When you acquire a company, the return you get depends on how you treat the people you just brought in, not the spreadsheet that justified the price. Jeff Helfgott, CEO of Boardroom Salon for Men, grew Excel Fitness Holdings from 17 to 92 locations before a successful exit to Olympus Partners. He will tell you the valuation work matters less than what happens to your team on day one.
Quick Answer
An acquisition pays off when the acquiring executive treats culture as a core part of the deal, not a cleanup task for after the paperwork is signed. I’m Glenn Gow, and after coaching CEOs through dozens of acquisitions, I see the same pattern every time: the deals that create value manage the people side with the same discipline as the balance sheet. Jeff Helfgott, Tom Ragen, and Cleveland Brown each point to the same failure point. Leaders nail the financial model and ignore the humans on the other side of the deal. Glenn Gow’s advice to CEOs is direct: build a plan for your people before you finish the plan for the assets.
Why Culture Decides Whether the Deal Pays Off
Private equity firms are good at math. Tom Ragen, CEO of Color Communications, worked through an acquisition equal to 25 percent of his company’s revenue and watched this play out firsthand. “There’s a lot of really smart guys in private equity, and they’re really great at figuring out what the value is from like a spreadsheet perspective,” Ragen said. “But they’re also sometimes not so good at the cultural side of it. But the leverage of the acquisition comes from the culture.” Ragen runs every deal through four levers: structure, process, people, and culture, then adds communication and reward plans on top to make the change stick.
Cleveland Brown, CEO of Payscout, learned the same lesson the hard way on an early deal. “We had a very clear plan in terms of products, efficiency mechanisms, both operationally and from a product perspective,” Brown said. “Those things are, more or less, the paperwork that you do, but you have to look at scaling people. You need to lead with the culture.” Darren Kimura, CEO of AISquared, has run this playbook across eight acquisitions in the technology sector. “In technology, we tend to acquire companies largely for their people,” Kimura said. “So if the cultural fit is not right, you’re going to have problems: attrition, bad chemistry, pockets of people that are resistant and fighting against the change.” Kimura has run that pattern across all eight of his acquisitions, which is why cultural fit is the variable he checks first, not last.
Define What Success Looks Like Before You Start
Gyner Ozgul, CEO of Fortis Fire & Safety, has worked across multiple acquisition platforms backed by private equity and venture sponsors, including his earlier role at SmartCare Equipment Solutions. He noticed that the word most likely to sink a deal is the one every sponsor uses without defining it. “Before you integrate, you should have a definition of what integration means for your company,” Ozgul said. “In venture capital and private equity spaces, integration is kind of a word that’s left to a lot of definition. Come up with an aligned definition. Because once you define it, you can build a playbook of the actual integration work streams and activities to go do.”
Set Expectations Before the Ink Dries
Helfgott starts talking about what happens after close before the letter of intent is even signed. He runs town halls the moment diligence begins, and he names the exact moment things tend to break down. “There’s the flirting stage before the deal is done, where you’re telling them you’re a great operator, you run a fantastic business, we’d be so lucky to have you,” Helfgott said. “And when you start working together, the tone can change to, now we’re gonna do things our way. And it creates a little bit of whiplash with the acquired group.”
The details matter as much as the tone. Helfgott’s team maps out benefits continuity before the deal closes so no employee loses ground on something as basic as a health plan. “We are trying to port over your healthcare deductibles,” Helfgott said. “So this way you don’t have to restart the year because your personal healthcare journey should not be impacted by a business transaction from our end. These things are critical. And that’s what I think people get wrong the most. They’re so focused on the acquirer, but they don’t think about the retained.” I tell CEOs this is the cheapest trust they will ever buy.
What Founders Actually Feel When They Sell
Jonathon Snow sold his agency into Avenue Z and describes selling a company as giving away something you built, not a transaction you walk away from clean. Dr. Jonathon Snow, CEO of Avenue Z, describes the emotional weight most acquirers never see. “Anytime you sell a company, you feel like your child kind of was given away to another family, essentially,” Snow said. “Who is acquiring you? Is it the right partner? Are they just gonna acquire you and tuck you in and just be an afterthought, or are you gonna be a big part of what that future of that company will be?” Once the deal closed, Snow found relief in what he no longer had to carry. “I didn’t need to focus any more on HR, Finance, Legal, all the things that become ninety-nine percent of your day,” he said. Snow’s agency joined Avenue Z as part of a larger holding structure, and he continued leading creative work for his unit under that structure rather than stepping into a purely administrative role.
