Resources · · 8 min read
After the Acquisition: Stay Independent, Sell Together
On November 5, 2026, two companies announced acquisitions. Bechtle is buying Bespoke, a Manchester-based specialist in Microsoft AI, data analytics and Power Platform with 52 employees. Mews Partners is acquiring OPEO, a Paris-based industrial consultancy with 40 consultants and six partners. In late August, Accenture had acquired the Dutch SAP partner McCoy with more than 380 professionals.
Bespoke and OPEO will stay independent for now: Bespoke will initially operate as its own company within Bechtle UK, and its founders are staying on. OPEO keeps its brand. This is often the case in consulting acquisitions: the buyer is paying for client relationships and people, and neither should be lost on day one.
The purchase price only pays off, though, once both consultancies win work together that neither would have won alone. Independence makes that harder, because each side has its own profiles, its own career levels, its own framework agreements and its own results.
Four places where independence slows down joint proposals
Separate profiles: nobody can find the people
A tender asks for Power Platform experience in healthcare. The account manager knows the new team should have someone like that. But the profiles are Word files in the acquired firm’s template, where the skill is called “Power Apps and Power Automate.” Whether the person is free in March is tracked in a different plan. By the time this is sorted out by email, the submission deadline may have passed.
Separate career models: levels and day rates don’t match
What one consultancy calls a senior consultant, the other calls a manager, with a different day rate and different expectations of experience. If a proposal lists a mixed team, the client’s procurement team will notice at the latest. Besides shared skills, joint proposals therefore need a mapping of career levels and a shared rate card.
Same title, different level
Separate framework agreements: the acquired business is not on the client’s supplier list
Large clients buy consulting through framework agreements with approved suppliers. The acquired consultancy is often not on that list, even though it is now part of the group. Its people can then only join a project as subcontractors through the listed company. Clarify early with your legal team how such assignments work contractually, because joint projects can get stuck here even after the right people have been found.
Separate results: the earn-out slows down joint staffing
Often part of the purchase price depends on the acquired firm’s revenue or profit in the years after the deal. For its former managing directors, it then makes no sense to give up their best people to the buyer’s projects. If you want joint staffing, you need an internal transfer pricing model in which working on a sister company’s project does not hurt their own results. This rule should be in place before the first conflict about it arises.
Checklist
What you should be able to answer after closing
- Who in either company knows a specific technology, at what level, and which of them are free in the next eight weeks?
- Which career level on one side matches which level in the other, and at what day rate do you offer mixed teams?
- Which company is an approved supplier at which clients?
- Which project references does the new team bring, and may you name them in proposals?
- How is work on a sister company’s project charged internally?
A plan for the first 90 days
The plan tackles the four hurdles in the order in which they block joint proposals. First you need to see who can do what, and transfer pricing has to be in place. Then you need shared terms and levels, and only then does selling together pay off. The exact dates matter less than this order. Name one person responsible for the whole process, ideally from resource planning, with a fixed counterpart in the acquired firm.
Day 1 to 30
Make people visible
Import profiles, get approvals, settle transfer pricing
Day 31 to 60
A shared language
Core skills, career levels, rate card, CV template
Day 61 to 90
Sell together
First mixed team in a proposal, weekly meeting
By day 30: make people visible
Solves: separate profiles, separate results
- Import the new team’s existing résumés instead of having them rewritten. Employees then review their own profile and add what is missing.
- Involve data protection and, where they exist, the works councils of both companies. Skill and profile data are personal data, and without approval the project will stall later.
- Agree on internal transfer pricing for joint assignments before the first case comes up.
By day 60: a shared language
Solves: separate profiles, separate career models
- Agree on shared core skills, the usually 50 to 200 higher-level competencies your clients ask for and that you report on. The acquired firm’s strengths belong in them explicitly, or nobody will find them later. You do not need to align the thousands of specific skills below them. AI can create a first draft of the core skills from the company profile, for example our free competency model generator. Our competency model guide describes how to keep the model lean after that.
- Map career levels and agree on a shared rate card for mixed teams.
- Set one template for résumés in proposals, so the client cannot tell from two layouts that the team comes from two firms.
- Count the certifications of both companies. With vendors such as Microsoft, SAP or AWS, partner status depends in part on the number of certified professionals. Whether the acquired firm’s certifications can be counted is up to each vendor.
Core skills instead of matching terms
Your companyAcquisitionShared core skill
By day 90: sell together
Solves: separate framework agreements
- Deliberately staff the next suitable tender with people from both consultancies. A real case shows where terms, levels or contracts don’t fit yet.
- For your most important clients, decide which company submits the proposal.
- Set up a weekly meeting of sales and resource planning from both companies, working from one shared list of opportunities and availability.
Metrics
How to tell the integration is working
- Share of proposals that include people from both firms
- Time until a profile from the new team is available in the client’s template
- Utilization of the new team compared with the time before the acquisition
How decídalo helps
decídalo suggests core skills based on your company profile; you review and adopt them. You can also bring in the new firm’s employees from Microsoft 365 and upload their existing résumés. The AI identifies skills and experience from this data. It detects synonyms and typos, avoids duplicate skills and automatically maps every specific skill to the matching core skills. Employees review the assessments and can correct them.
Upload your proposal template once, and decídalo generates CVs for all consultants in that design, no matter which company they come from. The skill search also takes similar and related skills into account: anyone searching for SAP Finance will also find the colleague from the other consultancy whose profile says S/4HANA FI. It shows their availability right away, and in resource planning you build mixed teams.
Stay independent, sell together
You do not have to give up independence for this. If the acquired consultancy, like Bespoke or OPEO, continues as its own legal entity for now, decídalo reflects that: with its own employees, its own projects and invoices and its own managers who only see and plan their people. Both consultancies still share the skill catalog and search from day one. That way the new team stays independent where it should be and is visible for joint proposals right away.
Where to start
Whether an acquisition stays independent is a strategic decision. Whether both sides still sell together shows in the next suitable tender. Make it your first joint case and go through the checklist along the way. Every question you cannot answer is something to work on in the next 90 days.
If you would like to see how both consultancies’ profiles come together in decídalo, book a demo or try decídalo for free.