- People & Culture
- 10 Oct 2025
Culture After the Close: How to Build the Company You Actually Bought
When you acquire a business, you’re not just buying financials, contracts, or customers — you’re inheriting a culture. And whether you recognize it on day one or not, that culture will determine how fast (or how painfully) your value creation plan takes hold.
For Search and ETA CEOs, this is one of the most under-discussed parts of the first 90 days: you didn’t just buy a company — you bought a community of people with habits, loyalties, fears, and unwritten rules.
Step One: Observe Before You Overhaul
It’s natural to want to make changes quickly. But rushing to impose a new culture can backfire fast.
In the first weeks post-close, listen more than you lead. Sit in on team meetings. Ask people what they’re proud of — and what frustrates them. You’ll learn more from hallway conversations and recurring Slack threads than you will from the board deck.
What you’re looking for are the anchors and accelerants:
-
Anchors are the cultural habits that slow execution (e.g., silos, risk aversion, “that’s not my job” mindsets).
-
Accelerants are the traits that can fuel your growth plan (e.g., pride in product quality, strong customer empathy, willingness to learn).
Step Two: Translate Strategy into Shared Behavior
Most 100-day plans focus on operational levers — pricing, systems, talent. But value creation fails when the team doesn’t know how to behave under the new strategy.
If your goal is speed, what does that look like in daily routines?
If your goal is accountability, how does that change meetings, reporting, and ownership?
Culture isn’t what you say at all-hands — it’s what gets repeated when you’re not in the room.
In other words: strategy becomes real only when behavior changes.
Step Three: Keep the Old Story, Write the Next Chapter
When you acquire a company, you’re stepping into someone else’s story. People joined and stayed for reasons that made sense before you arrived. Ignoring that past erases their identity — but honoring it gives you credibility.
The best leaders find ways to say: “We’re proud of what’s been built. Now we’re taking it to the next level.”
It’s not a revolution; it’s a continuation.
Step Four: Align Culture with Value Creation
Culture shouldn’t just “feel good.” It should produce results.
Tie your new norms directly to outcomes investors care about:
-
Collaboration that drives faster cycle times
-
Accountability that improves reporting accuracy
-
Empowerment that reduces turnover or rework
Culture is a value creation lever — but only if you measure it the same way you do margin or retention.
Step Five: Bring in Experienced Operators Early
Culture change is leadership work — but it’s also operational work.
Experts in organizational design, communication, HR systems, and performance enablement can help translate intent into scalable systems.
At Five Experts, we see this pattern in every successful post-acquisition story: CEOs who intentionally invest in early culture design outperform those who try to retrofit it later. Culture is the connective tissue between strategy and execution — and it’s one of the few levers you can shape before the numbers catch up.
The takeaway:
You can’t copy-paste culture from one playbook to another. But if you treat it as a core value-creation lever — not a “soft” initiative — it becomes the foundation that turns your investment thesis into an operating reality.
