The situation
Wunderdog had eight subsidiaries that needed to operate as one company, each with its own way of running People. At the same time we were expanding across Europe, and the culture had to travel with us.
Eight companies means eight versions of everything that touches a person. Eight ways of hiring, eight salary structures, eight ideas of what a promotion is and who gets one. None of them wrong on their own, all of them incompatible the moment someone moves between offices or two teams work the same account.
In a consultancy this is not a back-office problem. The product is the people. If an engineer in one subsidiary is on a different career path from an equivalent engineer in another, the company cannot staff a project across both without someone noticing they are being treated worse.
What I did
I opened two new offices, including Spain, taking us from one office to three and 200 people.
Then we acquired more companies, and I led the post-merger integration: eight subsidiaries and 2,000 people brought into one company, with People Ops rebuilt as one function instead of eight.
Rebuilding it as one function is the part that decides whether an integration holds. Eight People teams reporting into one structure is still eight companies with a shared org chart. One function means one set of levels, one promotion process, one way a manager is trained, applied everywhere, with the local exceptions written down deliberately rather than inherited by accident.
To give the new teams real leadership, I set up coaching and mentoring for engineers across all three offices, trained senior engineers to become people leads, and built promotion paths that did not exist before.
That last part is what an acquisition usually breaks. The people who were on a path to something in their old company arrive to find the path gone, and the good ones leave within the year. Building the paths before they noticed they were missing is cheaper than replacing the engineers who work it out.
The result
- A 2,000-person consultancy running as one company
- People Ops costs down 40%
- Revenue up 70%
- Spain brought in $2M in its first year after covering all its operating costs, and became the most profitable office
- Churn down 25%, 70% of promotions from inside, engineering delivery productivity up 40%
Why it worked
The two numbers that matter most are the churn and the internal promotions, and they are the same number seen from two sides. Seventy percent of promotions coming from inside means people could see a future without leaving, which is why a quarter fewer of them left.
That is also what produced the cost reduction. Forty percent out of People Ops was not achieved by cutting the function. It came from stopping the replacement hiring that eight disconnected companies generate on their own.
Spain worked because it was opened before the acquisitions, not after. By the time 2,000 people had to be integrated, there was already a working example of how this company sets up an office and how its culture behaves somewhere it did not start.
If an integration is coming
Decide what to protect before anyone starts flattening. Each company you are buying does something better than you do, and it is usually not in the deck. Find it and write it down while the people who built it are still there to ask.
Most integrations are run as a reporting exercise. The org chart merges, the spreadsheet gets tidy, and the thing that made each company worth buying quietly dies. The work is deciding what to protect before anyone flattens it.