There’s a line that floats around deal rooms: “Let them keep their horses.”
I agree with the advice to a point. What bothers me is how it sometimes gets used. Closing day is over. You won. Be gracious. Leave the acquired company a few of its traditions so the employees don’t revolt.
I don’t like the framing from that perspective — a winner and loser perspective. General Grant let the Confederate soldiers keep their horses after defeat. He rightly knew they were again countrymen. But we can inadvertently wrap this around the idea that the loser of the war gets a concession.
As an executive sponsor or leader of buy-side transactions, I try to keep the end state in mind. The people sitting across from us are going to be our teammates in a few months. I want them to be as successful, or more successful, than they were before the deal. And I want them to feel welcome from Day 1.
That should influence how we treat them long before closing.
We often start strong at the leadership level. We talk about partnership, opportunity, and what we can build together. This utopian outlook of the combined future of two companies. Then diligence begins. The internal conversation shifts toward everything that needs to change. Different policies. Different benefits. Different systems. Before long, we’re building a list of things to eliminate in a business we just spent months convincing ourselves was worth buying. And there always seems to be angst somewhere. “Mr. Herren, do you realize the owner lets their people do this?!? What in the world? As if….”
Then, after closing, we wonder why we have so much trust to rebuild.
The horses aren’t a consolation prize. Some of them are part of why the company is successful. Part of why you wanted to buy it. Part of why you agreed to pay what you paid.
Don’t screw that up.
When you buy a company, you’re buying more than revenue, backlog, or a multiple. You’re buying the little engine that made the business work. The bonus plan people actually understand. The customer relationships that live in someone’s head and phone, not just in a CRM. The sense of security employees feel around an owner who built the business and still buys them pizza on Friday. The annual event that looks optional on a spreadsheet but means something to the people who show up.
Individually, those things might look small. Collectively, they help shape how people work, what they care about, and why they stay.
Our business discipline leads can admire the outcome while overlooking what helped produce it. HR might say, “They have great retention.” Someone else might ask, “Do we really need that Friday pizza thing? And why do they offer that benefit?”
Fair questions. But we ought to understand the answers before deciding.
Maybe the pizza isn’t what keeps people there. Could be, or likely, it’s the access to the owner. The chance to ask a question without scheduling a meeting. The recognition. The feeling that someone knows who they are and appreciates what they contribute.
You can replace the meal and preserve all of that. You can also keep ordering pizza and lose every bit of it. The point is to understand what’s happening around the table.
Right after close, a lot of buyers start “cleaning house.” Standardize the bonus plan. Cancel the offsite. Move everyone onto the buyer’s systems in ninety days. Replace the local rituals with the corporate ones.
It sounds responsible. And it looks like you’re executing the plan. Every change has a rationale, an owner, and a completion date. Then comes the surprise when retention drops.
In business, we have skilled experts everywhere. Legal. Finance. Accounting. Contracts. Business development. HR. Every function has a seat at the table, a checklist, and findings to resolve.
Who is accountable for understanding what makes this team work? HR has a critical role. But the executive sponsor and the leaders who will run the business after closing have to own that question, too. We can’t delegate the human side of an acquisition and then act surprised by the human response.
Culture doesn’t fit neatly into a diligence tracker. You won’t find a clean line in the financial model that tells you what happens when employees stop trusting leadership. So the things that are harder to measure can become easier to sacrifice.
A small change here. Another one there. Each makes sense in isolation. Together, they can take apart something you haven’t spent enough time understanding. It all feels reasonable. But it can be quietly detrimental.
I’ve seen this show up during diligence, with an owner who was already concerned about the well-being of their team. Someone shooting off about a post-closing strip-down of G&A. I removed someone from the deal team because of it. How we conduct ourselves before closing tells the seller and their employees something about what life will be like afterward. We should take that seriously.
And yes, some things need to change. Legal obligations, financial controls, and safety requirements can demand immediate action. A buyer’s preference for its own way of doing things deserves more scrutiny.
Synergies are real. Buyers do add value. Scale, capital, contracts expertise, leadership depth, better systems, and access to customers the smaller company couldn’t reach alone can create tremendous opportunity. That’s part of the reason to do the deal. But adding value requires some judgment about where to add it.
My approach is pretty simple:
Keep what made them successful.
Add where you clearly make them better.
Do both with them, not to them.
Keep the bonus structure long enough to understand the behavior it encourages before you rewrite it. Learn the customer rhythms that built trust. Pay attention to the events, benefits, and familiar routines that tell employees they matter.
Ask their leaders what they would improve if they had more resources. Ask their employees what gets in the way of doing good work. You might find that some of your best integration opportunities are things they’ve wanted to fix for years. You might also learn that they do a few things better than you do. That ought to be welcome news. We paid for their capabilities. Synergies can flow both directions.
The goal is to help the combined business become stronger. Sometimes that means introducing a better process. Sometimes it means leaving a good one alone. Sometimes it means taking something the acquired company does well and bringing it into the rest of the organization. That requires enough confidence as a leader to recognize that your existing way isn’t automatically the best way.
I’ve watched deals where the math was fine and the first year still went sideways because someone treated culture like a soft variable. I’ve also watched acquired teams outperform their own pre-deal results because the buyer protected what worked and added support where it mattered. The difference showed up in how people were treated, how decisions were made, and whether leadership followed through on the partnership it promised.
Those future teammates we met during diligence were paying attention the whole time.
So before you standardize the next “little” thing, ask a harder question: is this actually broken, or is it just different from how we do it?
To you, the change might barely register. To an employee, it might be the latest signal that the business they helped build no longer has a place for them. Understand what you’re changing. Understand what it makes possible. And understand what you could lose.
Are we solving a problem — or deleting part of the purchase price?
Don’t kill what you just bought.
Leave no doubt.
If you’re thinking about a deal of your own, a few of the tools I use are in Tools & Resources: https://www.lndmindset.com/toolsandresources