How much management time does an acquisition need?

For many owners thinking about an acquisition, the first worry is not the price. It is time. You already run a business. Who runs it while you are buying another one?

It is a fair worry, and the honest answer is that an acquisition does need real management time. But it does not need all of your time, all of the time. The trick is to understand where the effort falls, what only you can do, and what someone else can do for you.

Time versus duration

Two different things often get mixed up.

Duration is the calendar time from starting a search to completing a deal. That can be long. Dealsuite's survey of UK and Irish M&A advisers found that 80% of the adviser-led mid-market sale processes they reported on completed within 12 months. That figure only covers sales that completed, and it does not include the time a buyer spends finding the business in the first place. As one example from Michael Ferguson's earlier career, an off-market acquisition of a £6m wealth management business took seven months from start to completion (see our case studies). For more on calendar time, see how long a UK acquisition takes.

Management time is the hours you and your team actually spend. It is not spread evenly across the calendar. Long stretches need little from you while research, approaches or legal drafting go on in the background. Then a few weeks need a lot.

Thinking in peaks rather than averages is more useful, because the peaks are what collide with the day job.

Who does what at each stage?

This is an illustrative model, not a fixed rule. The split will depend on your team and the advisers you use.

When does the workload peak?

In our experience, five points call for the most from the owner and senior team.

1. Deciding what to buy. This needs thinking time rather than many hours, but it needs your best thinking. Clear criteria save time at every later stage because they make it easier to say no quickly. See what an acquisition thesis is.

2. Meeting owners. A seller wants to meet the person who will look after the business they built. You cannot delegate that relationship, and early meetings often have to fit the seller's diary rather than yours.

3. Agreeing the price and main terms. Offers and heads of terms (agreeing the price and main terms in writing) need quick, clear decisions. Slow responses at this stage can cost you the deal or the seller's confidence.

4. Due diligence. This is usually the heaviest period for the finance team. Questions come back from accountants and lawyers, issues need a decision, and funding has to be lined up. If something unexpected turns up, it can also become the heaviest period for you.

5. Preparing to bring the businesses together. The weeks before completion are when people, customers and systems plans are finalised. If an earn-out (paying part of the price later if the business delivers) is involved, the relationship with the seller also carries on after completion. The CMS European M&A Study 2026 found that 58% of earn-outs on the deals it advised on ran for 12 to 36 months, so plan for that ongoing involvement. See the integration guide.

How do you protect the day job?

The aim is to keep decisions with you and push everything else to the right person. This is an illustrative operating model, which you can adapt.

• Name a deputy. Before a deal goes live, decide who runs the business day to day during the peaks, and tell them.
• Set walk-away criteria early. If you have already agreed what you will not pay and what you will not accept, decisions at the busy stages take minutes rather than days.
• Hold a regular decision meeting. A short, fixed slot (weekly while a deal is live, less often during the search) where the adviser brings decisions that need you. Outside that slot, the work carries on without you.
• Give each type of information one owner. One person in finance answers financial questions, one person in operations answers operational ones. Requests go through a single coordinator, so your team is not answering the same question three times.
• Plan finance cover before due diligence. If your finance director is already stretched, arrange temporary support before diligence starts rather than in the middle of it.
• Keep your board informed. Agree in advance what the board will be asked to approve and when, so approvals do not hold up the timetable.

Advisers can take on a lot of defined work. They cannot own your strategy, your relationships with sellers, your information or the decision to proceed. Any adviser who suggests otherwise is promising something no one can deliver.

Is now the right time?

Sometimes the honest answer is not yet. A few signs suggest the business may not have the capacity for a deal at the moment:

• There is no one who could run the business for a few weeks if you had to focus elsewhere.
• The finance team is already behind on month-end, audit or a systems change.
• A major project is under way, such as a new site, a large contract or a restructure, that needs the same people a deal would need.
• The board is not yet agreed on what it wants to buy, or how it would pay for it.

None of these rules out an acquisition. They tell you what to fix first, or what extra support to line up, so the deal does not come at the expense of the business you already have. Starting the search before you need to complete also helps, because the early stages need less of your time than the later ones.

How does outside support change your input?

With Acquisitiv Target 45, your main input comes at the start and the end. You agree the criteria and the list of 100 businesses we research, then you meet the owners who are open to a confidential conversation. The research and the approaches in between are done for you.

With the Acquisitiv Expansion Partnership, we run your search, your pipeline and your live deals month after month, coordinating your lawyers and accountants. Your input is the decisions and the relationships: approving targets, meeting owners, setting limits and deciding whether to proceed. For a fuller comparison with hiring your own team, see in-house vs outsourced corporate development.

Keep acquisitions moving while you run the business

If time is the thing holding you back, the Acquisitiv Expansion Partnership is designed for exactly that: your acquisition team without the hire, so deals keep moving while you keep running the business you have built.