Most agency acquisitions are won in the deal room and lost in the eighteen months after it.

This tells you, honestly, how ready you are to buy well: whether you are acquiring a business or a person, and whether you can make it worth more once it is yours.

I have sat on both sides of these deals. With my partners I have bought and sold, and supervised the years after completion, when the buyer finds out what they actually bought. Most acquisitions do not fail on price. They fail because the thing that made the firm worth buying, the relationships, the judgement, the people, turned out to live in one person the buyer could not keep, or a deep mysterious culture that is not well understood. Nobody had a plan for the day after. This is the diagnostic I run with acquirers before they commit. It will not value the target. It will tell you how ready you are to buy it well.

Who this is for: agency owners, holding companies and private equity teams weighing an acquisition, now or in the next year. If you are years from buying and simply curious, that is fine, but the questions assume you mean it. About four minutes. No login, no preamble.