BKL buys music accountancy firm Dales Evans, its fifth deal since taking private equity money

BKL, the London tax, accounting and business advisory firm, said on 13 August that Dales Evans will become part of the business. Dales Evans works in music, media and entertainment accounting, advising artists, managers, producers, actors, record labels and music publishers on business management, worldwide taxation and personal accounting.

Neither firm disclosed a price. BKL said day to day support for Dales Evans clients will stay the same, with access to wider BKL expertise.

The fifth deal since CBPE came in

The transaction is BKL’s fifth acquisition since it took investment from private equity house CBPE in 2023, according to City AM. It follows the 2024 merger with Alan Heywood, another music-focused accountancy boutique, and the arrival of RBS Chartered Accountants in April 2026. Earlier deals brought in Wilson Wright in 2024 and the commercial finance consultancy CFPro in December 2023.

Lee Brook, BKL’s chief executive, said the Dales Evans team brings “an exceptional reputation and deep experience in a specialist sector”.

Read on its own, this is a mid-tier London firm buying a small competitor. Read alongside the rest of the year, it is one more data point in a pattern that has been running through UK professional services since institutional capital discovered the sector. Grant Thornton’s partners took private equity money. The offshore law firm Mourant took a minority equity investment from MML on 4 August. The buyers are not other accountants. They are funds with a return horizon.

Why this matters for families

Entertainment wealth is not a niche concern for family offices. Musicians, actors and producers generate income that is lumpy, taxed in a dozen countries in the same year, and tied up in catalogue rights that behave more like an asset class than a salary. Tour accounting, royalty audits and cross-border withholding are specialist skills. The firms that do this work well tend to be small, and the relationship usually sits with one or two named people rather than with the letterhead.

That is exactly what changes hands in a deal like this one. BKL’s own private client practice already covers trusts, offshore trusts, non-domiciled clients, probate and a professional trustee service, so a Dales Evans client acquires a broader menu overnight. Whether they wanted it is another question. Scale brings technical depth. It also brings minimum fee levels, standardised onboarding, and partners with a new set of internal targets.

Tim Gazzard, BKL’s music, media, sport and entertainment partner, told City AM that Dales Evans clients would keep the same close personal service, now backed by BKL’s resources. Every acquirer says a version of this, and some of them mean it. The test comes eighteen months later, once the integration is finished and the original partners have vested.

Questions worth asking

Families with an adviser inside a firm that has just been bought have three things to establish. Who is my point of contact in a year, and is that person contractually tied to the new group? What happens to the fee basis at the next renewal? And does the enlarged firm now advise someone whose interests sit against mine, in a way the smaller firm did not?

None of that argues against consolidation. Larger firms can carry the tax specialists a small practice cannot afford, and succession is a genuine problem for boutiques whose founders are approaching retirement. Selling to a funded consolidator is often the cleaner outcome for clients than watching a practice wind down. It just needs to be a decision the family notices, rather than one it reads about afterwards.

Sources: BKL (13 August 2026); City AM (14 August 2026); eprivateclient (14 August 2026).