Where does your M&A knowledge go?

A team can complete four deals and still start the fifth from a blank page. The scope gets rebuilt, the request list gets rewritten, and the questions that mattered last time are remembered by whoever happens to still be in the room.

It leaves in three ways: advisers take it with them, people move on, and the rest is scattered across inboxes and folders nobody opens again. What should be an institutional asset is treated as engagement waste.

Spreadsheets are excellent at holding numbers and terrible at holding evidence, ownership and time. They cannot tell you why a conclusion was reached, who confirmed it, or whether it survived into the integration plan. The trap is that they work well enough to never be replaced.

A repeatable operating model means the fifth deal is faster, cheaper and better judged than the first — because the scope, the request library and the lessons carry forward rather than being reassembled from memory.

What to capture, where it belongs, and how the next deal should reuse it. Covers the standing workstream taxonomy, a request library that improves each time, and the handful of decisions worth recording the reasoning behind.

The hand-off method: which findings become integration actions, who owns them, how they are prioritised, and how the outcome feeds back into how you scope the deal after this one.