The M&A & Integration Guide for Private Equity
The hundred days after close decide whether a deal works — buy-and-build, post-merger integration, and the operating model that carries it.
An acquisition creates value only if the integration does. This guide collects the operator’s playbook for M&A and integration in private equity: the first hundred days, the buy-and-build model, and the commercial systems that turn two companies into one without breaking the revenue.
It is written by an operator who has acquired and integrated more than forty businesses and digital properties, and carried the outcome each time.
Why the deal is won or lost after close
The model assumes synergies; the integration has to deliver them. Most value leakage in a hold happens in the months after close, when systems collide, customers get nervous, and the operating model that worked for one company breaks under two.
A disciplined first hundred days, a clear integration sequence, and a commercial operating model built for the combined entity are what separate a thesis that compounds from one that stalls.
What this guide covers
- The first 100 days: what to do, and in what order
- Post-merger integration across CRM, martech, data, and web
- The buy-and-build operating model for add-ons
- How to acquire digital properties, and what to check first
- Reading the business model and the deal before you sign
The M&A & Integration library
Every deep dive below is a full article. Grouped by stage of the deal.
Post-merger integration
- The First 100 Days After an Acquisition: Commercial and Digital Integration Plan
- Post-Merger Integration Checklist for Revenue, Data and Customer Systems
Buy-and-build & digital acquisitions
- Buy-and-Build Integration: A Commercial Operating Model for Add-On Acquisitions
- Acquiring Digital Properties: Why, What, and Where to Buy
- Capability Acquisition Framework & Organizational Signal Alignment in Recruitment
Deal & business-model read
- Decoding Business Models: Unpacking Strategies and Pitch Decks
- 11 Strategic Pillars for Scalable Recruitment Marketing and Talent Acquisition Excellence
- Inbound Demand Architecture: An Executive Guide to Scalable Audience Acquisition
- Authority-Driven Client Acquisition: Growth Systems for Editorial Service Providers
Where Growth Shuttle comes in
When a portfolio company needs the integration diagnosed and sequenced, that is where Growth Shuttle comes in — a portfolio company audit that names what is slowing the combined business and a costed 100-day plan to fix it.
Working a live deal or hold?
Common questions
What matters most in the first 100 days?
Stabilising revenue and customers, aligning the leadership team, and picking the few integration moves that actually drive the synergy case — not integrating everything at once.
How is buy-and-build different from a single acquisition?
It needs a repeatable operating model: each add-on has to slot into shared systems and a shared commercial motion, or the roll-up creates complexity instead of value.
Do you integrate the systems yourselves?
Advisory diagnoses and sequences the integration; the build, if you want it, is a separate business, DevriX. The two are kept separate on purpose.