You closed the deal. Now comes the work that determines whether it was worth it.

Opening

Construction and distribution are consolidating. Strategic acquirers are buying regional operators. Private-equity-backed platforms are assembling regional distribution chains into national footprints. The deals get announced cleanly and the integrations rarely match the announcement.

The gap between closing a deal and actually owning what you bought is where the value leaks: quietly, persistently, and at a cost that never shows up cleanly on a balance sheet. What happens operationally over the eighteen months that follow is where the transaction either earns its model or doesn't.

That eighteen-month window is the work we do.

The integration problem nobody owns.

Most acquisitions receive attention immediately after close. Corporate sends a transition team. There’s a plan. Everyone is optimistic. Then attention shifts to the next transaction, and the acquired company is left to figure out the rest of the integration on its own.

Six months later the pattern is familiar. The acquired company is still running its old systems because the migration got complicated. Staff have two computers, one for the new platform, one because the old platform still has things nobody’s moved yet. Someone in AP is running a manual process because the equivalent workflow in the new system was never built out. Vendor relationships are split across two ERPs. The integration was supposed to be 80% complete and it’s 40%.

This is the norm. It’s expensive, it’s demoralizing for the acquired team, and it represents real financial and operational risk for the acquirer. The reason it persists isn’t lack of capability inside the acquiring organization. It’s that integration loses to the next deal, every time, in the competition for executive attention.

We specialize in ending that pattern.

Before the deal closes.

Most operational integration firms engage after close. We engage before close when the acquirer brings us in early. That’s the work that pays back hardest.

The work is straightforward: we audit the target’s operational and technology environment with the same lens we’ll apply during integration. The ERP that’s held together with custom scripts. The vendor dependencies that aren’t in any contract. The single employee who is the entire institutional memory of how the inventory system actually works. The fax machine that nobody has thought about in eight years but is still receiving customer orders.

What we surface is the operational risk the financial and legal teams aren’t structured to find. Sometimes it changes the deal terms. Sometimes it changes the integration timeline. Sometimes it changes nothing in the transaction but gets the acquirer to close with their eyes open.

After close: until nobody has two computers.

Once the deal closes, the integration is operational. That’s the work we own end to end.

Infrastructure migration. Networking, surveillance, endpoints, communications. Everything with a plug gets accounted for. The legacy phones nobody has cataloged, the modem dialing out to a vendor every night for pricing updates, the access control system nobody documented, the surveillance DVR running on Windows XP; these are not edge cases in construction distribution and civil acquisitions, they are most of what we find.

ERP and systems integration. We’ve worked with many ERPs and the legacy systems they displaced. The migration work is more than data transfer; it’s identifying which workflows should be replicated, which should be redesigned, and which should be retired entirely. Acquired companies routinely run workflows built around the limitations of the old ERP. Replicating those workflows imports the limitations. We catch that and fix it during transition rather than after.

Staff transition and training. The people doing the work are the last group to get attention in most integrations. We stay until nobody says “in the old system I could…” and nobody has two computers because one still connects to something that should have been decommissioned. That’s the definition of done.

In 2024 and 2025 alone, we worked over 145 acquired businesses across the vertical: sustained acquisition activity at a pace exceeding one acquired business per week. That volume matters because it means the methodology is repeatable under load. We are not learning the work each time. The patterns are familiar, the playbook is real, and the things that go wrong in integration go wrong in ways we’ve seen before.

The persistent voice at corporate.

The other half of the integration work happens at corporate, not in the acquired company. Integrations stall because the acquiring organization has ten other priorities competing for attention. Decisions don’t get made. Resources don’t get allocated. The integration drifts.

We are the persistent voice that keeps the integration on the agenda. We push. We follow up. We escalate when decisions aren’t being made. If being the person who calls again is what it takes to get the acquired company fully integrated, we make the call.

This is the part of the work that resists description because it doesn't have a deliverable. It’s posture, not output. But it’s frequently the difference between an integration that closes out in twelve months and one that’s still half-finished at three years.

What we bring that the deal team doesn’t.

Acquirers in this vertical typically arrive at close with strong financial and legal advisory teams. What the market rarely offers alongside those teams is operational integration expertise specific to the construction and distribution stack.

That’s the gap we fill. We’re the operational counterpart, the third leg of the deal team, focused entirely on what happens to the acquired business once the close is done. We’ve supported acquirers across the vertical, including conglomerates like Nortek and strategic acquirers like Ferguson with sustained acquisition programs.