By Mario Peshev, DevriX
Most post-merger integration decks I see are written for the integration team, not for the person who owns the return. That is the first failure. A deal partner does not need a Gantt chart with 240 workstream dependencies. A deal partner needs to know whether the thesis still holds after the close, what could break it, and how fast the combined business reaches the operating state that justified the price paid.
I have sat on both sides of this. I have watched carve-outs stall because nobody could tell the sponsor whether the revenue synergy was realized or merely forecast. I have watched operating partners inherit a 100-day plan that was really a list of activities with no financial consequence attached. The gap is almost always the same: the PMI is run as a project, and judged as a project, when the people who fund it are underwriting an outcome.
This piece is about that gap. What the deal partner and the operating partner each actually need to decide during integration, and how to judge whether the answers they are getting are real.
The two readers of a PMI are not the same person
The single most common mistake in integration reporting is writing one document for two audiences with different jobs. Write to the stakeholder, not to “PE.”
The deal partner owns the thesis. Their questions are about whether the reason for the acquisition survived contact with reality. Did the synergy case hold? Is the exit timeline intact? What new risk showed up that was not in the model? They do not want to hear about sprint velocity.
The operating partner owns execution. Their questions are about speed, adoption, and whether the playbook is repeatable across the platform. They care about which integration tasks are actually moving the numbers and which are theater. They translate the deal partner’s thesis into a set of things that have to work by a date.
When you brief both people with the same slide, one of them is being underserved. The deal partner drowns in operational detail. The operating partner gets thesis language with no execution teeth. I have argued before that value creation requires embedded partners, not advisory firms, and this is exactly why. An outsider producing a status report cannot tell you whether the number is real. Someone accountable for the P&L can.
The first decision is whether the thesis survived the data room
Between signing and day one, the deal partner has to decide one thing before anything else: does the integration plan still serve the thesis, or did diligence surface something that changes the plan?
This is where a lot of PMIs quietly go wrong. The synergy model was built during a competitive process, under time pressure, on management’s numbers. Once you own the business and see clean data, some of those assumptions move. Bain’s Global Private Equity Report has tracked for years how much of the value creation story now rests on operational improvement rather than multiple expansion or leverage. That shifts the burden onto the PMI. If the return depends on operating gains, the integration plan has to be judged on whether it delivers those gains, not on whether it completes on time.
So the first judgment question is simple. Show me the three assumptions in the synergy case that would hurt the most if they were wrong, and show me the evidence, post-close, that each one still holds. If the answer is a list of completed tasks, the plan is being managed as a project. If the answer is a set of validated or revised financial assumptions, the plan is being run for return.
Classify every synergy before you defend it
I push teams to classify every synergy in the deck by state before it goes in front of a sponsor. Realized means it is in the numbers already. Run-rate means the mechanism is live and will annualize. Forecast means it is modeled but not yet proven. Enabled means the capability exists but nobody has captured the value yet. Risk avoided means you spent to prevent a loss.
I treat this classification as non-negotiable, and for a reason: forecast value dressed up as realized value is how PMIs create the appearance of progress while the return quietly slips. A deal partner who cannot tell the difference is deciding on a number that does not exist yet.
What the operating partner decides in the first 100 days
The operating partner’s job is narrower and harder. They have to decide, with imperfect information, which few moves in the integration create most of the value, and then sequence everything else around protecting those moves.
The trap is treating all workstreams as equal. They are not. In most B2B businesses I have worked on, the value concentrates in a handful of commercial levers: pricing discipline, sales motion, retention, and the systems that give management visibility into all three. The rest is hygiene. Necessary, but not where the return lives.
This is why I am skeptical of PMI plans that lead with systems consolidation. Merging two ERPs is expensive, slow, and rarely moves EBITDA in year one. It often needs to happen. It is almost never the thing that justifies the deal. The operating partner has to resist the gravitational pull of the biggest, most visible workstream and instead ask which lever, if pulled well in the first 100 days, protects the thesis.
I have written a full breakdown of this in the 100-day go-to-market plan for a newly acquired B2B business, and the core idea carries here: the first 100 days is a commercial exercise wearing an operational costume. If your day-one plan does not have revenue and margin outcomes attached to dates, it is a project schedule, not a value-creation plan.
How to judge whether the number you are being shown is real
Here is where operators earn their keep. A deal partner is shown a synergy or a run-rate improvement and has to decide whether to believe it. There are four tests I apply, and they travel across almost any integration.
Does it have a baseline
You cannot claim improvement without a starting point. If someone tells me the combined business has lifted win rate or reduced churn, my first question is: against what baseline, over what period, measured how. No baseline, no claim. This is the same discipline I hold my own team to. Any outcome we put in front of a client needs an account, a period, a baseline, and a method, or it does not get said.
Does the mechanism exist or is it hope
A run-rate synergy has to have a live mechanism. If the claim is a 6 percent pricing uplift, I want to see the new price list, the customers on it, and the renewal cohort it applies to. If none of that exists yet, the number is forecast, not run-rate, and it should be labeled that way. The difference between “we will” and “we have started” is the difference between a story and a result.
Is it net of the cost to get it
Synergies get quoted gross far too often. The cost to capture, severance, systems spend, retention bonuses, the temporary productivity dip, all of it belongs in the number. This is where adjusted-EBITDA discipline matters, and I have gone deep on the honest and dishonest versions of this in adjusted EBITDA and the art of add-backs. A PMI that reports gross synergy and hides the cost to achieve is telling the sponsor a flattering half-truth.
Does the CFO agree it hits the forecast
The final test is whether the CFO will put the number in the forecast and defend it to the lenders. If the operating team claims a synergy the CFO will not forecast, one of them is wrong, and you need to know which before it becomes a covenant problem. Forecast reliability is the CFO’s core deliverable, and the SEC has made clear through its guidance that non-GAAP and adjusted figures carry real scrutiny. Guidance from bodies like AICPA & CIMA points the same way. What holds for public reporting is a healthy discipline for private forecasts too: if you would not defend the adjustment to a regulator, be careful defending it to your LPs.
The risk column matters more than the synergy column
Deal partners spend most of their attention on upside. The more useful discipline in a PMI is watching what could destroy the base case, because integration is where hidden risk surfaces.
Customer concentration that looked fine in diligence becomes a live threat the moment a key contact hears “acquisition” and starts taking competitor calls. Talent you underwrote as retained starts to leave in month two. A revenue synergy that assumed cross-sell ignores that the two sales teams have never sold each other’s product and have no comp incentive to start.
I laid out the diligence version of this in commercial due diligence red flags in B2B businesses, and most of those red flags do not disappear at close. They migrate into the PMI. A good integration plan has a risk register that is read as seriously as the synergy tracker, because a preserved base case is worth more than an ambitious upside case that leaks the floor.
The related and underappreciated risk is revenue leakage. Integrations create leakage almost by default: overlapping accounts get dropped, discounting spikes during uncertainty, renewals slip while both teams are distracted by the merger. The operating partner who is only watching new synergy while the base erodes underneath is winning a battle and losing the war.
Activity is not outcome, and the register proves it
There is a specific failure mode worth naming: hours, tickets, features, campaigns, and traffic presented as if they were results. PMIs are especially prone to this because integration genuinely produces enormous activity. Thousands of tasks. Dozens of workstreams. It feels like progress, and much of it is necessary. But activity is the input, not the return.
The tell is in the reporting. If your weekly PMI update leads with percent-complete on workstreams, you are measuring effort. If it leads with movement in the commercial KPIs that underpin the thesis, you are measuring outcome. I built a fuller argument for which numbers actually matter in portfolio company operating reviews, and the same filter applies during integration. Win rate, CAC, net revenue retention, pipeline coverage, and gross margin tell you whether the business is getting better. Ticket burndown tells you the team is busy.
This distinction is not academic. McKinsey’s private capital research has repeatedly pointed to operational value creation as the discriminator between funds that clear their hurdle and funds that do not. Operational value shows up in the P&L, not in the project plan. A PMI judged on activity can look healthy right up to the moment the numbers say otherwise.
How the CFO and CTO fit the same decision
Two more readers deserve their own translation, because a PMI that ignores them creates surprises later.
The CFO is judging one thing above all: is the forecast reliable enough to run the covenant math and the exit model on? Every synergy claim, every cost-to-achieve, every timing assumption flows into that forecast. A CFO who is handed activity summaries instead of financial consequences cannot do their job, and the first missed covenant is where that failure becomes visible to lenders. The right relationship here often looks less like advice and more like accountability, a distinction I drew out in value creation consultants versus operators.
The CTO’s questions in a PMI are usually the most mistranslated. The CTO is not asking for permission to consolidate systems. The CTO is telling you where the integration risk sits and what it costs. Systems debt, security exposure, and brittle integrations are diligence risks that show up as EBITDA drag or as a discount at exit. The operating partner’s job is to translate the CTO’s technical risk into the deal partner’s language: what does this cost the thesis, and when.
One commercial engine per platform
For platform deals doing multiple add-ons, the highest-leverage decision the operating partner makes is whether each PMI builds toward a repeatable commercial engine or reinvents the go-to-market each time. A fractional commercial leader can enforce this, and I made the case for exactly that role in fractional CROs in PE fixing win rate and CAC, not revenue theory. The alternative, letting every acquired business keep its own sales motion, pricing logic, and data definitions, guarantees you will run every future integration from scratch.
What I would actually put in front of each reader
If I am running the reporting on a PMI, here is the split I hold to.
- For the deal partner: one page. The three thesis-critical assumptions, each marked validated, revised, or at risk. The synergy total split by realized, run-rate, forecast, and enabled, net of cost to achieve. The top three risks to the base case. The exit timeline, held or slipped.
- For the operating partner: the commercial KPI trend against baseline, the two or three levers that carry most of the value and where each stands, and the adoption rate on anything that requires people to change behavior.
- For the CFO: the forecast, the assumptions behind it, the cost-to-achieve schedule, and the covenant headroom.
- For the CTO: the integration risk register with each item translated into EBITDA or exit impact.
Notice what is not on any of those pages: workstream completion percentages, ticket volumes, and meeting counts. Those live in the project management tool where the integration team works. They do not belong in front of the people underwriting the return. Getting this separation right is part of the broader discipline I described in avoiding value creation pitfalls in PE GTM, and it compounds across a portfolio. The funds that build this reporting muscle early are the ones I see practicing the kind of organizational future-proofing that survives more than one hold period.
The judgment that actually matters
Strip everything back and a PMI comes down to one repeated judgment: is what I am being shown a result, or is it activity wearing the costume of a result. The deal partner makes that call on the thesis. The operating partner makes it on the levers. The CFO makes it on the forecast. Every one of them is asking the same underlying question in their own language.
Get the reporting right and the answer becomes obvious. Get it wrong and the integration will feel busy and productive right up until the exit model stops working. I have seen both. The difference was never how hard the team worked. It was whether anyone insisted on connecting the work to the number.
BCG’s work on principal investors and other research houses like PitchBook keep landing on the same point from different angles: the returns are being made in operations now, not in financial engineering. That is a demand on integration specifically, because integration is where operational value is either captured or lost.
Where to take this next
If you are heading into a close, or you are staring at a PMI that reports plenty of activity and not much movement in the numbers, the fix is to rebuild the reporting around what each reader actually decides. That is the core of our 100-Day Digital Execution work: turning an integration plan into a set of commercial outcomes with baselines, owners, and dates, so the deal partner can see the thesis, the operating partner can see the levers, and the CFO can defend the forecast.
If that is the problem in front of you, start a conversation with me here. Bring your current PMI plan and I will tell you, plainly, which parts are results and which parts are activity in a costume. That first read is usually the most valuable hour of the whole integration.
