In a buy-and-build, synergy figures stack up easily: purchasing leverage at platform level, shared back office, cross-sell between add-ons. Every figure looks convincing on a sheet. But a figure is not an assumption, and without an assumption nobody knows why the figure is what it is. The question that's often missing is simple: what needs to be true for this figure to actually land?
If a synergy is estimated at a saving of, say, a certain percentage on purchasing, then underneath that lies an assumption about volume bundling, about supplier willingness, about contract terms expiring at a moment that fits the integration plan. If one of those assumptions changes, the figure changes along with it, even if nobody has adjusted the figure itself. Whoever only tracks the figure misses the moment the assumption already started to wobble. How you substantiate whether a synergy rests on more than an estimate is therefore not a matter of precision after the fact, but of clarity beforehand: which facts, which dependencies, which sources underlie this number.
A synergy figure often comes from the deal team, substantiated in the investment memorandum. But who is responsible for realizing it during the integration is a different person, with a different agenda and a different kind of pressure. Without an explicit owner, a synergy falls between the cracks: the deal team has moved on to the next transaction, and the operational layer never accepted the figure as its own goal. Who owns a synergy is therefore not a formality for an org chart, it's the question that determines whether someone wakes up in the morning feeling that this figure is theirs.
In buy-and-build, almost every synergy is tied to an assumption about the deal thesis: why these platforms and these add-ons together are worth more than apart. That thesis gets sharply formulated during the deal phase and often quietly disappears during the integration, when attention shifts to systems, contracts, and people. What a deal thesis is and why it disappears touches exactly this synergy question: if the thesis is no longer sharp, the figure that leans on it is no longer sharp either, even though it still stands unchanged on the synergy baseline.
A synergy figure that's only checked at the end of a period only delivers news in hindsight. For a buy-and-build with multiple platforms and multiple add-ons, that's too late to still adjust. Tracking means seeing in the interim whether the underlying assumption still holds, not just whether the figure is still on the list. How you track synergies with traffic lights provides a framework for that which doesn't wait for the final number, but signals as soon as the assumption comes under pressure, so there's still time to respond before the figure itself falls away.
An assumption that no longer holds doesn't automatically mean the synergy must be scrapped. It means there's a choice to make: adjust, reformulate, or honestly acknowledge that this figure is no longer achievable. How you test whether a synergy is still achievable therefore shouldn't be a one-time exercise at the start, but a recurring question, precisely because the assumptions underneath a buy-and-build keep changing through successive add-ons. And when a synergy still fails to land despite adjustment, the question isn't whether someone has failed, but what you do with a synergy that doesn't land: let it go, redistribute it across other parts of the plan, or still hold onto it with a new timeline.
This page does not describe a track record or a completed process: it is a way to structure which assumption underlies a synergy figure, who owns it, and how it's tracked. Whoever wants to record this in the synergy baseline, the Day 1 plan, or the Day 100 plan can sign up for the waitlist; the tool is under construction.
Wherever a synergy leans on an assumption about capacity, back office, or shared support tasks, there's a follow-up question that isn't part of this tool but is part of FTE TO AI's work scan: it calculates per task which portion of the work can be taken over by AI, thereby making visible whether a synergy that leans on headcount reduction should actually rest on a different assumption.
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.