He Takes Almost No Income Because He Picked His Exit Number
Dower & Associates is a CPA firm in Texas buying other CPA firms. Brad Dower is not optimizing for what the business pays him. He decided what the firm has to be worth when he leaves it, and every other decision runs off that number.
October 29, 2026
·
1 min read
The number is not decoration. It sets the acquisition pace, the financing structure and what he is willing to live on while the debt gets paid down. His own framing of the trade is blunt: you have to ask yourself whether you are fine putting 100% of the cash flow back in for at least the first 3 years of a deal.
Why it matters to you.
Most founders have a direction rather than a number. Grow, improve margins, maybe sell one day. That sounds prudent and it quietly costs you, because without a number every decision gets made on its own merits and the ones that pay you sooner always win the argument. A specific target does the opposite. It makes some obviously attractive choices wrong. Taking a million a year out of this firm would be a perfectly reasonable thing for Dower to do, and it is wrong against his number, which is why he can decide it in one line instead of agonising. The limit is that a number you picked badly is worse than no number, because you will optimize toward it for years. The point is not that $100 million is the right target. It is that his is specific enough to rule things out, and a goal that rules nothing out is not doing any work.
“I can live on very minimal, we live in Texas, cost of living here is next to nothing. And so basically all of our cash flow gets reinvested back in the business, because, you know, I could care less if I was making a million a year. I want the $100 million at the tail end of this, right? - Brad Dower, CEO, Dower & Associates”
Your one thing.
Write down what your firm has to be worth on the day you leave it, and one decision you made this year that you would have made differently against that figure. If nothing changes, your number is not specific enough to be useful yet.
Collective 54 is where boutique service firm founders go to make more money, scale with less friction, and build a firm worth buying.
See if it’s a fit →