AOL and Time Warner. Daimler Chrysler. Sprint and Nextel. Quaker Oats and Snapple.
You see where this is going, right? These are the major pitfalls to avoid during post-merger integrations, plus a free template you can use to turn the plan into a practical PMI checklist.
Value capture is the whole point of an acquisition. Companies will spend more than $2 trillion on M&A this year, and most of that capital will fail to do what the deal memo promised. Harvard Business Review puts the failure rate at 70 to 90 percent. Deloitte’s 2025 M&A study found 47% of executives admit their last deal underperformed expectations. The work that separates the winners from the losers is not the deal. It is the four operating decisions that follow it.
When the strategy is wrong, the cleanest version of acquisitions like Daimler Chrysler and Sprint/Nextel stick to a balance sheet for a generation. When it is right, you end up looking like the Apple of acquisitions: dozens of quiet bolt-ons, a clear thesis, and compounding value year after year. The difference comes down to four levers that drive roughly 80% of the value capture in successful deals.
“Running a business and integrating two companies is like having two different jobs and both are equally important.” – Chris Barbin, CEO, Founder, Entrepreneur
Only one-third of mergers and acquisitions successfully create shareholder value. More often than not, this is down to failures during the post-merger integration (PMI) process. Cari Windt, who specializes in organizational design and change management, pins this on a lack of planning; CEO Christ Barbin claims it’s a lack of execution.
These two problems, however, are not mutually exclusive. Executing a poor plan can be more harmful than not executing a plan at all.
Being aware of the challenges of post-merger integrations and developing a thorough PMI process can both go a long way to ensuring yours runs smoothly. But how do you determine if total integration is right for your organization?
This Process Street post will look at the 4 main post-merger strategies and when you should use them:
Let’s dive in!
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“The truth is mistakes happen. The accepted data says that most mergers and acquisitions don’t work out.” – Martin Sikora, professor of management and editor of Mergers & Acquisitions: The Dealmaker’s Journal
Mergers and acquisitions are complicated. Like, really complicated. A simple mistake at any point can delay the deal, derail the process, and potentially cost your company millions.
No matter how highly trained or experienced a person is with M&A procedures, human error happens. In fact, errors are more likely to occur in processes we’re overly familiar with. Once we’ve performed a task so many times that we “know” the steps, we tend to run on autopilot, which means routine actions can be overlooked or forgotten.
Making a mistake during a process with as much risk and expense as a merger or acquisition can ruin one or both companies. This makes having a thorough, well-documented process is an absolute must for any M&A executive.
After analyzing the main reasons mergers fail, I’ve used that knowledge to build several Process Street workflow templates for essential M&A processes. Feel free to jump ahead if you’re looking for a particular template, or continue reading for a walkthrough of all the features these workflows use:
Ready to acquire some new workflows?
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