Half the key people you just acquired will be gone within a year.

47% of key employees leave in the first year after a transaction. 75% are gone within three. You paid for the earnings, the customer relationships and the operating knowledge. Most of that walks on two legs.

And 40% of acquirers do not track post-close retention at all, so this is not a risk most buyers are managing badly. It is a risk most buyers never see. They find out from the org chart eighteen months later, by which time it reads as ordinary turnover rather than the thing that took the deal off its numbers.

Talk to us about a deal

We work on the buy side. Diligence before the deal, day-one readiness at close, and the integration afterwards. Every engagement is scoped to the transaction, so there is no price on this page and there is no template quote. We look at the deal first.

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47%

Of key employees leave within a year of the transaction. 75% within three.

40%

Of acquirers never track post-close retention. KPMG calls HR diligence “often underestimated, or ignored completely.”

WTW retention study · KPMG

80%

Of lower-middle-market deals are buy-and-build add-ons. High frequency, small cheques.

PitchBook, via Cherry Bekaert

3.1

Deals per financial buyer last year. Nearly half of add-ons are a platform’s fourth or later.

Bain PE Report 2026

Your strategy is not the problem.

Buy-and-build beats standalone buyouts on average, and it beats them hardest in the lower middle market. Nobody needs to be talked out of it.

But research from BCG with HHL Leipzig found returns fall to 19.9% IRR once a platform passes two add-ons, down from 35.5% at one or two, and below the 23.1% a standalone buyout returns. Revenue keeps compounding while returns do not.

That is a conversion failure, not a growth failure. The deals keep working on paper and stop working in practice, and the most common reason is that the third integration is run by the same people, in the same spare hours, as the first.

Half of all add-ons today are a platform’s fourth or later. If you are past the second, this is the window.

Single study — BCG / HHL Leipzig. Cited by name because it is one source, not a consensus.

Six independent firms out of 162 sell HR M&A diligence. The rest of the market is Bain, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, Mercer, Aon, WTW and the national accounting firms — who are not built for a $30M add-on and do not price for one. We measured that ourselves, across 162 real consultancies and 216 service pages.

What we do.

Entry · fixed scope

Post-Close People Audit

Retention exposure on named key people. Culture and compensation collision points. Compliance you inherited with the deal. And the day-one items nobody has been given.

It sells against nothing rather than against a competitor, because 40% of acquirers are not doing it at all. Its output scopes whatever comes next.

Core · per deal

Integration Execution

Day-one readiness, the integration playbook, a retention plan for named people, compensation and benefits harmonisation, org and reporting-line design.

Two ways to run it, and we decide together which you want: advisory, where the value is judgment and a risk read, or project-managed, where we run the plan, the tracker, the RACI and the status packs.

Retained · on deal cadence

Standing Integration Partner

A platform doing three add-ons a year buys the capability once, not three times. The playbook stops being rebuilt from memory on every deal.

This is where integration stops being a scramble and starts being something your operating model already knows how to do.

Lianne Rubbo

CHRO / Director of HR Services · HR Sources Pro

Twenty-five years running HR and operations for mid-market companies, including workforce and integration engagements where the people question was the deal question. She has sat on both sides of a transition, and she stays on the project through implementation rather than handing you a report and a bill.

Every engagement is scoped to the transaction. Talk to us about the deal and we will tell you what it needs, including when the answer is that it does not need us.

The people risk is the one nobody put a number on.

Tell us about the deal. We will tell you what the exposure looks like, what day one actually requires, and what it takes to hold the people side together.

Talk to us about a deal

Sources. Retention figures are EY and the WTW M&A retention study; the tracking gap and the quoted characterisation of HR diligence are KPMG’s own material. Deal-mix figures are PitchBook via Cherry Bekaert; deal cadence is the Bain Private Equity Report 2026. The IRR-by-add-on figures are a single BCG / HHL Leipzig study and are attributed as such. The competitive count is HRSP’s own measurement of 162 consultancies across 216 service pages. Nothing here is a prediction of your outcome, and none of it is legal or tax advice.