Spotlight On: Chris Masters, Managing Principal, Doeren Mayhew
August 2025 — CPA firm Doeren Mayhew has seen Houston’s image as an energy and oil production town evolve to become a leader in business across sectors, attracting fulfillment centers, tech startups, and marketing agencies over the past decade. “The business environment is constantly moving, and you’re only relevant if you can keep up and move with those shifts,” Chris Masters, the firm’s Houston area managing principal, told Invest:.
What shifts in the market have impacted Doeren Mayhew or its clients over the past year?
There have been numerous shifts. The business environment is constantly moving, and you’re only relevant if you can keep up and move with those shifts. Previously, Houston was largely an energy and production town. But over the last 10 years, it has redefined itself as a greater business hub for everything from fulfillment centers to tech startups and marketing agencies. What was once a singularly focused business environment is now open to everyone. That shifts the need for professionals and the advice that’s given. Instead of just a singular focus or niche, the regional growth creates more opportunities for everyone in professional services and their ideas, and opens up a need for our expertise, which helps us gather more growth organically.
In addition, there have been several changes within the public accounting field, given the lower number of students going into accounting, creating more competition for talent to provide these services to clients. Getting access to that valuable talent is paramount in the industry right now.
What factors are driving growth for Doeren Mayhew, and how do you plan to sustain the firm’s upward momentum?
Doeren Mayhew is founded on the fact that we’re strategic wayfinders. We’re helping our clients navigate the business world in a manner that makes their businesses more efficient and helps maximize the dollars that go into their pockets. Whether that’s through business planning, tax planning, estate planning, or exit planning, whatever the case may be, our focus is on helping those family units get the most out of their business. With that mindset and the growth within Houston, our ability to help our clients grow has created organic growth. Our ability to service those clients and provide those ideas is exciting to them.
When we look at what Doeren Mayhew is doing to continue to meet that demand, we need quality people. We need further bench strength and capacity to take on that growth. An acquisition strategy is one path, bringing on smaller firms that might not have the economies of scale to utilize their people efficiently. This allows those legacy people to rise to another level while creating more capacity.
The second path is to provide more support at a lower level through interns, or potentially offshoring. By increasing the lower levels through recruiting on campus or offshoring, you create capacity across the firm.
Where are you seeing the most demand and opportunity for your firm?
The highest demand is always tax-driven. The changing tax environment and tax code always drive business. How we take advantage of some of the new programs out there, or how we deal with the changes in the tax code that took place with various rules, sunsetting, and things being redone, will always drive demand.
Over the last year or two, for example, the potential sunsetting of an individual’s lifetime giving drove a great need for gifting and succession planning within a lot of businesses or high-net-worth family offices. Then, just recently, the tax code was changed to extend many of these provisions, which will again create opportunity.
Then you have complexity that comes from the regulatory environment over auditing or banking. When the restrictions were put on banks and their lending rules became tighter, it caused a lot more reporting and strain on the businesses that borrow from them. That then drives a lot of need for our services as well.
Cybersecurity is another growth area. What do we need to do to protect businesses in terms of cybersecurity? We’re consulting around that as well.
There is also the mergers and acquisitions world. We have a boutique investment bank within the firm that helps our clients sell. We also help manage the process for them, even if we’re not helping them sell. We help manage the process of diligence, structuring, and the overall economics of the deal. We also have a transaction advisory group that does quality of earnings and diligence projects.
The M&A world is an ever-moving industry with services that are highly needed. It’s a piece that clients often don’t know a lot about in terms of the whole process. It is usually the largest asset the owner has, and they lean on advisers like us as they navigate that world.
How are you leveraging technology for better outcomes for your team?
Technology has done nothing but speed up the accounting world and the volume of work that can be taken on. That’s not going to stop anytime soon. From a technology standpoint, we’re working with several partners to harness what the AI world is going to bring, using these systems to get things done, as opposed to utilizing man or woman hours.
It’s an expensive proposition. Development takes a long time, but we’ve had a lot in the works for the last five or six years.
Another piece is offshoring. Our goal over the next three years is to build and maintain a large global capacity center to provide the underlying assistance needed for the overall group. Our goal is to get from where we are today to about three or four times that within the next three years.
What are your top goals for the near to midterm, and what is your outlook for the firm?
We have a five-year plan. It’s always best to put it down on paper and then try to achieve it. The goal here is to take our office over the next three years and triple it. When we set out our initial plan, it was to double it, and that was five years ago. And we went from 65 people to 135 people in five years. We met the goal, and now we’re trying to triple it over the next five years. That’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s not as rewarding if you put an easy goal out there. Our goal is to get to about 350 to 400 people here in the Houston office. The biggest benefit to all of this is creating opportunities for people. In the process of bringing on that many people, you’re going to make new partners, you’re going to make new managers, and you’re going to better the lives of a lot of people in this industry and in this city.
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