Retain the Founder or Bring in Your Own Leader
Andy Unanue keeps acquired founders in place. Colby Durnin moves them out. Both approaches have produced exits worth citing. Andy Unanue, Managing Partner at AUA Private Equity Partners, backed founder Peter Lee at Water Lilies Food through a facility move that more than tripled capacity, with no lost inventory or sales during the transition. “The best feeling for me was when we sold that business four years later for five and a half times our money,” Unanue said. “Peter was such a good CEO that the sponsor we sold to asked him to stay on.”
Colby Durnin, Founder and CEO of CREDE, has acquired more than 30 boutique real estate firms and reaches a different conclusion. “I’d say the biggest issue you have when you’re acquiring folks is that culture,” Durnin said. “It’s taking a founder and putting them into an institutional support role or background and keeping the fire going. And you can’t do it with money, you can’t do it with structure.” Durnin often moves the founder aside instead. “Sometimes that means removing folks from the top, because you’re looking for the next generation, not necessarily the group that you just bought or that CEO,” he said. “Oftentimes if that person could have done it, they would have done it themselves.”
| Approach | Who used it | What happened to the founder | Outcome for the CEO |
| Retain the founder | Andy Unanue, AUA Private Equity Partners | Peter Lee stayed on and ran Water Lilies Food with institutional finance support | Facility capacity more than tripled; business sold four years later at 5.5x |
| Transition the founder out | Colby Durnin, CREDE | Legacy founders moved into support roles or exited to make room for next-generation leaders | CREDE scaled past 30 acquired firms under professional operators |
Neither approach is universally correct. Unanue’s model works when the founder wants to keep operating and the sponsor gives them support to do it. Durnin’s model works when the business has outgrown what the founder can scale alone.
Don’t Let a Deal Cover for a Strategy You Haven’t Solved
Premal Shah, CEO of MyOme, warns CEOs against a trap that shows up most often in hyper-growth companies. “In hyper-growth mode, the trap is doing M&A to avoid hard internal work,” Shah said. “Acquisitions should accelerate a clear strategy, not compensate for one.” Shah applies a specific test before signing anything. “Is this capability core to our long-term differentiation, or is it primarily about speed? If the cost of being late is higher than the cost of integration risk, then acquisition makes more sense,” Shah said. “It’s one of these things where the cost of integration is rarely factored into M&A.” A CEO who cannot answer Shah’s question in one sentence is not ready to make the acquisition.
Ignoring that test creates the kind of leadership failure that shows up months later, not on signing day. Colby Durnin has watched deals where basic back-office work gets skipped because everyone is focused on the bigger strategic story. When general ledgers do not get mapped and simple address changes get delayed, accounts receivable can stretch from 30 days to 120 days within months of closing, and the cash crunch hits before anyone updates the strategy deck.
That gap between the deal thesis and the back-office reality is where a lot of “successful” acquisitions quietly start losing money. A CEO can announce a strategic rationale to the board, close the deal, and still get blindsided by an accounts receivable problem that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with someone forgetting to update a billing address. Durnin’s experience across more than 30 acquired firms is that the operational plumbing, invoicing systems, vendor contracts, payroll platforms, decides how fast the acquisition actually starts contributing cash, regardless of how sound the strategic case looked in the boardroom. CEOs who assign a single owner to that plumbing before close catch these problems in week one instead of month four.
Treat the Deal Pipeline Like a Sales Funnel
Adam Hasemeyer, CEO for Americas at Valtech, ran acquisition strategy for a firm that had already acquired his own company. He rebuilt the acquisition process around a discipline most CEOs already trust. “I had the pleasure of looking at the M&A funnel with a whole new set of strategic questions,” Hasemeyer said. “I looked at it through a sales funnel, frankly. Who are the types of businesses that we believe will help move our mission forward? What are the types of founders we want to try to attract?” Hasemeyer built that filter after his own company was acquired and folded into a larger platform, so he approaches sourcing from both sides of the table.
Hasemeyer applies the same transparency to retention that he applies to sourcing, telling acquired employees exactly what the combined company is building toward. “Giving people the roadmap and being very clear about where you’re going and the decisions to get to that point gives them the ability to choose for themselves, whether on that mission or not,” he said. He does not try to convince every acquired employee to stay. He gives them the picture and lets them decide, which is a faster path to a stable team than forcing loyalty that was never there to begin with.
This matters most with boutique firms, where employees often wear five roles at once and joined precisely because the company was small. Hasemeyer has watched talented people leave large platforms within a year of an acquisition, not because the money was wrong, but because a narrow enterprise role killed the variety that drew them to the smaller firm in the first place. A CEO who treats every acquired employee as a future fit for a defined job description will lose exactly the people who made the acquired company worth buying. The sales funnel model works both ways. It qualifies which companies to pursue, and it qualifies which people are genuinely a fit for the company you are building, rather than assuming everyone should want to stay.
FAQ
What does culture actually do in a merger or acquisition?
