Colm Advisory: Introduction

The key strategy in the game of chess is to take control of the center squares of the board. With control of the center squares, you can monitor your opponent and deploy offensive and defensive strategies as you see fit. If you had the opportunity to take control of the board before the game even started, why wouldn’t you? That’s my goal with Colm Advisory: to put my clients in the center squares of the board in the strategies they pursue.

I am a CPA with over seven years of experience in public accounting and mergers and acquisitions advisory. During my time in the Big 4, I gained experience auditing public and private companies, most recently as a director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Deals Practice. Working in client service is a great experience because every project involves people, new perspectives, questions to be answered, analyses to be performed and problems to be solved. The best part about working in M&A transactions is that every deal involves at least two parties, so all of those attributes are essentially doubled for each transaction but in the same amount of time. I have advised on more than 75 mergers and acquisition transactions, met hundreds (if not thousands) of people from all sorts of backgrounds, and worked on companies in various industries, including pest control, transportation & logistics, equipment rental, cloud-based software and just about everything in between.

My experience includes more than just financial and accounting analysis. I’ve seen good deals and bad deals, successful transactions and aborted transactions, best practices to implement and worst practices to avoid. I started this firm to offer the knowledge, capabilities, and resources that I’ve accumulated to small and medium-sized enterprises and companies in the middle-market. I will be using this blog to regularly discuss M&A and accounting and finance trends, industry and business insights, deeper dives into our service offerings and key analyses, among other related topics.

Interested in learning more about Colm Advisory services and capabilities or have an idea for a blog post or topic you would like to hear more about? Contact us today.

About the author: Joe Finnerty is the founder and managing principal of Colm Advisory.