What 25 Acquisitions Taught Me About Operational Consistency

This article is part of a sponsored series by Fulcrum.

Over the course of my career I have been involved in more than 25 agency acquisitions, first as VP of Agency Operations at a large independent brokerage working through an aggressive growth period, and more recently through my work helping brokerages redesign the operational infrastructure that integrations tend to expose. Across all of those transactions, the financial due diligence varied. The attention to operational readiness varied even more.

What stayed consistent were the patterns. The agencies that integrated smoothly shared certain characteristics, and after enough repetitions those characteristics become fairly predictable. I think they are worth sharing with anyone building or considering an acquisition-led growth strategy right now, when consolidation across the independent brokerage market is as active as it has been in years.

Pattern One: The Best Acquirees Had Already Standardized

The agencies that were easiest to integrate were rarely the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They were the ones with the most consistent processes. Every account manager handled renewals the same way. Policy data was stored in the same place, in the same format, across the book. New account onboarding followed a defined sequence rather than varying by producer or office location.

That consistency made everything that came next faster and more efficient. Training the team on new systems was easier because the underlying process was already clear. Reporting on the combined book was cleaner because the data had been maintained to a common standard. And when something needed to be reviewed or reconstructed, the record was there.

Operational consistency is also what makes an agency easier to value accurately. When workflows vary widely across the team, the true cost of running the business is harder to assess. Acquirers who looked carefully at process discipline alongside financial metrics consistently found fewer surprises after the deal closed.

Pattern Two: Key-Person Risk Shows Up Fast

In almost every integration I worked through, there was at least one person whose departure would have been genuinely disruptive. Sometimes it was a senior account manager who carried the relationships on the largest accounts. Sometimes it was an office manager who had been running the operational infrastructure out of personal habit and institutional memory rather than documented process.

Acquisitions create uncertainty, and experienced people sometimes leave before the transition is complete. When the knowledge that kept the operation running lived in that person’s memory rather than in the system, the team felt the gap immediately. Accounts that had been running smoothly required more active management. Questions that would have had clear answers in a well-documented operation required a search through inboxes and shared drives.

The agencies that handled this well had reduced their key-person dependency before the deal, intentionally or otherwise, by building processes that any trained team member could follow. The knowledge lived in the workflow, and the workflow stayed when the person left.

Pattern Three: Two Workflows Running in Parallel Is a Temporary State That Tends to Persist

The integration period is when operational risk is highest, and the reason is straightforward. Two organizations with two different ways of doing things are now operating under one roof, and the work of aligning them takes longer than most integration timelines assume.

What I saw repeatedly was that parallel workflows, intended as a short-term bridge, had a way of becoming permanent. The acquiring firm had its process. The acquired firm had its process. Both teams were busy, the integration project competed with the actual work of running the business, and the standardization effort got deferred. Six months later, the book had grown but the two operating models were still running side by side.

The integrations that avoided this treated workflow alignment as a defined workstream with an owner and a timeline, starting before close rather than after. They made decisions about which processes would become the standard early, communicated them clearly, and built accountability for adoption into the transition plan.

Pattern Four: Operational Readiness on the Acquiring Side Matters as Much as the Target

It is easy to focus entirely on the operational condition of the agency being acquired. The acquiring firm’s infrastructure matters just as much. A brokerage absorbing its fifth or tenth agency while still running on informal processes and tribal knowledge is compounding its own operational exposure with each transaction.

The firms that grew through acquisition while maintaining operational discipline had built a replicable model before they started acquiring. Standardized onboarding, documented workflows, clear handoff protocols, consistent data practices. Each new agency came into a defined structure, and that structure absorbed the variation the acquired firm brought in.

For brokerages building toward acquisition-led growth, that is the investment worth making first. The deal flow will come. The question is whether the operation is ready to absorb what comes with it.

Kathryn Lerch is Insurance Solutions Engineer at Fulcrum, an AI-powered workflow platform built for insurance brokerages. She brings 18 years of experience redesigning service workflows, leading technology implementations, and scaling operations across multi-location agencies, including overseeing operations through more than 25 acquisitions.

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions