There is a photograph every deal seems to produce: the signing, the handshake, the moment everyone has been working toward for months. I have been in a few of those rooms. What I learned is that the photograph captures the easy part. The value of an acquisition is almost never decided at the table. It is decided in the long, unglamorous year that comes after, when two organizations have to actually become one.

Over the past decade I have led several acquisitions across multiple jurisdictions: North America, UK and EU. Before that, I spent years as CFO of a joint venture owned by a NYSE-listed payments company and a Dutch bank, holding finance together through three CEO transitions. Different deals, different countries, different logic. The same lesson every time.

The deal is the bounded part

Due diligence and negotiation feel hard because they are intense, but they are bounded. There is a data room, a model, a set of terms, a closing date. You can put your arms around it. Integration is the opposite: it is open-ended, it touches every person in both companies and it has no clean finish line. The work that determines whether the price you paid was a good one happens after the part that made the news.

This is why I have never treated the close as the finish. In the deals I led, I was thinking about the first hundred days of integration while we were still in diligence: which systems would have to reconcile, who needed to stay, what we were actually buying that a spreadsheet would never show. The number on the term sheet is a hypothesis. Integration is where you find out if it was true.

Where research and experience agree

I do not write this as theory, but it is reassuring when the research lands in the same place as the experience. In Harvard Business Review, Jennifer Fondrevay argues that M&A has shifted from transactional to transformational: deals once done for scale and cost are now done to change what a company is, and the old playbooks of certainty and standardization quietly fail in a volatile market. That matches what I saw. The acquisitions that mattered most were not about getting bigger. They were about acquiring a capability we could not build fast enough ourselves and that only pays off if the capability survives the integration intact.

From my experience I believe two things matter most around the deal itself. The first is that the room should stay small. On the deals I led, I kept the core room deliberately small and ran due diligence and negotiations directly rather than outsourcing the judgment. Advisors are essential for what they are essential for: legal structuring across jurisdictions, specialist tax, a genuine second opinion for the board. But discretion matters, speed matters and someone inside has to own the decision and hold the thread. The moment the advisory cast grew and nobody internal owned it, the deal slowed down, more people knew things that should have stayed quiet and conflicting opinions got averaged into something weaker than any single view. More advisors did not mean more insight. It meant more egos in the room, and exactly the drift and leaks I have watched derail otherwise sound deals.

The second is that discipline is usually what earns a company the right to acquire in the first place. In my experience the acquirer is rarely the biggest player; it is the better-run one, with cleaner numbers, clearer reporting and the structure to absorb something new without losing its footing. Discipline is not a by-product of scale. More often, it is the reason one company ends up buying another.

Integration is a leadership problem, not a process one

It is tempting to believe integration is a project plan: map the systems, align the policies, migrate the ledgers, close the workstreams. Those things have to happen. But I have watched technically flawless integrations stall and messy ones succeed and the difference was never the project plan. It was whether people trusted the people now in charge of their working lives.

When you acquire a founder-led business, you are not buying a logo. You are buying the relationships, the institutional memory and the reasons customers stayed, most of which live in people who can walk out the door. The finance integration I am proudest of worked not because the reconciliation was elegant, but because we spent real time with the people we had just acquired, understood what they were afraid of losing and were honest about what would change and what would not.

A clean systems migration with the wrong people gone is a failed integration. A messy one that keeps trust intact can still be a success.

My time in the joint venture taught me the same thing from a different angle. Holding finance steady through three changes of CEO had very little to do with process and almost everything to do with being the stable point two shareholders, a supervisory board and an anxious organization could orient around. Continuity is a leadership act before it is an operational one.

Structure travels, if you let it

The most useful thing a disciplined acquirer brings is not capital. It is structure: clearer reporting, cleaner data, governance that helps decisions get made. In one integration, the real prize was not the revenue we acquired but the visibility we could finally create once two sets of numbers spoke the same language, work that later surfaced fees no one had been billing for. Importing discipline is genuine value creation.

But structure has to arrive with respect. Drop a heavy corporate apparatus onto a small, fast-moving team and you will extinguish the very thing you paid for. The craft is knowing which of your standards are load-bearing and which are simply habit, and being willing to leave the habits at the door.

What I would tell a founder before they sign

When founders ask me about selling or being acquired, or about acquiring someone themselves, I tend to come back to a few things that have far more to do with the year after than the day itself:

The part worth celebrating

I understand why the signing gets the photograph. It is visible, finite and hard-won. But the deals I look back on with any pride are not the ones that closed well. They are the ones that were still working a year later, where the people we acquired chose to stay, where the capability we paid for was still alive, where two organizations genuinely became one.

That outcome is never decided in the room with the handshake. It is decided slowly, afterward, by whether someone treated integration as the real work rather than the cleanup. In my experience, that is where M&A value actually lives, and it is almost always a question of leadership before it is a question of process.

The signing is the photograph. The integration is the work, and that is where the value of the deal is quietly won or lost.

If your organization is heading into a deal, or living through the year after one, I am always glad to have the conversation.