Most integrations are not decided. They drift. Nobody chose to merge the two sales teams or move the new branch onto your pricing sheet. It happened because the loudest person in the room had an opinion, or because someone in finance needed a clean report by month end. Six months later the business you paid for looks different, and no one can say who made the call.
Owning the business does not mean you understand it yet. A playbook fixes the order of operations: you decide the approach first, you decide who holds which decision second, and you only then start moving things. That is what this page lays out. It sits next to the post-merger integration checklist, which lists the tasks, and the first 100 days integration plan, which sequences them. I will not repeat either here.
Get the playbook as a PDF
The decision framework, the decision rights worksheet, the governance cadence, and the exit criteria on a few printable pages you can hand to your team.
Step 1: Make the operating model decision on purpose
Every acquisition needs one honest answer before anything else changes: how much of this business are we going to change? There are three real options. Pick one per acquisition, write it down, and tell the people who need to know. One size does not fit all.
| Approach | When it fits | What changes | What stays | Who decides |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preserve and strengthen | The business is run well, its local name and relationships carry the revenue, and your thesis is growth, not cost. | Reporting, cash controls, safety and compliance standards, access to your purchasing and capital. | Brand, management team, customer relationships, pricing authority, most systems and processes. | The president or operating partner signs off. The acquired GM proposes and keeps daily operating authority. |
| Selectively integrate | Parts of the business are better than yours and parts are weaker, or the thesis needs some shared functions to pay off. | The functions you name in writing: for example back office, purchasing, or dispatch. Nothing else moves until it is named. | The customer-facing teams, the local brand, and any function that outperforms yours. | The president decides which functions move. A named function owner decides how, with the acquired leader in the room. |
| Substantially consolidate | Overlapping branches, customers, or crews in the same market, and the savings case only works if two operations become one. | Org structure, locations, systems, pricing, vendors, often the brand. | The customers you can still serve better together, and the few people who hold the knowledge. | The president decides and owns the outcome. Functional leaders execute against dated milestones. |
How to choose
Ask four questions, in this order. They come from your diligence, which is why integration starts before the close.
- Where does the revenue actually come from: the brand, a handful of relationships, or a repeatable process? If it is relationships, lean toward preserve.
- Is the acquired business better than you at anything that matters? If yes, protect that part and do not rebuild it in your image.
- What did the seller promise their people and their customers? Those promises are constraints until you renegotiate them on purpose.
- Does the savings case require consolidation, or only a belief that it does? A synergy that requires consolidation needs an owner and a date, or it stays off the model.
You can mix approaches across functions. A business can be preserved in sales and consolidated in finance. What you cannot do is leave it undecided. An undecided operating model is a consolidation by accident, and it usually lands on the people you most needed to keep.
Step 2: Set decision rights before the first dispute
Disputes in the first ninety days are normal. The problem is a dispute with no one authorized to end it. Settle who decides what before the first argument, and write it on one page.
For each decision area, name one owner and one backstop
- People and pay: who approves retention offers, compensation plan changes, and any exit of a named critical person. Default: the president, with HR as the process owner.
- Customers and pricing: who can change terms, credit, or service levels on the top accounts. Default: the sales leader, and nothing on a top account changes without the relationship holder in the conversation.
- Operations and service: who changes dispatch, scheduling, field procedures, or branch footprint. Default: the operations leader, within the model you chose.
- Systems and data: who approves access, migrations, and any change to how jobs, inventory, or invoices are recorded. Default: the finance leader, with IT as backstop, and neither changes a record the other has not seen.
- Spend and vendors: who can move a vendor, sign an integration expense, or approve a capital item. Set a dollar limit and a single approver above it.
- Escalation: who breaks a tie, how fast, and in what forum. Default: the president, within two working days. If the answer is "whoever is available," nobody owns it.
Two rules keep this honest. First, an owner can be wrong, but an owner cannot be absent. Second, the acquired leaders get a real voice on anything touching their customers and crews. They are the ones who know why the business works, and a decision made over their heads is one they will not carry out.
Step 3: Sequence by risk, not by convenience
Teams start with what is easy: the logo, the email domain, the vendor list. The order that protects value is the reverse. Protect before you improve, then drive growth.
- First, protect: payroll, cash, signing authority, the critical people, and the top customers. Nothing else matters if these break.
- Second, stabilize: reporting, controls, and the issue log. Learn how the business actually runs before you rewrite it. One issue is never just one issue.
