Gustaf Lundberg Toresson — Forbes Contributor, Careers, Leadership
Across the Nordic and global mid-market, funds spend months negotiating price, structure, leverage, and legal nuance, while far less time is spent preparing for what creates value: running and improving the business. As one operating partner in the UK recently put it: “Deals are won in the data room. Returns are won in the first 18 months.”
And that first phase, the messy, human, operational, reputation-risk-heavy period after acquisition, has never been more important. With multiples compressing, macro volatility increasing, and cheaper debt no longer doing the heavy lifting, value creation is shifting decisively toward fixing, integrating, and growing, not just buying.
This is a practical playbook for doing that well.
Fixing: The First 100 Days Determine the Next 1,000
Every investor claims to have a “100-day plan.” Few have a 100-day capability.
The first phase of the post-acquisition cycle is diagnostic: uncovering what actually drives the business, who actually drives the business, and where the operational liabilities lie. In founder-led companies — which dominate the Nordic lower mid-market — this phase determines whether the business can scale or whether the deal team has unintentionally bought a job.
The Single Most Underrated KPI: Managerial Reality
Before performance dashboards and cost initiatives, there is a more important audit:
Do the managers manage? Or do they firefight?
In a recent acquisition of a 200-employee industrial services company, one PE firm discovered that the “management team” spent over 70% of its time solving day-to-day issues technicians should have handled. The result:
- No strategic bandwidth
- No process ownership
- No accountability
- No ability to absorb acquisitions
The fix was not adding more reports or more consultants — it was clarifying decision rights and re-architecting roles. Within six months, operational uptime improved by 14% and gross margins widened by 220bps.
Fix What Breaks Cash First
In most mid-market acquisitions, three areas create the biggest early-stage leakage:
- Pricing discipline (especially in fragmented B2B services)
- Utilization (industrial services, field operations, maintenance)
- Working capital cycles (construction, logistics, wholesale distribution)
A Nordic roll-up in specialty logistics recently discovered that 40% of its customers were billed on outdated rates that hadn’t been updated for years. The fix? Reclassify accounts by profitability tiers and increase prices where relationships could absorb it. The company saw a 21% EBITA lift within a fiscal year — with zero volume growth.
Replace Before You Add
A common failure mode in new acquisitions is hiring “strategic” managers before removing the blockages below them.
True value creation in the first 100 days comes from:
Fewer, better managers — not more managers.
Integrating: Where Buy-and-Build Strategies Win or Die
The Nordic region has become an epicenter for buy-and-build platforms — from Lifco and Storskogen to sector-specific platforms in infrastructure services, industrial maintenance, and IT consulting. But not even the most aggressive platform can escape the fundamental laws of integration.
Below is a distilled set of lessons from platforms that successfully scaled to 20, 40, or even 100+ acquisitions.
Cultural Compatibility > Industrial Logic
Many investors assume that if two companies “fit” on paper — product, margin structure, customer type — they will integrate well.
In practice, the opposite is true.
A Swedish industrial group discovered this the hard way when it attempted to merge two nearly identical fabrication shops. Same machinery, same customer base, same revenue composition. Perfect synergy — theoretically.
But one shop had a strict hierarchy and time-clock culture. The other valued autonomy and self-directed teams. The merger triggered 22% staff turnover and a collapse in delivery quality.
The platform later changed its playbook:
Culture determines feasibility. The numbers only determine value.
Integrate Where It Matters — Leave the Rest Alone
The smartest integrators operate on the principle of “federated autonomy.”
They centralize only what creates leverage:
- Finance & reporting
- HR infrastructure
- Procurement
- Pricing frameworks
- Sales enablement
- Safety & compliance
- M&A pipeline & negotiation
But they keep decentralized what creates identity:
- Local relationships
- Customer delivery
- Leadership style
- Service configuration
In one Nordic technical services roll-up, centralizing procurement saved 8–12% across categories like protective equipment and vehicle leasing, while keeping local branch autonomy preserved retention and customer satisfaction.
The firms that try to centralize everything lose their best operators within the first year. The firms that centralize nothing never achieve multiple expansion.
Build Integrations Around People, Not Processes
The biggest misconception in buy-and-build is that integration is a systems challenge.
In reality, it is a human adoption challenge.
A platform that acquired 30+ HVAC companies across Scandinavia learned that the fastest way to harmonize processes was not through top-down mandates but through “operator councils” — groups of high-performing field managers who co-design the new standards.
Result: adoption rates doubled, and rollout timelines halved.
Once a business is stabilized and integrated, the next phase is growth — but not the random, reactive growth that founder-led companies often pursue. Instead, PE-driven growth is about:
- repeatability
- visibility
- pricing power
- and predictable unit economics.
Below are the levers that consistently generate outperformance in PE-backed transformations.
Pricing Power Is the Ultimate Multiple Expander
Too many investors view pricing as a one-time adjustment.
The firms that outperform treat pricing as a capability.
A Swedish industrial B2B platform increased EBITDA by 40% in two years without increasing volume, purely by:
- Eliminating legacy discounts
- Introducing differentiated pricing by customer type
- Charging faster for emergency work
- Charging premiums for remote locations
- Embedding value-based pricing scripts in sales playbooks
Pricing is the lowest-risk value-creation lever in the post-acquisition cycle — yet the most commonly ignored.
Teach Managers to Become Leaders
The fastest-growing PE-backed companies share one trait:
Managers become leaders faster than the business expands.
A typical mid-market company lacks:
- weekly operating cadence
- KPI visibility
- coaching capability
- talent succession
- cross-functional accountability
A Nordic PE-backed maintenance platform introduced a simple but rigid “Monday Operating System”:
- 60-minute cross-functional meeting
- 10 standardized KPIs
- same agenda every week
- decisions logged and reviewed
Turnaround time on key issues dropped from 14 days to 3 days. Leadership bench depth matured within a year. Organic growth accelerated.
M&A Flywheels: The Quiet Superpower
Once a platform has:
- clear integration playbooks
- trained managers
- standardized reporting
- scalable workflows
- brand credibility
- and a reputation for treating sellers well
— it unlocks what every platform wants: proprietary deal flow on autopilot.
A Stockholm-based industrial roll-up reported that after its first five successful acquisitions, 40% of its incoming sellers were referrals — no brokers, no intermediaries, no auction dynamics. The valuation delta versus brokered processes exceeded 20%.
This is the most underrated growth lever in private equity: Excellence compounds faster than capital.
Conclusion: Post-Acquisition Excellence Is the Last Real Moat
The PE world has spent a decade optimizing financial engineering.
The next decade will be about operational engineering:
- disciplined pricing
- managerial maturity
- scalable integrations
- predictable operating systems
- federated autonomy
- cultural compatibility
- and repeatable playbooks
Most firms still treat post-acquisition work as a checklist.
The outperformers treat it as a craft.
In an environment of tighter capital, lower multiples, and higher competition, the firms who win will be those that execute the middle of the journey — not just the beginning or the end.
Because in private equity, anyone can buy a company.
But very few can fix, integrate, and grow one into something far more valuable than what they started with.