If you acquired a business tomorrow, who would lead the people integration?

Every acquisition has a deal team. Corporate finance runs the model. Legal runs the contracts. There are more project managers than anyone knows what to do with. Everyone has a lane, a process, and a deadline.

The people workstream? That gets handed to someone in HR who has never done it before, alongside their day job, with a brief that amounts to “sort the people stuff out.” Sometimes it does not get handed to anyone at all.

This is the most expensive mistake in mid-market M&A and it happens in almost every deal.

The CEO assumes that once the ink is dry, the acquired workforce comes onto their terms. Their contracts, their benefits, their policies, their way of doing things. The deal model assumes it. The board assumes it.

It is not that simple. And most deal teams do not find out until it is too late and too expensive to fix.

The workforce you just acquired has legal protections that most deal teams have never properly understood. The terms transfer with the people. You cannot change them because you want to. You cannot align them because it is tidier. Try, and you are looking at void changes, tribunal claims, and the very people you paid millions to acquire walking out of the door.

You would not complete a deal without financial due diligence. Why would you complete one without someone who has done this before?

If you are planning an acquisition and you cannot name the person who will lead the people integration, you are not ready to do the deal.