The acquisition planning tool that keeps the deal on its promise.

Acquisition planning covers everything a company does to buy another business and make the deal work: deciding why to acquire, finding and assessing targets, due diligence, agreeing the deal, and then integrating the two companies afterwards. That last part, post-merger integration, is where most of the work and most of the risk sits.

A good acquisition plan starts from the reason for the deal, often called the deal thesis: what the combined business will be able to do that neither could alone. More customers, a product you didn’t have, a team you couldn’t hire, a market you couldn’t reach. Every part of the plan, from the first 100 days to the systems migration, should serve that thesis. When it doesn’t, the integration turns into a long list of tasks and the reason for the deal gets lost.

An acquisition is one of the biggest bets a company makes, and one of the hardest to undo. It uses cash or equity that could have funded something else, takes up the leadership team’s time for months, and changes the lives of everyone in the business being bought. When integration goes well, the combined company moves faster than either did alone. When it doesn’t, you have two cultures, two sets of systems and a goodwill line on the balance sheet.

The CEO usually owns the deal, with a corporate development lead or COO running the process and finance leading diligence. After completion, an integration lead often takes over day to day, but the work belongs to almost every department in both companies: sales teams to combine, products to align, customers to reassure, systems to merge and people to keep.

The single biggest thing an acquiring leadership team can do is keep everyone pointed at the same reason for the deal. When both teams can see the goal, what’s in the way and who owns each move, integration decisions get made on purpose instead of by whoever shouts loudest. That clarity also matters for the people being acquired, who want to know what’s changing and why.

Give the acquisition its own workspace and write the deal thesis as the goal. Not “complete the integration”, but something like “Cross-sell our platform to 30% of the acquired customers within 12 months, keeping the acquired team’s key people”. Write why it matters and how you’ll know. That goal is what every integration decision gets checked against.

With AJ, work out what could stop the deal delivering. Before completion that might be gaps in diligence or an unclear plan for the first 100 days. After completion it’s usually things like “Acquired customers don’t know what the deal means for them”, “The two sales teams sell against each other” or “Key engineers haven’t been told what their role will be”. AJ asks the questions an experienced integration lead would, and helps you put the constraints in order. Keep the detailed integration checklist in your project tool; Clearahead tracks the constraints that checklist is meant to clear.

Bring people from both companies into the workspace with the right roles. Owners update AJ in a sentence, and AJ keeps the facts as evidence, so you build a record of what was decided and why. Every Monday, This week from AJ gives both leadership teams the same view of progress and the calls that need them. Before a deal is public, run the planning in a separate organisation for the deal team. One login can belong to several, so nobody needs a second account, and the integration workspace can start in the main organisation once the deal is announced.

An acquisition always runs next to the day job. The acquiring company still has to hit its revenue goal, and the acquired business has customers to keep. Often the deal is part of a bigger plan to scale the company or enter a new market, and sometimes it’s paired with a push on margins to make the combined numbers work.

In Clearahead the integration gets its own workspace alongside the company’s other goals, up to 10 on the Clearahead plan. People and billing are shared, so a sales director can own moves in the integration and the revenue workspace and see both in My work. The leadership team can see where integration work is pulling people away from the core business, and make that trade-off deliberately.

Advisers often work across several deals. One Clearahead login can belong to several organisations, so a corporate development adviser can follow each client’s integration without separate accounts. See Clearahead for advisers.