The hardest afternoon of my career
The day after we completed the acquisition of Parliamentary Communications, I was on the first Eurostar to Brussels.
I arrived at the office that morning with fifteen people in it.
By the time I left that evening, there were four.
I’ve been involved in more than thirty M&A transactions over a forty-year career. I’ve raised over £120 million. I’ve sat on both sides of the negotiating table more times than I can count. I’ve integrated businesses across twenty-three countries.
Nothing in any of that prepared me for what it felt like to tell eleven people, in a single afternoon, that they no longer had a job.
The deal that nobody talks about
When we acquired Parliamentary Communications as part of Huveaux plc, the UK operations were profitable. The Brussels office was not. It was carrying significant losses and the restructuring needed to happen quickly, clearly, and correctly.
That was my job.
I’d been on both sides of redundancy before. As a young finance controller in Switzerland, I’d lived through my employer being acquired and watched colleagues lose their roles. I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end. I thought that experience would make the giving end easier.
It didn’t.
What I remember most is not the conversations themselves, though they were some of the hardest of my career. What I remember most is gathering the four remaining team members at the end of the day and looking at their faces.
They hadn’t lost their jobs. But they had lost eleven colleagues in a single afternoon. And they were sitting there wondering the same thing every person wonders in that moment: why them and not me?
The lessons from thirty years of deals.
Add Then Multiply includes the full Consolidate chapter, with the real stories behind the deals, and what thirty-odd transactions actually teach you about building a business that lasts.
What nobody tells you about acquiring a business
There is a version of acquisition that looks clean from the outside.
A deal is announced. Numbers are presented to investors. A press release goes out. Synergies are identified. Cost savings are projected. The market reacts.
And then the real work begins.
The real work is the eleven conversations in Brussels. It’s the flight home on Eurostar that evening with a gin and tonic, trying to process what you’ve just done to people’s livelihoods while knowing it was the right decision for the business. It’s the underground newspaper in Brussels called The Sprout, where the former MD of the acquired business wrote an article lamenting the bloodshed, noting that the first thing he did when I arrived was buy me a coffee.
And then I fired him.
There is a dark humour that surfaces in moments like that. You either find it or you don’t cope.
But here is what that day in Brussels taught me, and what I have carried into every acquisition and consolidation since.
People are never a line item. They are the business.
The thing most founders get wrong about people and culture
When founders think about acquiring a business, they think about revenue multiples, customer lists, technology, market position.
They rarely think about what happens to the people on day one after the deal closes.
And that omission is where most acquisitions quietly begin to fall apart.
I’ve seen it in healthcare businesses that acquired a complementary practice and discovered the cultures were so different that the combined team spent eighteen months at war with itself. I’ve seen it in agency founders who brought in a smaller competitor and lost half the acquired team within six months because nobody had thought about what they were joining or why.
I’ve seen it in tech founders who were so focused on the technology integration that they forgot the human one.
The people and culture work, deciding who stays, who goes, what the combined entity stands for, what values carry forward, how you treat the people who are leaving with dignity and the people who remain with honesty, that work has to start before the ink is dry on the deal.
Not after.
People and culture is often where the gaps show up first.
The Growth Readiness Assessment takes you through exactly where your business is today across funding, acquisition, consolidation, and exit readiness, before the pressure is already on.
What the four remaining people needed
When I gathered the four remaining team members in Brussels that evening, they didn’t need a spreadsheet. They didn’t need a synergy chart or a revised org structure.
They needed to know three things.
Why it happened. What their role was in what came next. And whether someone at the top of this organisation actually cared about the answer to both.
I told them the truth about all three.
That conversation, more than any other I had during that consolidation, determined how the Brussels office performed in the following twelve months. Because trust, once broken in a moment of corporate change, is almost impossible to rebuild. And trust, once established in that same moment, becomes the foundation for everything.
By the end of that year, the Brussels office had been turned around. It became a genuine contributor to the group’s growth rather than a drain on it. Not because of the restructuring. Because of what we built in its place.
What this has to do with your business right now
You may not be planning an acquisition. You may be nowhere near one.
But the lesson from Brussels applies to every founder-led business I work with, regardless of where they are in the FACE journey.
Your people are your foundations.
Not your product. Not your technology. Not your financial model, as important as all of those are. The business that can survive a period of rapid growth, a difficult restructuring, or a transition of leadership is the one where the culture is strong enough to carry the weight.
The clinician who has built a practice of fifty people and is wondering how to step back without everything wobbling. The answer almost always lives in the team, not the systems.
The agency founder with multiple income streams who is trying to protect momentum during a period of change. The answer almost always lives in the values, not the processes.
The tech founder who wants to bring in a complementary business and is worried about losing focus. The answer almost always lives in the culture you protect, not the one you inherit.
People and culture is the third of the four foundations I build into every business I work with. It’s also the one that gets the least attention, and costs the most when it’s neglected.
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The gin and tonic on the Eurostar
I got back to London that evening, sat down in my seat, and ordered two gin and tonics.
Not because I was celebrating. Because I needed to decompress from one of the hardest days of my professional life.
And then I wrote down everything I’d learned.
What I’d done well. What I’d do differently. What the people who remained needed from me in the weeks ahead. What the culture of that office needed to look like if it was going to survive what had just happened to it.
That habit, writing down what each hard experience teaches you and building it into how you do the next thing, is where the FACE methodology came from. Not from theory. From thirty-odd deals, eleven conversations in Brussels, and a lot of very honest reflection.
Know your numbers. Build your foundations. Then add. Then multiply.
What’s the people or culture challenge in your business that you’ve been putting off having an honest conversation about? Drop it in the comments. I read every one.
Before you go
📖 Get your copy of Add Then Multiply, including the full Consolidate chapter with the real stories behind the deals.
⚡ Find out where your business actually stands today with the Growth Readiness Assessment.
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David B Horne
Founder of Add Then Multiply & Funding Focus
Add Then Multiply is a fractional finance and business scaling consultancy helping founder-led businesses at £1M–£10M+ to Fund, Acquire, Consolidate, and Exit.
