From acquisition ambition to scalable integration
How BKL is building a repeatable integration capability while protecting what made each acquired business successful
Recent acquisitions included RBS Chartered Accountants and Dales Evans, two established professional services businesses with distinctive operating models, client relationships and cultures. Dales Evans, for example, had built a strong position in the music, media and entertainment industry.
While each acquisition strengthened BKL's service offering, geographic reach and specialist capabilities, successful outcomes depended not only on completing transactions, but on integrating acquired businesses in a way that protected client relationships, retained talent and created long-term value.
As acquisition activity accelerated, BKL evolved from completing individual transactions to building an institutional, repeatable integration capability that could support both current and future acquisitions, while protecting the client relationships, people and entrepreneurial characteristics that had made those businesses attractive in the first place.
BKL appointed EQUS Advisory to lead Integration Management Office (IMO) activities across the acquisition portfolio and establish a structured integration capability.
This was never going to be a conventional corporate integration.
Integrating mid-sized, family-owned, founder and partner-led professional services firms requires a different playbook.
Much of their value sits in trusted client relationships, reputation, specialist expertise and the people who have built those relationships over many years.
Protecting what BKL had acquired
Protect what made the acquired business successful while creating the foundations it needed to thrive within BKL.
The integration approach started with a simple principle:
BKL introduced the governance, controls, technology and capabilities required to operate as part of a larger group, while protecting the entrepreneurial culture, client relationships and specialist identity it had acquired. Integration planning explicitly identified these characteristics as things the integration must not break.
“The challenge wasn't simply bringing businesses onto BKL systems. We were acquiring successful firms with their own identity, relationships and ways of working. Getting integration right meant understanding what should change, but equally importantly what shouldn't.”
- James Addison, COO, BKL
With multiple acquisitions at different stages of integration, BKL needed more than individual project plans.
A portfolio-level integration model connected executive decision-making with cross-functional delivery across People, Finance, Technology, Operations, Compliance, CRM, Marketing and wider value creation.
The governance model separated strategic direction, integration orchestration and delivery, giving leadership visibility while enabling workstreams to execute.
From individual integrations to a scalable institutional capability
RBS and Dales Evans demonstrated why repeatability does not mean replicating exactly the same integration.
The businesses were materially different in their processes and ways of working. While one had a relatively flat organisation, the other used a more layered preparation and review process.
The integration framework therefore provided repeatable principles, governance and decision disciplines.
The framework was repeatable. The answer was not.
Integration plans responded to the characteristics of each business rather than forcing both through an identical corporate template.
Balancing standardisation with judgement
“What mattered to us was knowing that integration wouldn't disrupt the business we had spent years building. Ruchi created an open dialogue around the changes, giving us visibility of what was coming, why it was needed and where our input mattered. That gave us confidence that integration could move forward without losing sight of our clients or how the business actually worked.”
- Ketan Shah, Partner, RBS
One principle became particularly important to us: Pace must not outrun clarity. Taking people along the integration journey and ensuring adequate user readiness ahead of any significant change were non-negotiables. This philosophy materially affected how we executed the integration.
Changes were clearly explained to the incoming team and their buy-in sought before implementation. Rather than imposing a pre-determined end state, BKL and the incoming businesses jointly developed integration roadmaps. Any significant system, process and organisational changes were sequenced around business readiness instead of chasing arbitrary integration deadlines.
Pace must not outrun clarity
The programme therefore sought to avoid one of the most common integration mistakes:
Allowing the acquiring organisation's processes to become more important than the business it had acquired.
The programme increasingly connected integration execution with the original investment rationale.
For both RBS and Dales Evans, this meant protecting their specialist market positions and client relationships while progressively opening access to BKL's broader capabilities. The value creation plan identified opportunities around cross-selling, operational improvement and systems modernisation.
Integration designed around value, not simply completion
As BKL continues to pursue acquisition-led growth, that capability provides a foundation for integrating future businesses with greater confidence and consistency, without allowing integration to overwhelm the businesses BKL is seeking to acquire.
“Acquisition is an important part of how BKL is growing, but the real test is what happens afterwards. We want businesses to gain the capability and scale of BKL without losing the relationships, entrepreneurialism and specialist expertise that made them successful.
Ruchi helped translate that ambition into a practical integration approach, bringing structure and clarity while keeping the acquired businesses engaged in shaping the journey.”
- Lee Brook, CEO, BKL
Perhaps the most important outcome was not any individual system migration or workstream milestone. It was the creation of institutional knowledge.
Rather than treating each acquisition as a blank sheet of paper, lessons from RBS were progressively incorporated into Dales Evans and into repeatable processes for future acquisitions.
The model continues to mature through experience: common governance, repeatable decision processes, and integration planning disciplines around what should be standardised and what should remain flexible.
Building the foundations for the next acquisition
Across systems, people, processes, brand and organisational design, the underlying question remained:
Does this change protect and ultimately enhance the value BKL acquired?
Integration therefore became the bridge between the deal thesis and the operating reality.
EQUS Advisory Limited
Operational M&A and Value Creations Specialists
+44(0) 7512040928
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