There is money sitting inside a large company that nobody intends to waste. It is trapped in a property assessment, a sales-tax rule, a missed incentive, a customs calculation, or one of the thousands of ordinary decisions required to operate across jurisdictions. Ryan built its business by finding that money. Then it kept moving upstream - from recovering an overpayment, to fixing the process that caused it, to running the process, to selling software that remembers how the process should work.
That sequence explains how a firm launched in a 900-square-foot Dallas office became a global business-tax specialist. In July 1991, G. Brint Ryan and Chris F. Collis left Coopers & Lybrand and founded Collis & Ryan. Credit cards financed the start. Five employees produced $156,000 in first-year revenue. Ryan's own history says revenue then rose every year through 2024 - 34 consecutive increases - when it reached approximately $1.24 billion.
The product is a before-and-after photo of a tax department
Ryan is not the place an individual goes to file a Form 1040. Its customers are corporate tax directors, CFOs, real-estate teams, controllers, lawyers, and operations leaders. Their problems multiply with every state line, warehouse, acquisition, product code, fuel type, employee, and property. The company works across property tax, income tax, sales and use tax, VAT, excise, unclaimed property, credits and incentives, transfer pricing, business licenses, and tax technology.
Its public client wall reads like a tour of the modern economy: 7-Eleven, Alcoa, American Airlines, BASF, BP, Campbell's, Chevron, Chrysler, Cintas, Hershey, Kroger, Panasonic, Raytheon, Tyson, Walmart, and Warner Bros. The names are more than decoration. A retailer has thousands of locations and product codes. An energy producer faces property, severance, and excise rules. A manufacturer buys equipment, claims incentives, and moves goods across borders. Ryan can enter through one narrow problem and, if the work lands well, find several adjacent ones.
The first offer is recovery: inspect what a company paid and pursue money it should not have paid. Depending on the engagement and local rules, fees can be hourly, fixed, or contingent on savings. The next offers are consulting and advocacy - defend an audit, challenge an assessment, model an incentive, or redesign a process. Compliance outsourcing puts Ryan staff and systems into the recurring work of returns, registrations, payments, and notices. Ryan Legal Services adds an Arizona-licensed law firm. Technology teams select and implement systems. tax.com sells the resulting workflow as subscription software.
The Ryan loop
This is the clever part. A consulting case is not only revenue; it is product research. Every messy exception teaches the firm which data is missing, where ERP systems fall short, and which deadline or calculation needs automation. In 2022, Ryan made tax.com software broadly available by subscription for property tax, unclaimed property, transfer pricing, indirect tax, and grants, credits, and incentives. The company said the installation base already numbered in the thousands.
“Ryan has brought several ideas to us that we hadn't looked at before.”Tom Walker, CFO, Dallas Cowboys
A tax firm with one conspicuous omission
The largest alternative is obvious: Deloitte, PwC, EY, or KPMG. There are also middle-market accounting firms, specialist consultancies, law firms, internal tax departments, and software companies such as Avalara, Vertex, Sovos, and Thomson Reuters. Ryan's distinction is not that it does more than all of them. It is that it deliberately does less.
The firm stopped operating as a CPA firm in 1998 and does not audit or attest to financial statements. That leaves it free, Ryan argues, to advocate for a taxpayer without the independence conflicts and audit-committee approvals that constrain an external auditor. It also concentrates the company's recruiting and software work on business tax. Ryan can bring former auditors, tax officials, attorneys, statisticians, and technologists to a problem without needing to sell the client a financial-statement audit.
The limit is equally plain. A global company may prefer one Big Four relationship across audit, deals, and tax. A small business with simple obligations will not need Ryan's machinery. Recovery work depends on usable records and enough potential savings to justify the hunt. Software needs disciplined implementation. And a results-based fee can reward a quick refund without necessarily fixing the system that caused the mistake. Ryan is strongest when complexity is high, the money is measurable, and management wants a tax-only advocate.
