A good home for the practice you built
If you've started thinking about retirement, succession, or simply what happens to your clients and staff after you, we'd like to talk. Harbor Books acquires a small number of practices each year from owners who care where they land. Every conversation is confidential, starting before the first number is shared.
Practices built on steady, recurring work
Services
Monthly bookkeeping and client accounting services, payroll, sales tax, and business tax returns: the kind of work clients renew every month, not once a year. We're not the right buyer for seasonal 1040-only practices or for audit and attest work.
Size
Roughly $500k to $1M in annual revenue, with a meaningful share of it on monthly retainers. A bit outside that range is fine. The shape of the practice matters more to us than the exact number.
Geography
Anywhere in the US. We're a remote-first firm, and we've been looking most actively in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, but a well-run practice travels well.
We buy practices to keep them, not to strip them
The promise, in one sentence: we'll take care of your clients and your people, keep your name through the transition, and pay you to protect what you built.
Your name stays on the door. Through the transition, your practice keeps its name and its identity. Clients meet Harbor Books gradually, introduced by you, not by a rebranding announcement.
Your team keeps their jobs. We buy practices for the people in them as much as the client list. Key staff get retention agreements and a real path forward, and your senior person gets a bigger role, not a smaller one.
Clients keep their prices and their people. A practice like yours is valuable because clients stay, and clients stay when nothing gets worse. There is no repricing spree and no handing your clients to a call center.
You leave at your own pace. Most owners stay involved for one to three years: full-time at first, part-time later, on call after that. You hand off relationships the way they were built, personally.
The terms stay simple. A fair price with a solid cash component at close, a seller note, and a portion tied to client retention, the one thing you directly influence. Terms you can read without a translator, from people who publish their prices on their website.
From first hello to close, typically about 90 days
A quiet conversation
Thirty minutes, no documents needed. You're deciding whether you like us, and nothing about the call obligates you to anything.
An NDA, then the numbers
We sign confidentiality before you share a single figure. Then a few weeks of looking at the practice together, respectfully and on your schedule.
A simple offer in writing
Plain terms on paper: price, cash at close, note, and retention piece. No exploding deadlines, and no pressure to accept.
Close, then a careful hand-off
Most deals close within about 90 days of the first conversation, at your pace. The hand-off afterward takes as long as your clients need it to.
Nobody hears about this from us
Exploring a sale is sensitive, and we treat it that way. We sign an NDA before you share anything, and the fact that we're talking at all is covered by it. We never contact your staff or your clients unless and until you ask us to. If we don't end up doing a deal together, everything you shared is returned or destroyed, and the conversation stays between us.
Start with an email
Write to us and it goes straight to a founder: no intake form, no broker required, no follow-up sequence. We reply within one business day, and "just curious what my practice might be worth" is a perfectly good opening line.
Email info@harborbooks.tax