- Third, improve: the operating changes your thesis promised, one at a time, matched to what your team can absorb.
- Fourth, grow: cross-sell, footprint expansion, and new capacity, only after the base is steady.
One more constraint is the capacity of the people doing the work. Ask the same five people to run payroll conversion, a pricing review, and a systems migration in one month, and something breaks. Do not crush what you bought.
Plan for the dip
Performance and morale usually fall before they climb. This is the valley of despair, and it is normal. In ADKAR terms (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement), people need the first two before they can build the next two, and reinforcement before the new way sticks. That takes time. Tell your board or lender about the dip in advance. A dip that was forecast is a plan. A dip that was not is a crisis.
Step 4: Run a governance cadence that warns you early
Governance sounds heavy. It is not. It is a few meetings with a fixed purpose, a fixed owner, and a fixed set of numbers. The aim is to hear about trouble from a scorecard, not from a resignation letter or a lost account.
Who meets, how often, and what they look at
- Daily, first two weeks, 15 minutes: integration lead plus function owners. Cash, payroll, service delivery, open issues. Owner: the integration lead.
- Weekly, through day 100, 45 minutes: the integration team. Milestones due, milestones missed, the issue and risk log, decisions needed this week. Owner: the integration lead, with every open decision assigned a name and a date.
- Monthly, 90 minutes: the president and functional leaders. Actuals against the opening baseline for people, customers, profits, and cash, plus the synergy ledger. Owner: the president, with finance preparing the numbers.
- Quarterly, half day: the president, the acquired leadership, and the owner or sponsor. Is the operating model still right? Are the growth numbers on track? What changes next quarter? Owner: the president.
- On trigger, within 48 hours: a defined event calls an immediate meeting, such as a critical person resigning, a top account slipping, or a missed payroll. Owner: whoever owns the affected decision area.
Keep a synergy ledger inside this rhythm. List every promised cost saving and revenue opportunity with an owner, a date, and a status of bankable or aspirational. A growth number without an owner is a wish. If a line has no name by the second monthly review, remove it.
Step 5: Decide in advance when you are done
Integration programs do not end by themselves. Without exit criteria they fade out as attention shifts to the next deal, and the unfinished items become permanent. Write the exit criteria at the start, and have the president declare completion against them.
- The operating model decision has been carried out for every function, or formally revised in writing.
- Critical people are retained, or their replacements are in seat and trained, and knowledge no longer lives in a single head.
- The opening customer cohort is measured separately and has held at or above the baseline you set.
- Reporting, controls, and systems run on the standard you chose, with no workarounds left from the transition.
- The synergy ledger is closed: each line is captured, rejected, or moved into the normal budget with an owner.
- The acquired business reports through the normal management cadence, and the integration team has stood down.
If you want help applying the framework to a specific deal, see post-merger integration consulting.
Where the playbook bends
Add-ons to an existing platform
On an add-on to a platform you already run, experience is the advantage and the danger. Habit pulls you toward consolidating every time. Read roll-up and add-on integration for how to repeat the process without flattening what you bought.
The brand question
Whether to keep or retire the acquired name is a customer decision before it is a design decision. Some brands carry the trust. Some are a liability. Keep the brand or rebrand covers how to decide and when to do it.
Take the playbook to your team
One PDF for your leadership group: the three approaches side by side, the decision rights worksheet, the cadence, and the exit criteria.
Decisions on this topic
The specific calls operators face inside this part of the integration. Each has its own page, with the tension laid out and a way to decide.
- When their system is better than yours. Standardization says migrate them to your platform.
Questions
What is a post-merger integration playbook?
A post-merger integration playbook is the set of decisions and rules that guide how you combine two businesses after a deal closes: which operating model you use, who has authority over each area, in what order you act, how you track progress, and when you stop.
Is there a post-merger integration playbook PDF I can download?
Yes. Enter your email in the form above and we will send the playbook as a PDF, covering the operating model table, the decision rights worksheet, the governance cadence, and the exit criteria.
How is a playbook different from an integration checklist?
The checklist says what has to be done. The playbook says how to choose, who makes each call, and how you know the work is finished. Use the playbook to set direction and the checklist to catch what is missed.
Who should own post-merger integration?
The president owns the outcome and the operating model decision. A named integration lead runs the cadence day to day. Function owners carry out their own areas, and the acquired leaders keep a real voice on anything that touches their customers and crews. Ownership spread across everyone is held by no one.