M&A is now the top-ranked PE value creation lever for 2026

Operators and investors,

In the course of 12 months, M&A went from the lever private equity ranked last to the one it ranks first (FTI's 2026 Private Equity Value Creation Index, a survey of 555 senior PE leaders across 14 countries).

The share of respondents naming M&A their top value generator climbed from 7% to 24% year over year. That is the largest single move anywhere in the study, and it points to where conviction is heading into the next deal cycle.

M&A is now approached differently - and performing better

The decision to buy has never been the hard part. I have sat through enough integration reviews to know that the deal model and the integration plan are almost always built by different people, on different timelines, with different incentives. The model is finished before close. The integration is handed to operators who were never in the deal room, and who inherit a synergy number they did not set and a deadline nobody forecasted and owned.

The deeper finding in the data is that M&A is now being underwritten on synergies that have not happened yet. Only 25% of firms report M&A results within 12 months, and just 35% describe their integration as efficient or very efficient, the lowest score of any lever in the survey. The lever sponsors now rank first is also the one they execute worst.

And the shift from financial engineering to GTM and standard business operating principles has been underway for the last 3 years. But what differentiates private equity from a standard business is… capital. And “buy vs. build” is a unique lever where PEs have an unfair advantage.

M&A has moved from a transaction into an operating discipline. The firms that win on it have built integration into a repeatable capability with a clear owner, one that carries from each deal into the next instead of being rebuilt every time. For a mid-market platform running add-ons, that capability decides whether the next acquisition compounds the multiple or drains it.

This issue covers 4 things:

• Why M&A jumped from last to first in 12 months

• The execution gap behind the ranking

• Integration capability separates the high performers

• What this means for a mid-market platform

1. Why M&A jumped from last to first in 12 months

A year ago, M&A sat at the bottom of the value creation levers, widely seen as slow to deliver and hard to execute. In the 2026 read it sits at the top, and 51% of respondents say their acquisitions exceeded the original business case, among the highest rates of any lever. The reversal is broad enough to reflect a real change in strategy.

The shift has a structural cause. With entry multiples compressed and debt more expensive, the financial routes that used to carry returns have narrowed. Organic growth is harder to find in a slower economy, which pushes sponsors toward inorganic growth as one of the few remaining ways to reach the returns their LPs expect. BDO's 2026 private equity outlook lands in the same place, calling buy-and-build fundamental precisely where organic growth is constrained.

That changes what the entry multiple is paying for. When a platform is acquired partly on the promise of consolidation and cross-sell, the price already reflects synergies that have not been delivered. The model books them on a schedule. The business then has to produce them against a harder operating reality, with a management team that is also running the day job. The distance between booked synergies and realized ones is where the return is won or lost, and in most portfolios nobody measures it closely until the exit forces the question.

2. The execution gap behind the ranking

The same survey that puts M&A first also names it the slowest lever to pay off. Only a quarter of firms see results inside 12 months, and barely a third rate their integration as efficient. M&A is at once the most important lever and the worst executed, and that pairing is the real signal in this year's data.

Integration is difficult because there are many things happening at once:

• The alignment of both companies' operating models

• Go-to-market motions

• Finance stacks

• Cultures

• Running on a calendar without stakeholder buy-in

Each of those workstreams needs an owner, a sequence, and a deadline. A systems integration alone can take 2 to 3 quarters and usually lands on a finance and IT team that is already at capacity. Cross-sell depends on retraining both sales forces and merging both pipelines, which rarely produces revenue inside the first year. When no single person owns the whole program with the authority to clear obstacles, each workstream slips on its own.

The failure mode is predictable. The cross-sell that justified part of the price arrives 12 to 18 months late, or never. Cost synergies that looked clean on the model stall on systems that will not reconcile, and on contracts and headcount that take longer to rationalize than the plan assumed.

The financial effect is direct. Synergies that slip compress the IRR the deal was underwritten on, because value that lands in year 2 is worth less than value the model placed in year 1. An under-integrated platform also carries a messier set of numbers into its own sale, and a buyer prices that mess in as risk. The lever meant to lift the exit multiple ends up weighing on it.

