The Silent Takeover: Why PE Is Moving Into Professional Services En Masse

Why professional services have suddenly become so attractive

The appeal is not hard to explain. Professional services firms combine scalable, asset-light business models with stable recurring revenue and a high degree of fragmentation — the ideal ingredients for buy-and-build strategies. According to BHB Dullemond, the Dutch accountancy sector alone recorded 59 acquisitions in 2025, with a total deal value of over €1.6 billion, an increase of roughly 30% compared to 2024. Private equity accounted for 97% of that total deal value. Similar patterns are visible in legal, consultancy and compliance. Add the acceleration of digitalisation to that mix, and you have a sector that PE funds increasingly view as a growth platform rather than a stable but static domain.

The figures from PitchBook (2026) reinforce this shift. Data on PE deals in the Netherlands show steady growth: between 2021 and 2025, the number of PE firms investing in professional services rose by almost 37%. PE funds are increasingly focusing on scalable platforms with strategic relevance, and professional services score on both counts.

Forvis Mazars confirms that PE funds are showing renewed confidence, driven in part by improved portfolio performance and a deliberate focus on sectors delivering solid growth despite macroeconomic uncertainty. Professional services top that list.

Buy-and-build as the growth engine

What PE is looking for in this sector goes beyond short-term returns. SI Global highlights that 87% of all new PE investments in 2024 were so-called first-money deals — not reinvestments or bolt-ons, but initial entry positions. That is a deliberate choice to build platforms, not to optimise existing portfolios.

The conclusion emerging from the data is clear: professional services firms are becoming the platforms on which PE funds build their growth ecosystems. SSRN research shows a structural reorientation towards professional services, with legal, consultancy, accountancy, compliance and real estate advisory explicitly cited as new core sectors for investment capital.

Three factors are accelerating this shift: falling interest rates, higher valuations of knowledge-intensive assets, and the need for professional services firms to modernise and digitalise. That makes the sector interesting not only as a source of stable cash flow, but as an intellectually intensive growth market.

What this demands from leadership

PE-driven transformation is not a question of optimisation. It is a question of pace. And at that pace, leaders are exposed immediately. In professional services, where knowledge, culture and collaboration are the real assets, the biggest risk factor is not the model, not the market and not the PE structure. It is leadership that moves too slowly, lacks the nerve to act, and keeps reasoning in recommendations instead of decisions.

Leaders who succeed in a PE-backed environment have one thing in common: they are willing to commit to a direction irrevocably, even when it is uncomfortable. Knowing "what good looks like" is not enough. You have to be willing to act on it, even if that means breaking processes, restructuring teams or reversing a strategic course that seemed untouchable for years.

This is not about bravado, it is about execution. Buy-and-build strategies, digitalisation programmes and value-creation plans die under leaders who keep hiding behind project teams, advisory rounds or control mechanisms. The PE reality calls for leaders who take ownership, who make hard choices in weeks rather than quarters, and who bring teams along through radical clarity, not endless consensus-building.

In our conversations with PE investors, partners and CEOs, I see it time and again: organisations with outstanding subject-matter experts still stall because their leadership capacity is insufficient to carry the acceleration. The winners are leaders who confront their own limitations and actively bring in outside expertise. Not out of weakness, but out of strategic awareness.

Because in a PE context, there is only one rule: the value you fail to create within 24 months, you will never recover afterwards. And that calls for leaders who do not just raise the bar, but move it.

For us, this market shift is not an abstract trend from reports; we see it reflected in our practice every day. More than 50% of our PE-related assignments now sit within professional services. In our conversations with leaders of agencies and service platforms, we hear the same thing again and again: the model works, the market is there, but the transformation stands or falls on the human factor.

Ready for the next step?

In almost every PE case the pattern is the same: structures are in place, market potential is clear, but leadership is the bottleneck.

The uncomfortable question: does that apply to your organisation too?

If you want to prevent growth from being held back by leaders who are good, but not fast or sharp enough under PE pressure, now is the moment to test what is needed. Precisely because service-related PE cases have become the core of our practice, we can pinpoint exactly which leadership works under PE pressure, and which does not. We are happy to help you identify where the risks lie and which leaders will make the difference in your next phase.

Get in touch

Are you facing a leadership or succession challenge within your organisation? Or would you like to explore how executive search can contribute to a future-proof organisation? Get in touch with Rosanne Ferrari, Partner Business & Professional Services, at rosanne.ferrari@odgers.com, or contact Pieter Ebeling, Head of Private Equity Europe, at pieter.ebeling@odgers.com