Crowe Chizek buys Big Five office in Fort Wayne

Crowe, Chizek and Company LLP, the eighth-largest accounting firm in the United States, recently acquired a thriving PricewaterhouseCoopers practice in Fort Wayne, Ind.

According to Jim Powers, Crowe Chizek partner in charge of Northern Indiana, PricewaterhouseCoopers contacted Crowe Chizek about its possible interest in acquiring the Fort Wayne office in early June as PricewaterhouseCoopers pursued its strategy to focus on opportunities with the highest global profit potential. The acquisition was consummated November 1, 2000.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Fort Wayne office, which primarily handled tax and business assurance matters, included approximately 30 professional staff and two partners, both of whom are now Crowe Chizek partners. The majority of the other associates have remained with the new owners as well.

Crowe Chizek previously had no physical presence in the Fort Wayne market, Powers said, explaining that the acquired office’s strong practices in manufacturing, tax, and business assurance services fit well with Crowe Chizek.

Powers sees this acquisition as an example of a larger trend: concentrating resources on the services and markets that offer the greatest long-term benefit and growth potential to a firm.

“The Fort Wayne office was peripheral to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ core strategies,” Powers said. Although he couldn’t elaborate on Crowe Chizek’s other future plans, Powers stated clearly that the firm is “aggressively expanding.”

The CPA Journal is broadly recognized as an outstanding, technical-refereed publication aimed at public practitioners, management, educators, and other accounting professionals. It is edited by CPAs for CPAs. Our goal is to provide CPAs and other accounting professionals with the information and news to enable them to be successful accountants, managers, and executives in today's practice environments.