A synergy that stood on paper at the signing of the deal is not automatically still true by the next platform acquisition. Companies change, markets shift, and a synergy that was calculated three acquisitions ago often carries assumptions that no one has revisited. Testing whether a synergy is still achievable means looking at three things separately: the assumption, the owner, and the way you track whether it lands.
Behind every synergy amount sits an assumed mechanism: less overlap in procurement, shared overhead, cross-selling between customer bases. The amount can remain unchanged while the mechanism underneath it has been hollowed out, for instance because the supplier was acquired by a competitor, or because the customer base on which cross-selling was based had already been approached before the deal by another part of the group. If you want to know whether that applies to you, the first question is which assumption sits under your synergy amount and not whether the amount itself still checks out. An amount can be correct and still rest on an assumption that no longer holds.
A synergy attached to a team rather than to a name is, in practice, never revisited by anyone. In a buy-and-build with multiple platforms in integration at the same time, that is a real risk: the synergy was part of the original deal model, but the person who calculated the amount may no longer be the one responsible for execution. Before testing a synergy, it is therefore worthwhile establishing who owns a synergy at this moment, and whether that person is also the one who can confirm or refute the assumption. Testing without an owner produces a finding that no one acts on.
A synergy that is only substantiated with a percentage from a sector benchmark holds up less well at a second platform acquisition than a synergy built up from concrete items: which role is eliminated, which contract is merged, which system costs fall away. How you make that distinction, and why one substantiation survives a test while another does not, is described under how do you substantiate a synergy. In a buy-and-build with a growing number of platforms, this type of substantiation is not just nice to have, it is often the only thing that can still be checked once the original deal context has faded.
Testing achievability at a single point in time says little about achievability twelve months later. A synergy that looked achievable at Day 1 may have run into a dependency that no one foresaw by Day 100, or it may land sooner than planned because another part of the group had already done comparable work. A fixed way to review that periodically, with a simple classification into landing, at risk, or stopped, is explained under how do you track synergies with stoplights in a buy-and-build. This is not a reporting format meant to reassure management, it is a way to see in time which synergy needs attention before it is too late to still steer it.
The test itself can result in the finding that a synergy is no longer achievable, and that is not a failure of the test but the very point of the test. What follows differs: sometimes an amount is revised downward, sometimes the synergy disappears from the model, sometimes the underlying integration action turns out to still have value even without the original amount. For that judgment, and for the question of who decides on it in practice, there is what do you do with a synergy that does not land in a buy-and-build. Scrapping a synergy without that step is just as much an assumption as keeping a synergy without testing it.
Synergies are not separate from the reason the deal was done. A synergy that no longer looks achievable can point to a deal thesis that has itself shifted, and that is a different conversation than adjusting a single amount. What a deal thesis is and why it can disappear over the course of a buy-and-build without anyone having explicitly decided that, is covered on what is a deal thesis and why does it disappear. Anyone testing synergies without also looking at the thesis may be testing at the wrong level.
The three generators and the integration office of mergerintegration.net are meant to structure this testing: the synergy baseline links an amount to an assumption and an owner, and the tracking around it makes visible which synergy is still on course. The tool asks, for every synergy again, whether something should indeed be combined; it does not deliver an executed process and no proof that an approach has worked before. The tool is under construction, and anyone who wants to work with it can sign up for the waiting list.
A synergy centered on combining work usually also raises the question of who will do that work going forward and how much of it can be automated. That is a separate question, with a separate way of answering it: the work scan from FTE TO AI calculates, per task, which part of the work can be taken over by AI, independent of the synergy assumption itself, and can therefore provide clarity on the part of a synergy amount that rests on labor savings.
Vraag maar wat er op Day 1 moet staan, of wat integreren juist kapotmaakt.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.