Acquisition and integration support
Helping businesses bring acquisitions together smoothly and efficiently.
When you need this
- You are about to acquire, and want a view of the operation rather than only the numbers
- The deal has closed and day one is approaching faster than the plan
- You have made three acquisitions and none of them have been properly integrated
- Synergies committed in the deal model are not showing up in the accounts
- A buy and build platform is adding businesses faster than it can absorb them
What Kernva does
Most deals are priced on a view of what the target will be worth once it has been fixed and joined up. Most of the risk to that number is operational, and most of it becomes visible only after completion, when it is expensive.
The work covers:
- Operational due diligence. What state the operation is genuinely in, what it will cost and take to fix, and which of the assumed synergies are realistic
- Integration planning. A plan built before completion rather than after, covering systems, processes, structure, sites and people
- Day one readiness. Customers served, staff paid, regulators satisfied, nothing dropped
- Integration delivery. Running the programme, holding the workstreams together and making the decisions that keep it moving
- Synergy tracking. Measuring delivery against the deal model, and being honest when something is not going to land
The unglamorous part matters most here. Integration failures are rarely strategic. They are two teams using different systems, a process that only one person understood, and a decision nobody felt authorised to make.
How an engagement runs
Operational due diligence runs two to four weeks and fits the deal timetable rather than the other way round. Integration planning ideally starts before completion, which is the single biggest determinant of how the first hundred days go.
Delivery typically runs six to eighteen months, full time for a complex integration or fractional for a smaller bolt-on. Henriette has led integrations across the UK, US and Europe, so multi-country programmes are familiar ground.
What changes
- A value case that survives the first year, with an honest read on what will and will not deliver
- The people you bought the business for staying, because the integration was run with them rather than at them
- Customers who barely notice the change of ownership
- A repeatable integration playbook, which matters if this is the first of several
16 years leading operations from front line to C-suite. P&L accountability across businesses up to £70m and 250 employees. PE-backed and public companies, UK, US and Europe, in heavily regulated environments.
Questions people ask
- Can you work for us during the deal and then stay on?
- Yes, and it is usually the better arrangement. The person who saw the operation during diligence already knows where the difficulty sits.
- We are the ones being acquired. Can you help?
- Yes. Preparing an operation for diligence, and supporting a management team through integration, is the same work seen from the other side of the table.
- How early should we bring you in?
- As early as you can. The cheapest integration decisions are the ones made before completion.
Related services
Worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, no charge, no pitch. If Kernva is not the right answer, we will let you know and also point you somewhere more useful if we can.