The first system to fail was the culture
Ryan's most useful management lesson did not arrive in a strategy deck. It arrived as a resignation. In 2008, a rising employee told Brint Ryan that the firm's long-hours culture was incompatible with having a family. The company had grown by rewarding availability and visible effort. It was also earning what Ryan later called a “sweat-shop reputation.” The resignation made the cost specific: the system was pushing out the people it most wanted to keep.
Leadership changed its mind and built myRyan, a flexible environment with no single companywide schedule or office requirement, provided responsibilities were met. The important detail is often lost in the feel-good version: Ryan did not stop measuring. It measured more clearly. Dashboards tracked client-service scores, revenue, leadership, competencies, and team objectives. Freedom followed observable accountability.
The timing made the experiment harder. The financial crisis was underway. Yet Fortune reported record profit and revenue in 2009 and 2010. Ryan later credited myRyan with better retention, satisfaction, client scores, and results. The program's copyable idea is not unlimited vacation or remote work by itself. It is to define valuable output first, give people visibility into the score, and only then remove rules about where and when the work happens.
The acquisition machine gets a larger gear
Ryan has long bought specialist firms, but its January 2025 purchase of Altus Group's property-tax services business changed the scale. The price was CAD $700 million. Ryan gained roughly 1,000 employees, a property-tax presence in the United Kingdom, deeper Canadian and U.S. coverage, and itamlink property-tax software. The acquired business had generated CAD $263 million in 2023 revenue. A three-year subscription to Altus Market Insights added data to the package.
That deal shows what Ryan is buying: local expertise, relationships, recurring workflows, proprietary tools, and data. Later moves followed the same logic. Brayn Consulting added research-and-development credits, cost segregation, and green-energy incentives. A strategic investment in Dhruva Advisors widened access to India and the Middle East. Hucke and Associates added New York property-tax appeals. In June 2026, Ryan agreed to acquire Svalner Atlas Advisors, bringing 450 professionals and more than 4,000 clients across the Nordics and Benelux, subject to the expected closing.
Private capital has funded the pace. Onex invested $317 million in 2018 at a $1.1 billion valuation. Ares took a significant minority stake in 2022, valuing Ryan at $2.5 billion while Onex remained invested. Neuberger Berman agreed to join them as a significant minority shareholder in January 2026; the price and new valuation were not disclosed. These are equity investments, not the venture rounds of a young SaaS company, and Ryan remains led by its founder and principals.
The company’s two operating systems share one rule: vague activity is expensive; visible outcomes create room to move.
What a reader can copy - and what will break
Ryan's playbook travels beyond tax. Begin with a service where the client's return can be counted. Do the manual work until the exceptions become familiar. Fix the process behind the first win. Turn recurring pieces into software. Keep expert services nearby when rules and edge cases change faster than the product can.
Copy this carefully
- Sell a measurable first result. “We found $1 million” is easier to buy than “we transformed the function.”
- Use services as product discovery. Repeated exceptions should become data rules, controls, or software.
- Measure outcomes before granting autonomy. Flexibility without a shared score creates politics; a shared score creates trust.
- Acquire missing density. Ryan buys local expertise and workflow depth, not merely flags on a map.
It will not work everywhere. The savings must be large enough to fund specialist attention. The work must recur enough to justify software. Clients must share reliable data. Regulations must be complex enough to reward accumulated knowledge. Most of all, managers must be willing to stop confusing hours with output. Ryan changed only after a resignation made that confusion impossible to ignore.
Today the company reports more than 7,100 professionals and associates, 74,000 clients, and work in more than 80 countries. Its website displays names from BASF and Chevron to Kroger, Panasonic, Tyson, Walmart, and Warner Bros. The range makes sense. Every large physical or digital business creates a tax trail. Ryan's job is to follow it backward, find what leaked, and build a system that leaks less next time.