Amtivo, the certification group, had made twelve acquisitions between its founding in 2017 and July 2022, when it agreed a change of owner. In September 2024 it said it had completed nine acquisitions since 2022, and a year later it reported more than 30,000 clients. Its careers page now advertises a newly created role: Chief Integration and Transformation Officer, reporting to the chief executive, for a group it describes as in “a classic buy-and-build phase” across the UK, the US, Ireland and Italy.
Someone will have done that work before the title existed, most likely the chief executive and the finance team alongside their day jobs. The new seat is a dedicated one, created after a dozen or more acquisitions rather than before them. That sequence is common. In our view, the person who integrates the add-ons holds a different seat from the platform chief executive, and a sponsor should name that seat at the second add-on rather than after the twelfth.
Add-ons are at a decade high, and they land on platforms already deep into a programme
Add-ons made up 57.7% of European private equity deals in 2026 to the end of June, a decade high, according to PitchBook’s European PE Breakdown published in July. Bain’s 2024 Global Private Equity Report found that close to half of add-on deals were at least the platform’s fourth acquisition, against 21% in 2003. More sponsors, it said, were “hustling to try to complete buy-and-build strategies than are trying to launch new ones”.
The workload also arrives early. Bansraj, Smit and Volosovych studied 684 buy-and-build strategies with platforms in seven European countries and 1,401 follow-on acquisitions. Most strategies made one or two follow-ons, and most follow-ons came in the first three years after the platform was bought. A chief executive hired to deliver the platform’s plan meets the integration work in the same years as the plan itself.
The return is in the integration, and it thins as the deals stack up
Bain looked at 44 buy-and-build deals made between 2010 and 2019. Those that depended on multiple arbitrage alone returned an average of 1.4 times invested capital. Those with a strategic case driving faster organic growth or a real margin gain returned 2.2 times. Success, Bain concluded, “ultimately relies on M&A expertise, thoughtful integration”.
An older study by BCG and HHL Leipzig, of 121 exited deals, nine in ten of them European, points the same way. Deals with one or two add-ons returned an average IRR of 35.5%, against 23.1% for standalone deals and 19.9% for deals with more than two. Firms with operating experience made 42.8% from add-on deals; firms without it made 21.2%.
On those figures, buy-and-build pays on the first add-ons, and the premium fades once the count passes two. McKinsey describes what goes wrong: “mediocre integrations turn deals that might have been transformative into slow-growing add-ons”.
An integration needs an owner before it starts
PwC’s 2026 integration survey, of 530 executives and dealmakers, found that only about one acquirer in three fully achieves its deal thesis. The successful ones assign “an owner, timeline, and funding to every value initiative before integration begins”, at nearly twice the rate of acquirers with limited success: 59% against 28%. Only 16% of respondents assessed leadership and talent before signing.
By the second deal, the platform chief executive is usually the wrong owner. The same person is delivering the budget, running the lender relationship and producing the board pack. Integration is a second job with its own calendar, and it is easiest to treat as a sideline at the point the evidence says it pays most.
The groups that name the seat tend to do it late
PTSG, the private equity-backed compliance services group, gave integration its own role in December 2025, appointing Faye Brown as Group Integration Co-ordinator to lead the rollout of integration, fit acquisitions to the group’s operating model and answer for milestones and benefits. Its Chief Performance Officer, Alison Chard, described the task as “integrating them with precision so that value is delivered in full and on time.”
In May, AROBS, the Romanian software group listed in Bucharest, appointed a Group Chief Transformation and Integration Officer after four transactions in 2025 and early 2026. Its chairman and chief executive, Voicu Oprean, said that “the efficient integration of teams, processes, and capabilities across the Group has become essential”.
Amtivo, PTSG and AROBS each named the seat once the acquisitions had accumulated. In our view each named it a few deals late.
What naming the seat costs
It means a senior salary before the workload fully justifies it, and a hire made for an integration model that may not yet be settled. A dedicated integrator can become a second centre of power beside the chief executive. Some sponsors will say their own operating team does this job, and BCG’s return gap is about the sponsor’s operating experience rather than a platform hire. That holds while an operating partner can give each add-on its first hundred days. In our view it stops holding when several platforms in one portfolio are buying in the same year. PwC’s own caution applies too: the chief executive and the executive team “still own the choices and the trade-offs”, and an integration office is only part of that system.
The evidence has a limit. No study we have found compares when an integration lead was appointed with how the platform performed, so the timing is our judgement, built on where the return sits and when the deals arrive.
A sponsor with an add-on in the pipeline can run this test in an afternoon. Before signing the next add-on, write down who will run its first hundred days: the platform chief executive, the acquired founder, the sponsor’s operating team or a named hire. If the answer is the chief executive, and this is the second deal, price the seat now.
HMN Capital. Specialist Executive Search & Interim Management for Private Capital.
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