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M&A is an alignment problem, not a pricing problem.

Greg Moran · November 2026 · 5 min read

I have done more than a dozen acquisitions across Europe and Latin America. At one company we were a $2M ARR startup when we bought a business four times our size. Price got those deals done. Alignment decided whether they worked.

What you are actually buying

Founders treat M&A like a pricing problem because price is the part you can model. Multiples, earnouts, working capital adjustments. All of it fits in a spreadsheet, so that is where the attention goes.

But what you are buying is people. My CFO came in through an acquisition. So did our head of product. The spreadsheet called them “assumed headcount costs.” They turned out to be the deal.

And people leave when they do not believe in where you are going. I have had an entire founding team walk out in one day. No clause in the purchase agreement gets that back. The price was right. The alignment was not, and the alignment was the asset.

Where the real cost hides

Integration is the real time and money cost, and it barely shows up in diligence. I have watched tech teams spend years attempting to merge codebases that would have been faster to rebuild from day one. Every one of those years was paid for in roadmap, morale, and market position, none of which appeared in the model that priced the deal.

Culture is the same. It cannot be handed down from the top, and it cannot be imposed by the acquirer. Both companies have to build it together, which only happens if both sides wanted the same company in the first place.

The one question

Before you close, ask this: can both leadership teams describe the same company three years from now?

Not similar companies. The same one. Same customer, same product center of gravity, same answer to who runs what. If they cannot, you are buying an expensive problem. Solve it before you close, or walk away.

How to test alignment before you sign

1. Write the three-year description together. One page, both leadership teams in the room, before the final price is set. Where the pens stop moving is where the deal breaks later.
2. Interview below the founder line. The founder is selling and will say what closes. The level below will tell you what the company actually believes, if you ask before the announcement locks everyone into a script.
3. Map who holds the customer relationships. If the answer is three people, your retention plan for those three people is the deal. Price it that way.
4. Decide the integration spine up front. Whose codebase survives, whose process wins, who reports to whom on day one. Deferring those calls to “post-close planning” means fighting about them with the clock running and the best people interviewing elsewhere.

Alignment over price

None of this means price does not matter. Overpay badly enough and no amount of alignment saves you. But in my experience the deals that failed did not fail on price. They failed because two leadership teams were describing two different companies and nobody made them compare notes until the ink was dry.

Get aligned, then negotiate. Alignment > price.