In recent years, the professional services sector has been undergoing a profound transformation: future sustainability may depend less and less on the individual size of a firm and increasingly on its ability to become part of organized platforms capable of investing, innovating, and growing over time.
In this context, several international players are experimenting with organizational and industrial models that differ significantly from the traditional professional firm, demonstrating that even a historically fragmented activity can be scaled.
Among these, Kelly Partners Group Holdings certainly represents one of the most successful and interesting cases to analyze. It is a modern example of how professional services can be organized according to a disciplined, long-term, compounding growth logic, without losing control over the professional-client relationship.
The experience of Kelly Partners Group therefore offers a useful perspective for reflecting on whether similar models could, or could not, find application in the Italian market.
Kelly Partners Group operates as a decentralized industrial platform, in which the holding company holds a controlling stake in the individual operating entities it has acquired over time, while leaving a significant portion of equity and governance in the hands of local partners.
The so-called “Partner-Owner-Driver” model provides that the professionals leading the firms retain a meaningful equity stake in the individual entity, ensuring commitment and participation in the group’s results, while remaining responsible for client relationships and day-to-day management. At the same time, the central platform consolidates key functions such as software, marketing, training, intellectual property, and operating standards—capabilities that small and mid-sized firms would struggle to develop efficiently on their own.
The result is a balance between local entrepreneurial autonomy and industrial discipline, allowing the group to grow through acquisitions of small to mid-sized targets in the Anglo-Saxon market (revenues between USD 2 and 10 million). From this perspective, Kelly Partners is not merely the sum of individual professional firms, but a more complex equation that multiplies results through economies of scale and specialization, making it a scalable system.
From an economic standpoint, the Kelly Partners model is based on a combination of local professional revenues and a service fee paid to the central platform. This fee, calculated as a percentage of the firms’ revenues, compensates access to shared services and is consistently reinvested by the holding company into what it does best: acquisitions, integration, and operational optimization.
In terms of incentives, the ownership structure ensures strong alignment: local partners continue to directly benefit from the growth in the firm’s economic value through their equity participation, while the holding captures value through the group’s expansion and the creation of economies of scale. This is a compounding growth logic, rather than simple dimensional expansion.
The sustainability of the model is also evident in the group’s financial discipline, summarized by Brett Kelly as “reducing risk and maximizing revenue.” The group has based its growth on acquisitions of relatively small firms, carried out at moderate multiples and with payment structures that prioritize the cash generation of the acquired business.
The results reported by the group highlight a high return on invested capital (FY2025, ROIC 23%) and strong revenue growth (+25% YoY), consistent with a model that prioritizes acquisition quality over volume. The absence of significant equity dilution and the decision to reinvest generated cash further reinforce the long-term value creation logic.
One of the most relevant questions concerns the sustainability of the model in the context of technological evolution and, in particular, the increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence. The automation of repetitive activities (basic accounting, reconciliations, standard compliance) tends to compress the economic value of lower-value professional services, putting pressure on firms that base most of their revenues on these activities.
In this scenario, economic sustainability depends less on resisting AI and more on the ability to integrate it within a structured platform. The industrialization of repetitive processes reduces unit service costs and frees up professional resources that can be allocated to higher value-added activities such as advisory, tax planning, strategic support for businesses, and other extraordinary transactions.
A model like that of Kelly Partners, built on centralized technology investments and economies of scale, is undoubtedly better suited to absorb this change than an individual or small professional firm. In this sense, AI represents not only a risk of disintermediation, but also an accelerating factor for aggregation and competitive selection processes in the sector. It is perhaps in this light that the decline in KPG’s share price over the past year can be interpreted, despite the group’s strong financial performance.
The stock is down from its peak reached in February 2025, while still maintaining a +350% increase compared to its IPO price: it is possible that the market is already reassessing revenues derived from repetitive activities of listed professional firms in light of the upcoming technological revolution. This aspect is particularly relevant for smaller firms, which may face declining valuation multiples for repetitive activities at the time of sale in the future.
In this context, the Italian professional services market finds itself in a particularly interesting phase in terms of timing. In recent years, valuation multiples for professional firms in Italy have been rising, supported by the entry of structured platforms and increasingly frequent aggregation transactions. This dynamic creates a window of opportunity for professionals to act in a phase of high multiples and maximize the value of existing activities.
Entering aggregation paths today means not only benefiting from favorable market conditions, but also reducing the risk of value erosion in the medium to long term, turning technological pressure into a growth lever. From this perspective, the goal is not to sell the firm, but to rethink its positioning within a platform capable of investing, innovating, and adapting.
Returning to the initial question of replicability in the Italian market, Italy presents favorable conditions from a structural standpoint: a high fragmentation of professional firms, an increasingly relevant generational turnover issue, and growing regulatory complexity that makes individual management less sustainable.
At the same time, there are non-negligible constraints, such as the regulatory environment, a professional culture historically oriented toward independence, and a lower openness to shared governance models, which may represent obstacles to full replicability.
MpO is currently already in contact with operators proposing approaches similar to those of KPG, adapted to the needs of the Italian market, and therefore tangible evidence may emerge in the near future.
More than a “mechanical” replication, the Kelly Partners case suggests a direction: the transition from the firm as an individual entity to the firm as a unit within a platform. In a context of increasing competitive and technological pressure, the ability to aggregate, share investments, and adopt industrial logics may become a necessary condition to preserve margins and service quality.
