Managing Partner
Pointe Advisory
Stuart Ferguson leads Pointe Advisory, a boutique strategy consultancy with 15-plus years of experience advising leading professional services firms, including the Big Four. Pointe is a market leader in growth strategy, M&A diligence and value creation for CPA+ firms across the US and Europe. Over the last 5-years, Pointe has advised the largest PE funds on active processes around 15 of the top 25 US accounting firms and currently advises >10 of the T100 CPA firms’ leadership teams on strategy and operating model optimization.
Prior to joining Pointe, Stuart led diligences in Bain & Company’s Private Equity Group. Before that, he was an accountant at KPMG, specializing in hedge fund accounting and tax.
Stuart holds an MBA with distinction from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and graduated magna cum laude with a BBA from the College of William & Mary. Stuart is also a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in Virginia.
Private equity’s theses for CPA+ platforms is increasingly nuanced and increasingly linked to the believability of a firm’s organic growth prospects. In this session, Stuart Ferguson explores what today’s Investment Committees (ICs) actually underwrite: commercially led organic growth, the maturity of commercial excellence, and—critically—the scalability of the talent engine. He will also frame the portfolio opportunities and risks created by AI and outline an inorganic strategy that moves beyond CPA consolidation into adjacencies where a platform has a defensible “right to win.”