Culture is where the financial return either shows up or disappears. Tom Ragen puts it directly: private equity teams are strong on valuation and weaker on the human side, yet the payoff in any deal comes from culture, not the model. Glenn Gow tells CEOs to build a culture plan with a named owner and a budget line, the same way they would for legal or tax diligence.
What are the four main types of M&A strategies?
Most deals fall into one of four buckets: acquiring for a customer base, acquiring for technology or IP, acquiring for talent, or acquiring for market consolidation. Darren Kimura’s technology deals fall squarely into the talent bucket, which is why he treats cultural fit as a financial variable, not a soft one. Glenn Gow has seen CEOs pick the wrong approach because they misclassify which of the four buckets their deal actually belongs to.
What happens in the first 100 days after a merger closes?
The first 100 days decide whether the retained team trusts leadership or starts updating their resumes. Jeff Helfgott runs town halls before close and carries specific commitments into the first weeks after signing. Darren Kimura, who has run this across eight acquisitions, treats the first 100 days as the window where cultural fit either holds or breaks into attrition, since technology deals are people buys first and asset buys second.
How do you combine two companies without losing your best people?
You give people a specific reason to stay and you tell them the truth about what is changing. Adam Hasemeyer hands acquired employees a clear roadmap and lets them opt in or out rather than forcing compliance. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that forced enthusiasm reads as fake within a week, while an honest roadmap earns loyalty even from people who eventually decide to leave.
Should I keep the founder of the company I just acquired, or bring in my own leader?
It depends on whether the founder wants to keep operating and whether your team can support them. Andy Unanue backed Peter Lee through a facility expansion and a 5.5x exit because Lee wanted to keep running the business with better financial infrastructure behind him. Colby Durnin moves founders into support roles instead. His reasoning: “you can’t do it with money, you can’t do it with structure.”
How do I stop an acquisition from turning into a strategy band-aid?
Answer Premal Shah’s question before you sign: is this capability core to your long-term differentiation, or is it about speed? Shah warns that hyper-growth CEOs use acquisitions to avoid hard internal decisions, and that habit shows up later as a company built on patchwork instead of a plan. Glenn Gow asks every CEO he coaches to write down the answer to Shah’s question in one sentence before the deal moves forward.
What is the biggest mistake CEOs make right after closing a deal?
They let the tone shift from courtship to control too fast. Jeff Helfgott, who grew Excel Fitness Holdings from 17 to 92 locations before its exit to Olympus Partners, calls this the whiplash effect: acquirers spend diligence praising the target, then flip to “we’ll do things our way” the moment the deal closes. Glenn Gow has watched this single shift undo months of goodwill inside the first town hall.
How long does it take to fully combine two companies after an acquisition?
There is no fixed number, and Gyner Ozgul argues most sponsors get this wrong by never defining what “done” looks like in the first place. He pushes every deal team to agree on a shared definition before building a workstream plan, because an undefined finish line means the work never actually ends. Glenn Gow tells clients to set that definition in writing during diligence, not after close.
What should I tell acquired employees in the first town hall?
Tell them what will change, what will not, and acknowledge that leadership carries a different weight in this transition than staff do. Jonathon Snow describes selling a company as feeling like your child was given away to another family. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that naming that reality directly, rather than only reassuring line staff about logistics, does more for trust than an hour of vision talk.
How do I know if an acquisition is a people buy or an asset buy?
Ask what you are actually paying for. Darren Kimura’s technology acquisitions are people buys, and he treats attrition risk as a financial risk from day one. Colby Durnin’s more than 30 boutique real estate acquisitions fall on the same side of the line, which is why he treats culture, not money or structure, as the hardest thing to buy.
Why do most mergers and acquisitions fail?
Most M&A failures trace back to culture, not valuation. Tom Ragen says private equity teams are strong on the financial model and weak on the cultural side, and Darren Kimura has watched deals suffer from attrition and cultural mismatch across his eight acquisitions. Glenn Gow tells CEOs the model rarely kills a deal. The people side does.
How do you measure whether an acquisition is actually working?
Watch two numbers: retention of the people you needed to keep, and how fast your back office is functioning again. Colby Durnin has seen accounts receivable stretch from 30 days to 120 days when the back office lags, an early signal the deal isn’t combining well. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that a clean exit, like Andy Unanue’s 5.5x return backing Peter Lee, is the lagging indicator. The leading indicators are cultural, and they show up in the first 100 days.
What You Do Next
I’m Glenn Gow, and if you are heading into an acquisition or you already closed one, do not wait until your best people start walking out the door to build the culture plan. Schedule time with me directly and we will map your first 90 days so the deal delivers the value you paid for, instead of losing it to a team that never trusted the transition.
