aprio is growing, is building this alliance of smaller firms. and let’s remember that aprio wasn’t always $485 million for those watching and listening. it started as a local firm in atlanta, probably on peachtree street. right? and a lot of time has passed then, and look at the result of all this hard work. so we have lots of listeners who are in smaller firms. tell me what you see, what challenges you see in these alliance firms related to growth, and how does the alliance help those firms?
richard: yeah. so the number one reason that firms are partnering with us, and we’ve been doing this for eight years. we started just with partnering with firms, and then we acquired actually our first two alliances, one from rsm, their firm foundation three years ago. and we also acquired sarah dobek’s business, her alliance. and so that’s the core of what we have today. and now we’re gonna… that’s 40 firms. we’re gonna add 70 to it. so we’re gonna be at 110 firms across north america, u.s., and canada.
and we’ve seen because we experienced i mean, i remember coming up in our firm, we didn’t have r&d, and i was serving manufacturing companies. i was leading our manufacturing practice. cost segregation r&d were two things that, you know, immediately come to mind in my past of ways we needed help. and there were firms in place then that helped us, you know, get those stood up, first as third parties, and then later as we grew, we brought that in-house when it made sense. but it had to make economic sense. i think there’s a risk of being single-threaded in a particular specialty service line. and we’re partnering with firms to help them best serve their clients. they have their relationships. they’re local. they’re serving their clients. they have those bonds that they’ve created, and we’re there to partner alongside them, only to do the things that they want us to do and not get in their way and not take on any work they don’t authorize us to do. so we respect those relationships. and we can do it at a price point that i think makes sense today.
and we’re serving the same clients they are. because if you look at the mosaic of aprio, 80% of our leaders in segments, in practices, in industries, in service lines came from firms that have merged with us over the last seven years.
my other board members today from aprio that serve on the board both merged in, one in 2023 and one in 2019. and so we know exactly what they’re going through still. we still have that view, and we’re still serving that client base. so it’s a great way to partner with them, and it’s a great way for us to continue to build the quality and size of team in particular specialty areas so that they’re not single-threaded, and very few of them are today. and they’re more robust, and so it’s a win-win across the board.
jean: yeah. and would you say that it’s niche-driven?
richard: very much. we focus on adjacencies of services. and i mentioned earlier, you know, just listen to clients. and so, as we’ve listened to our manufacturing clients or our restaurant franchise hospitality, technology clients, real estate clients, we’ve added the services they’ve said they needed.
jean: right. that’s wonderful.
so my last question is a bonus question. i understand that you have a passion for sailing. where is your favorite place to sail?
richard: oh, well, i’ve sailed in lots of places. i learned to sail in minnesota when i was a child.
jean: minnesota?
richard: jean, 10,000 lakes. 10,000 lakes, so lots of sailing. i went to sailing camp when i was 12, 11 or 12. maybe it’s both years. both summers. i went to sailing camp in minnesota. and, so i love it. atlanta is not a great place to go sailing. we do have lakes here as you know, but they’re all in the mountains. they’re all man-made, and the wind directions shift, you know, pretty often. so not my favorite sailing in the lakes. so i love going down to the caribbean, in the mediterranean. i’ve done some sailing recently, and i’m gonna be doing some sailing this summer.
jean: awesome. awesome.
richard: yeah. i’m gonna learn to sail bigger boats. i’ve always sailed, like, 18-foots, 16-foots, you know, just like, afternoon fun sailing for two or three hours. but i wanna learn to sail something bigger. so i’m gonna learn to sail a 32-foot, this summer. i’m gonna be taking some sailing lessons, and we’ll see how that goes.
jean: so is that a live-aboard then? you will actually wanna, like, sail at some point that you could live onboard and go? okay.
richard: i don’t see living on one. maybe for a few days or a week. you know, but take something out for, you know, a full day sail would be amazing.
jean: right. oh, it sounds amazing.
richard: do a little fishing off the back of the boat. yeah. i think it’ll be fun.
jean: there you go. there you go. that sounds wonderful.
well, i’ve been speaking with richard kopelman, ceo of aprio advisory group. richard, it has been awesome to catch up with you today.
richard: jean, a pleasure. and i’m, you know, maybe you don’t… you know this story, i think. you know my legal name. right?
jean: yes. yes. richard berry aprio kopelman.
richard: there you go.
jean: i didn’t ask you that question because i’ve read it many times at this point, so i thought, well, everybody knows the aprio… okay. so since you opened that up, is it just legend that you also have a tattoo of aprio?
richard: that is definitely legend. i do not have a single tattoo, and i definitely don’t have a tattoo of aprio. and i’m not branded either.
jean: oh my gosh. yeah. when i heard that story, i’m like, really? like, i really had to dig into that to see if it’s actually true.
richard: yeah, that’s a legend. if there’s a legend about a tattoo, that’s great. that’s even more fun.
jean: you’re gonna keep it a legend.
richard: you know, we’ll let it be a legend. jean, thank you so much for having me on, and always a pleasure to catch up. so we have to… we’ll definitely have to connect more often.