The First Hundred Days
Most integration value gets created or destroyed in the first hundred days. Not gradually. Not over eighteen months. In the first hundred days.
The clock starts
The deal closes. Champagne in the boardroom. Handshakes. Press release.
Then reality: two businesses, two cultures, two sets of systems. Acquired teams wondering whether they keep their jobs, what software they’ll use, who they report to. Every week of ambiguity degrades performance. Integration isn’t a workstream you bolt onto business as usual. For the first hundred days, integration is the business.
The mistake is treating it like steady state with extra meetings.
Three questions determine success
How fast can you diagnose? Uncertainty kills productivity faster than bad decisions. Good integrations compress diagnosis into two weeks—who stays, what changes, why we bought this business. Structural decisions by day thirty. Stability signalled by day sixty. Drag it to ninety days and you’ve lost three months of output.
Who decides what? Integration creates a thousand micro-decisions. Which CRM? How do we reconcile commission structures? Who approves marketing spend? Without explicit decision rights, everything escalates or stalls. Write it down. Sales ops stays with acquirer. Product roadmap involves both teams. Compensation needs CEO sign-off. Communicate it repeatedly.
What do you integrate immediately versus what do you leave alone? This determines whether you preserve value or destroy it.
What to integrate, what to leave
Finance and reporting, immediately. You can’t run two P&Ls beyond month one. Consolidate chart of accounts, align reporting cycles, establish one source of truth. Not optional.
Customer-facing operations, slowly. Sales teams have relationships. Delivery teams have workflows. Support knows product quirks. Forcing integration in month one breaks what works. Let them run whilst you figure out what you’re actually integrating.
Systems, only when workflow demands it. If both businesses run different CRMs and don’t need to share data yet, leave them separate. The cost of premature consolidation usually exceeds the benefit. Integrate when workflow requires it, not because the Gantt chart says so.
Culture doesn’t integrate—it collides
Two businesses, two sets of assumptions about how decisions get made and what good looks like. Ignore this and it festers. Force alignment too fast and you destroy what made the acquired business valuable.
Run joint leadership meetings immediately. Not to integrate culture—to make differences visible. How do they run meetings? What do they care about? Understanding difference beats forcing sameness.
Preserve what’s valuable before you homogenise. They were bought for a reason. Often a capability the acquirer lacks. Find it, protect it, learn from it. The best integrations treat acquisition as two-way learning, not one-way compliance.
Signal stability early
Acquired teams assume the worst until you tell them otherwise. If key people stay, announce it in week one. If reporting lines are clear, publish the org chart by day thirty. If the product roadmap continues, confirm it in writing.
Silence creates rumours. Clarity creates productivity.
The test
Pull your last acquisition. What happened in the first thirty days? When did key decisions get made? How long did uncertainty last?
If it took ninety days to clarify org structure, you lost three months. If systems integrated before anyone understood workflow, you broke things that worked.
For the next one: compress diagnosis to two weeks. Make structural decisions by day thirty. Integrate finance immediately, customer operations slowly, systems only when workflow demands it.
Integration done well feels boring. Decisions get made, people know what’s expected, operations stabilise. Integration done badly feels chaotic for months.
Survivors call themselves lucky rather than competent.
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