Making Growth Through M&A Pay Off

Standardization Starts in the Field

Integration often leads to conversations about centralization, common systems, and standard processes. Those changes can create significant value, but standardization should never become an objective in itself.

Some differences across acquired businesses are simply remnants of companies that developed independently. Others reflect customer expectations, regulatory requirements, regional economics, or operating practices that contribute to the value of the business.

Consider a service company whose customers have called the same local employee for years. That person knows the account, its history, and the preferences of the customer. Routing every call through a centralized contact center may create a cleaner process map, but it may also remove part of the experience that customers value.

The objective of integration should be to create streamlined processes that enhance local strengths, centralize core activities, and maintain local autonomy. That requires going into the field.

Integration teams need to observe how work is actually performed, speak with managers and employees, and understand why processes vary before deciding what the future standard should be.

At one large fertility network, for example, efforts to align systems and processes had to account for meaningful differences among individual clinics. Purchasing responsibilities, pricing practices, and local operating relationships couldn’t be understood from a screen alone. Practitioners had distinct clinical practices that heavily impacted product and supply selection. Ignoring these distinctions meant losing practitioner support.

A separate healthcare provider with 325 clinics faced a similar challenge on a much greater scale. Job descriptions and management structures varied widely across the network. Rather than standardizing roles based on titles, the organization spent time defining core activities by position and identifying best practices that could be shared across the network, while preservingworking to define core activities by position and, identify best practices that could be shared across the network, while protecting localized nuances. It also identified significant training gaps, obsolete processes, and leadership opportunities.

This work could not have been conducted without significant consultation with field leadership and clinics. Field involvement didn’t weaken the standardization process; it made the standard more credible.

Standards Need Guardrails

Designing the right process is only the first step. The organization must then ensure that the new way of working survives once the integration is “complete”.

Employees attend training, procedures are documented, and systems are introduced. But when operating pressure increases, people often return to familiar methods or find different, often less efficient ways of working around the new system. Without visibility, coaching, and clear accountability, yesterday’s workaround becomes tomorrow’s standard practice.

A luxury residential pool company we worked with provides a useful example. After acquiring several local businesses, its Service & Maintenance operation had become the largest provider in the region, servicing thousands of pools under recurring contracts. But the acquired operations had inconsistent technician training, poorly designed service zones, limited routing discipline, and very little visibility into technician performance.

We worked to standardize onboarding and operating methods, redesign zoning and routing, and introduce management routines that made daily execution visible. Clear action registers gave managers a mechanism to follow through on issues, including highlighting real opportunities for improvement and droppingnipping unnecessary legacy practices.

The result wasn’t just a more consistent process. Technicians increased the number of pools cleaned per person by 30%. Material cost per pool dropped by 35%. The fleet was reduced by 40%, creating a significant positive cash flowcash-flow impact from asset sales. Customer churn fellimproved from 8% to 3%. Most importantly, the new operating capacity allowed the company to absorb 900 additional pools without increasing either the labor force or the fleet.

Build The Integration Method for the Next Deal

There is another test of whether integration has truly worked: What happens when the next acquisition closes?

Too many organizations approach integration as a one-time project. Teams work through the immediate issues, create new procedures, and move on. When another business is acquired, the process begins again. A scalable acquisition model needs a repeatable method.

For the pool-services company, the operating improvements were captured in a custom playbook of more than 50 pages, providing a guide for integrating future acquisitions consistently. The work wasn’t considered complete when the first group of businesses had been stabilized. The organization codified what it had learned so the next transaction would be easier to absorb.

We saw the same principle at a large vertically integrated building-materials supplier that had completed six acquisitions in a single year. Its integration effort involved more than 1,000 activities across 11 workstreams and 53 key roles. Organizing that work into a defined playbook gave teams a visible critical path showing what needed to happen, when it needed to occur, who owned it, and which activities depended on others. It also helped the organization forecast integration benefit timing, allowing it to course-correctcourse correct if those benefits were not being realized.

An effective integration playbook does more than just improve execution; it supports the acquisition decisions themselves. If leadership understands how a target will fit into the operating model, it can make better assumptions about integration cost, timing, required resources, and the likely path to margin improvement.

Building a Business Rather than Accumulating Companies

A string of transactions can create size, but profitable growth requires something more. It requires understanding which differences among acquired businesses create value and which simply create complexity. It requires management routines that keep new standards in place. And it requires a repeatable integration method that strengthens with each transaction rather than starting over eachbecomes stronger with each transaction rather than starting over every time.

That is the difference between accumulating companies and building a platform. The transaction determines the size, but operational integration determines the value.