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No. 20
Revenue growth FY 2021 to 2023: 96.5%
2023 revenue: $8.8 million
Jeffrey Donovan says Donovan CPAs and Advisors has flipped its focus. The company puts the growth and well-being of its employees first, then the firm and then, last, the clients. “And you say, ‘Well, golly, that just sounds like a really bad client experience,’” says Donovan, the firm’s managing partner. “But in reality, the opposite is true. It’s a better client experience because our people are happy, and they’re more engaged with the clients.” One tool of note toward that employee-first focus is an in-house playbook for each employee that helps map a pathway toward promotion.
The long game: Donovan points to two mergers in 2022 that likely vaulted the company into the Fast 25. One began as a conversation with a person he met at an industry conference. They started talking about what succession looks like, what an opportunity might be that could bring the two firms together sometime in the future. And about five years later, Donovan got a phone call. It can be “a long play,” he says, “to identify and recruit a merger or an acquisition.”
A shift in strategy: A growing firm—the number of full-time employees is now 41 from 25 two years prior—has provided an opportunity to approach work differently. Rather than focus on departments, like a tax department or audit department or client advisory department, the company is in the process of building itself around industries, such as education, affordable housing, construction. “We want to build basically a business plan around each of those industries so that we have the right team in place,” he says.
Self-realization: Donovan admits that he was a micromanager. He was too controlling. But as the work mounted, he couldn’t keep up. “And the thing that I learned,” he says, “which was a surprise at the time, is, whenever you give people an opportunity to do something or just a shot at doing something, they’ll generally do it, and they’ll do it very well, and they will probably do it differently than the way I would have done it.”•
Check out more of IBJ’s ranking of Indy’s fastest-growing companies.
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