My name is Seth Cohen, and I'm the chief impact officer of Forbes and the founder of the Forbes Impact Lab.

I'm here in New York City at the NASDAQ market site today, joined with Richard Copelman, the CEO of Aprio, a business advisory and CPA firm that is entrepreneurs serving entrepreneurs all around the country.

Richard, thanks for joining me today.

Seth, thank you for having me. Great to be here.

So, Richard, first, tell me a little bit about APRO.

It's had an amazing trajectory.

It was founded in the 50s in its, I guess, headquarter town of Atlanta,

but now it's over 25 locations and over 15 markets

around the country. Tell me what APRIO is and what it represents in terms of servicing

entrepreneurs. Yeah, we've had some amazing growth over the last few years, and I often refer to the

firm as a 72-year-old overnight success.

Headquartered in Atlanta, we were Atlanta only until seven years ago. And seven years ago,

we decided it was time to take what we had the capabilities of doing and working with entrepreneurs

and helping them scale their businesses. And we decided to take that on the road outside of Atlanta.

And we've now completed 24 transactions.

Actually, at the end of last year, it was 24, and by the end of this year, it'll be 34.

So tell me about that transformation for a moment,

because that's not a particularly easy thing to do.

I'm assuming there were a lot of partners that had only known the market of Atlanta

and now you presented this idea of expanding nationally how did that conversation go

that was an interesting conversation if you want to really get into the into

the you know into the into the into the specifics of what happened, it was not an easy

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