Two accounting firms in the same suburb. Both billing around $900,000 a year. Both owner-managed, both compliance-weighted, both with a team of six. One sells in eleven weeks with three competing offers. The other takes nine months and settles for a figure the owner describes as disappointing. Nothing on either profit and loss statement explains the gap. If you're a practice principal thinking about the next few years — whether that's growth, succession, a partial exit or a full sale — the useful question isn't "what's the going rate?" It's "what separates the top of the range from the bottom?"[...]