NH’s Top Women-Led Businesses: (#43) UHY

Before it became part of UHY, a national firm providing audit, tax, consulting and advisory services, the firm was Bigelow & Co., which was founded in NH in 1935. In 2023, the firm, which has 30 employees in NH, became part of UHY, an international firm.

UHY’s NH operation is led by Marie McKay, who originally joined Bigelow & Co. in 1983, worked her way up to a partner within six years, and eventually became the firm’s office managing partner.

After the pandemic, she and the leadership team started to work on a succession plan. It quickly became evident the firm either needed to join a larger company or downsize to survive. “It’s harder to be a midsized firm now than it used to be due to a lot of regulation and compliance that has changed,” McKay says. Led by McKay, the principals and senior managers opted to become part of a larger company that could provide the firm with more resources to serve its clients.

Over the years, McKay had fielded many offers to buy the firm, but the timing or fit was never right. When UHY called, the timing and fit were a match. “They are not like other [firms]. They are not trying to take your staff and use them in their firm. They want you to remain in the community working with your clients but providing you with more resources,” she says. “UHY allows you to work pretty autonomously. … It was a better path to the future.”

By becoming part of UHY, the firm can attract leaders who want to grow successful practices without dealing with the headaches of business ownership, says McKay. Being part of an international firm also allows the firm to recruit the next generation of CPAs who don’t necessarily want to be generalists and want to specialize. “Now we have subject matter experts,” McKay says.

The firm continues to work with small and medium-sized businesses as well as individual clients, and McKay says they do so strategically to assist them with a variety of matters, including mergers and acquisitions and succession planning. “We’re all about quality work and client service,” McKay says. “It’s really a people business.”