When you acquire a shop, a lot of things get reviewed before close. The book of business, the equipment, the team, whether the techs are going to stay. The comp plan usually makes it in too because you want to know what you're walking into.
What almost never gets the same attention is the process sitting behind it.
Every shop runs payroll the way it evolved, not the way someone designed it. There's a spreadsheet that grew over time, a person who knows all the quirks, and rules that are half documented and half institutional knowledge. When you close the deal, you inherit all of that.
Here are the financial practices worth getting right before and after close.
Document the comp plan during due diligence, not after. Every tier, every split, every exception. Don't rely on the seller to walk you through it post-close. Get it in writing while you still have leverage.
Audit the last three to six months of payroll. Look for patterns, overrides, and anything that was handled manually outside the system. Those are the gaps that become your problem on day one.
Run a shadow payroll before you go live. One full cycle in parallel with whatever they were doing before. If the numbers don't match, you want to find out before the money moves.
Identify the single point of failure. Who runs payroll? What happens if they leave the week after close? If the answer is "we'd be in trouble," that's the process you need to replace first.
Don't change the comp plan in the first 90 days. Retention risk is highest right after an acquisition. Your new techs are watching. Stability in their paycheck buys you time to earn their trust before you make changes.
The operators growing through acquisition we work with aren't standardizing what they pay across every location. They're standardizing how payroll gets calculated so every shop runs on the same infrastructure regardless of what the plan looks like.
Keep the plan. Replace the process that runs it.
If you want to learn more about how we can make the acquisition process smoother, book time below.
Don