Your Acquisition Deal has Closed. Success right?

By Monday morning, three of your new acquisition’s top performers had resigned.
By Wednesday, two major clients were “reviewing their options.”
By the end of month one, revenue was down 23%.

Your existing business? Also suffering.

Your leadership team is firefighting full-time.
Your customers are questioning service quality.
Projects are slipping.
Your focus is gone.

Six months later, you’re haemorrhaging cash, running on adrenaline, and wondering whether you should’ve done the deal at all.

This isn’t a horror story. It’s the standard outcome for unprepared acquisitions.

The Pattern Everyone Misses

Founders obsess over the deal:

• Cash vs shares?

• The right multiple?

• Earnout structure?

• Negotiation tactics?

They spend months modelling scenarios and paying advisers.

Then the deal closes and then discover none of it mattered as much as what comes next.

The deal is the easy part. Integration is where acquisitions succeed or fail.

Are you ready to integrate an acquisition without damaging either business?

What Actually Happens After You Sign

Day 1: You own a new business with its own systems, culture, processes, customers, and team dynamics developed over years. Your job? Combine it with your business without destroying either one.

Week 1: The acquired team is watching everything you do. Looking for signals about their future. Will their roles change? Are redundancies coming? Can you actually run this business you just bought?

Month 1: You’re integrating financial systems whilst maintaining separate reporting. Managing two different cultures. Dealing with operational differences you didn’t spot during due diligence. Your existing team is confused about priorities. Your new team is resistant to change. Customers from both businesses are nervous.

Month 3: Key staff are leaving. Revenue is declining. The “synergies” you projected aren’t materialising. Your carefully modelled financial projections are laughably optimistic compared to reality. You’re working 80-hour weeks just trying to keep both businesses functioning.

Month 6: You’re seriously considering whether this was a terrible mistake.

This is what integration looks like when you’re unprepared. And it’s completely avoidable.

What Breaks During Bad Integration

Financial Infrastructure Collapses

Your bookkeeper can’t handle two businesses. Now you’re consolidating two sets of books, reconciling different accounting methods, combining billing systems. Your P&L is three weeks behind and contains errors. You literally don’t know if the combined business is profitable. You’re flying blind.

Operations Descend Into Chaos

Which CRM? Whose project management system? How do we handle client onboarding? Every team defaults to their existing way. You’re running parallel systems instead of integrated operations. You bought economies of scale but created operational duplication instead.

Your Team Fragments

Integration requires massive senior leadership time across every function simultaneously. The founder tries to handle everything. Your existing business suffers. The acquired team feels abandoned. Key performers leave.

Strategic Direction Becomes Unclear

You bought the business for strategic reasons. But in the chaos, strategy gets forgotten. You’re firefighting operational issues instead of executing the vision. Six months later, you own two disconnected businesses that create complexity instead of competitive advantage.

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The Questions That Reveal Whether You’re Ready

Most entrepreneurs dramatically overestimate their acquisition readiness. They confuse enthusiasm with capability.

Financial Infrastructure:

• Can your finance function produce consolidated management accounts for two entities within three weeks of acquisition?
• Do you have systems for multi-entity cash flow forecasting and working capital management?

If the answer is “we’ll figure it out after closing,” you’re not ready.

Operational Excellence:

• Are your core processes documented well enough that an acquired team could adopt them in week one?
• Can your operations continue at current quality levels if senior leadership is 50% focused on integration?

If your processes live primarily in people’s heads, integration will fail.

Growth Infrastructure:

• Can your current systems handle 2x the activity without major investment?
• Do you have departmental leaders who can manage integration workstreams whilst maintaining BAU performance?

If you’re the critical path for most decisions, you physically cannot integrate an acquisition.

Strategic Clarity:

• Can you articulate exactly why this acquisition creates competitive advantage?
• Do you have a documented integration plan with week-by-week milestones?

If your strategic rationale is vague, integration will drift.

The Most Important Question

If you closed an acquisition tomorrow, could you really integrate it?

Not “I think we’d figure it out.”

But systematically:

• Integrate operations

• Consolidate financials

• Maintain service quality

• Extract strategic value

If the honest answer is no, it’s not failure. It’s simply preparation you haven’t done yet.

Acquisition readiness takes 8–12 weeks of structured work across four pillars.

Ironically, the infrastructure that makes you acquisition-ready also makes you more fundable, sellable, scalable, and resilient.

Build readiness first. Pursue acquisitions second. Extract value systematically.

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There’s no reason your next integration needs to end in chaos.

— David B Horne