There is something very seductive about acquisitions.
You identify a great brand.
You build the business case.
You agree a price.
You sign the deal.
Everyone celebrates.
And then the real work begins.
Because buying a brand is a financial transaction.
Integrating a brand is a commercial, organisational and cultural one.
Over my career, I have experienced acquisitions from several different perspectives.
At Glanbia, I was involved in the integration of the BSN and Nutramino acquisitions. At Church & Dwight, I was involved in the integration of Waterpik.
And earlier in my career, I spent almost 11 years at Wella, working across three countries and in a number of different commercial and marketing roles, eventually becoming Country Manager for Portugal.
That last experience gives me a slightly different perspective.
I knew Wella as an organisation and its brands long before it was acquired by Procter & Gamble — and I have subsequently watched the business pass through several different owners.
Those experiences have convinced me that the acquisition itself is often the easy part.
The difficult question is:
What do you do with the business once you've bought it?
The spreadsheet doesn't tell you everything
An acquisition model can tell you a great deal.
Revenue.
Gross margin.
EBITDA.
Growth rates.
Synergies.
Working capital.
Market share.
But it can't easily tell you:
Which people are critical to the business?
Which customers have relationships with the founder rather than the brand?
Which distributors actually create value?
Which processes are essential — and which are simply historical baggage?
How much of the brand's success comes from its culture?
What will happen when you put it into a much larger organisation?
These are the questions that determine whether an acquisition creates value or destroys it.
I saw this at Glanbia
At Glanbia, I was involved in the integration of the BSN and Nutramino acquisitions.
The temptation after acquiring a successful brand is to start integrating immediately.
Put it into the existing systems.
Align the reporting.
Change the processes.
Standardise everything.
Make it look like the rest of the company.
But there is a danger here.
The things that make an acquisition attractive are often the very things that make it different from the acquiring company.
A successful brand may have developed its own way of working because that way of working was effective.
The job isn't necessarily to eliminate those differences.
The job is to understand which differences are valuable.
Waterpik taught me another lesson
At Church & Dwight, I was involved in the integration of Waterpik.
Waterpik was an established, successful brand with its own history, customer relationships and market dynamics.
The acquisition created obvious opportunities.
But capturing those opportunities wasn't simply a matter of putting Waterpik into Church & Dwight's existing structure.
It required understanding the brand, the markets, the channels and the people — and then deciding where Church & Dwight could genuinely make the business better.
And the results demonstrated the potential.
Following the acquisition, Waterpik grew turnover by more than 18% in the first year.
But the lesson for me wasn't simply about growth.
It was about understanding what you had bought before deciding how to change it.
Integration shouldn't mean making the acquired business identical to the acquiring business.
It should mean making the combined business better than either could have been independently.
And then there is Wella
My experience with Wella gives me a rather different perspective.
I spent almost 11 years with Wella, working in three different countries and across a variety of commercial and marketing roles, before becoming Country Manager for Portugal.
During that time I saw the organisation from several different perspectives — from trade marketing and brand management through regional marketing and ultimately country management.
I knew the brands.
I knew the people.
I knew the markets.
And I saw how much of a company's success comes from the combination of its brands, people, culture and ways of working.
Wella was subsequently acquired by Procter & Gamble.
The business later became part of Coty, before Coty sold its Professional and Retail Hair business to KKR, creating the standalone Wella Company.
Coty eventually sold its remaining stake in Wella to KKR.
So a business I knew very well has experienced several changes of ownership since I worked there.
I don't claim to know the detail of every integration decision made along the way.
But watching that journey has reinforced something for me:
A brand can survive a change of ownership. But preserving the things that made it valuable requires deliberate effort.
Every new owner naturally wants to put its own stamp on the business.
That's understandable.
But there is a danger in assuming that because you own the business, everything about the business needs to change.
Sometimes the smartest thing an acquirer can do is understand what not to change.
The five things I would look at before integrating an acquisition
Having been on the operating side of acquisitions, these are the areas I would pay particular attention to.
1. Protect what you bought
Don't immediately start fixing things.
First understand why the business works.
What are you actually buying?
A brand?
A distribution network?
A product technology?
A customer base?
A management team?
A culture?
Often, it's a combination of all of them.
2. Identify the people you cannot afford to lose
The organisational chart doesn't tell you who holds the business together.
Sometimes it is the CEO.
Sometimes it is a salesperson who has spent 15 years building retailer relationships.
Sometimes it is a product developer.
Sometimes it is somebody whose name never appears on the acquisition presentation.
Lose the wrong people and you can lose a significant part of the value you thought you had bought.
3. Decide what should be integrated — and what shouldn't
Finance, systems, governance and compliance may benefit enormously from integration.
Brand positioning, customer relationships and local market expertise may not.
There is no prize for making every part of an acquired business look like the parent company.
The objective is value creation, not uniformity.
4. Don't underestimate the international dimension
This becomes even more complicated when the acquired company operates internationally.
Different markets may have different distributors, retailers, regulations, pricing structures and customer relationships.
A global acquisition can therefore contain dozens of mini-integration projects.
The strategy that works in Germany may be completely wrong for Portugal, Turkey or the Middle East.
Integration needs a global framework.
But execution still needs local understanding.
5. Have a plan for the day after the deal
Too many acquisition plans concentrate on Day One.
But Day One isn't the destination.
It's the starting line.
The real test comes six, twelve and twenty-four months later.
Are sales growing?
Are margins improving?
Are key people still there?
Are customers happier?
Have the promised synergies actually appeared?
Has the brand become stronger?
And perhaps most importantly:
Is the combined business now worth more than the two businesses were separately?
M&A isn't about owning more brands
This is perhaps the biggest lesson I've taken from my experience.
Acquisitions are often presented as a way of buying growth.
But you don't create value simply by owning more brands.
You create value by making the brands you acquire better, bigger, more profitable or more strategically valuable as part of the new organisation.
Sometimes that means changing almost everything.
Sometimes it means changing surprisingly little.
The skill is knowing which is which.
Because ultimately:
Buying a brand is easy.
Integrating it is the hard part.