3. Integration capability separates the high performers

The study isolates a high-performing group, roughly 40% of respondents, defined as firms that outperformed their expected returns over the past 12 months. The gap shows up most sharply in M&A, where 46% of high performers rate their integration as smooth against 29% of everyone else. The advantage sits in post-close delivery, and it has little to do with how many deals they sign.

What those firms share is a capability they built deliberately.

1. They run a defined 100-day plan from day one.

2. They appoint a named integration owner who sits apart from the operating CEO, so the base business keeps running while integration gets full-time attention.

3. They track realized synergies against the model every month, which surfaces a slipping workstream in weeks instead of at the next board meeting.

4. And they keep a playbook that improves with each deal, so the second integration is faster and cleaner than the first.

Forvis Mazars' 2026 read makes the same point, treating integration speed in buy-and-build as a pivotal driver of returns.

This is the part that does not transfer by accident. A firm that exited one buy-and-build well may have done it on the strength of a single management team and favorable timing, with no repeatable capability underneath. The next platform then starts from zero. The firms in the top 40% turned integration into an institutional asset, and that is what lets them keep paying for synergies and actually banking them across a fund.

4. What this means for a mid-market platform

If you own or run a platform in the $50M to $250M range, the survey is pointing at something specific. The binding constraint on your next add-on is usually whether your platform can absorb it. Finding a target is rarely the hard part. The target gets most of the diligence attention while the readiness of the acquirer gets very little, and that is backward, given where the value actually leaks.

Before the next acquisition, the questions that matter are operational.

1. Does the platform have a finance function that can consolidate a new entity within a few weeks?

2. Is there a RevOps and go-to-market model the acquired revenue can move onto without a 6-month rebuild?

3. Is there a single person with the authority and the bandwidth to own integration end to end?

When the honest answer is no, the deal is buying a problem at a premium and calling it growth.

The math runs both ways. A platform that integrates well compounds: each add-on bought at a lower multiple and folded cleanly into the whole lifts the blended enterprise value, and that arbitrage is the engine the model runs on. A platform that integrates badly accumulates dis-synergies, orphaned systems, and a confused customer base, and it exits flat or at a discount. The deal thesis can be identical in both cases. The operating capability is the variable that decides which outcome you get.

This week, run a 60-minute integration-readiness review with your CFO, your head of RevOps, and whoever would own the next integration. Three questions to think about:

1. If we signed an add-on next month, who owns the integration full-time, and what comes off their plate to make room for it.

2. How many weeks would it take to move the acquired company onto our financial and go-to-market systems, and what specifically breaks first.

3. For our most recent acquisition, what share of the modeled synergies have we actually realized, and do we have a tracker that would tell us.

Score each one red, yellow, or green; any red is why the next add-on will come in under the model.

Mario

🏗️ PE firms spent $87B on portfolio upgrades in 2023, mostly on consultants who diagnosed problems and left. Too many decks land in companies that had nobody in the room when decisions were made. Embedded technical units cost less than 6 months of Big Four and stay through implementation - some of ours through 2 exits and 5-10 year retainers.

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Working with me

🌐 Scaling $30M - $100M+ mid-market companies with value creation through RevOps, data engineering, and WordPress. DevriX provides full RevOps consulting + delivery with GTM enablement for PE-backed portfolio companies, traditional tech, healthcare, finance, and professional service businesses pacing toward revenue growth initiatives. Our standard retainers between $10K and $60K include revenue lifecycle services for marketing and sales leaders, FP&A for financial teams, pipeline enrichment through websites and dozens of lead sources, automations and delivery integrations, CRO and ongoing testing, product delivery and platform integration solutions, and more through our consulting solutions.

🚀 1:1 Advisory retainers. At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($3,500/mo) for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($997/mo) for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups. My fractional executive plan is also available here.

📈 Building US LLCs from Europe. I help European and Asian founders scale faster through doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Also suitable for US citizens (given their bookkeeping solution), but in very high demand across Europe.

📊 Post-Merger Integration. We take on M&A initiatives with Flippa. Working closely on PMI retainers for PE companies and fast-growing startups integrating new companies within their portfolios, enabling data pipelines, and securing more deals through my personal network.