Bachelor Thesis · M&A Research
Success factors of horizontal acquisitions in the German Mittelstand, mapped across four deal phases and six company functions — and translated into a checklist a managing director can actually work through.
The mechanics of an M&A deal are exhaustively documented — every phase, every workstream, every standard document. So the question that started this thesis was the one the literature doesn’t answer: if the process is this well understood, why do acquisitions still fail so regularly?
The working hypothesis: the factors deciding success sit largely outside the structure of the deal itself, and they differ systematically for a Mittelstand buyer, because a failed acquisition can threaten the acquirer’s own existence far faster than it would a listed corporate’s.
Horizontal acquisitions are well covered. The German Mittelstand is well covered. The two together are almost not covered at all.
That intersection is where the specific problems live: owner-manager emotional attachment to the business, equity-heavy financing that makes every phase consume scarce resources, short decision paths that cut both ways, and small workforces where cultural friction between two companies is immediate rather than abstract.
A descriptive, systematic literature review rather than an empirical study — with one deliberate structural choice that shaped everything downstream: literature-based success factors and my own analytically derived ones were kept strictly separate throughout, and merged only at the final step, when they became checklist items.
Acquisition types, methods, buyer types, financing and the full buy-side process — before narrowing to either focus field.
A SWOT of the horizontal acquisition type from a strategic investor’s view, and a parallel analysis of Mittelstand characteristics and problem areas.
Use both analyses to add factors where existing sources had never been adapted to this buyer or this deal type.
Categorize every factor by company function, then place it in the phase where it actually has to be acted on.
Existing literature categorizes success factors loosely, if at all. The contribution here is a two-axis structure: six company functions across four acquisition phases. Every identified factor sits at one intersection — which is what makes the result distributable across a deal team rather than readable only by one person. One representative check per cell:
| Function | Preparation | Due Diligence | Negotiation | Integration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leadership | Advisers engaged — and own strategic goals clear enough not to be steered by them? | Target’s top management assessed, not just middle, and willingness to abort established? | Walk-away conditions and concession positions defined before sitting down? | Integration run by an integration office, with the owner back on the day-to-day business? |
| Strategy | Acquisition strategy complements the corporate one; brand approach decided upfront? | Synergies quantified on internal numbers, short-term and long-term held apart? | Integration model agreed with the seller — standalone or fully absorbed? | Core business supported rather than risk diversified; strategy piloted on one area first? |
| Organization | A standing M&A team — without formalizing away the speed that makes an SME an SME? | Integration planning continued, functional overlaps surfaced early? | Integration teams, reporting lines and responsibilities settled before closing? | Cross-functional teams, so knowledge actually moves between the two organizations? |
| People | Key personnel at the target identified and a retention plan already drafted? | Target management assessed on leadership and cultural adaptability, not just HR data? | Key-employee list reconciled with the seller; retention fitted to their culture? | Mentoring in place so knowledge transfers rather than walks out? |
| Control & Planning | Planning and control systems built before diligence starts; documentation complete? | Red-flag diligence before full diligence, with a query portal carrying owners and deadlines? | Performance targets contractually secured, with KPI-based controls and earn-out mechanics? | Integration status shared with the workforce, not only with management? |
| Culture | A culture-focused SWOT run before the expensive diligence begins? | Cultural diligence run only once the other workstreams found no deal breakers? | Joint cultural team from both companies drafting a shared mission statement? | Former owner retained temporarily to carry the culture across? |
Scroll the table sideways to see all four phases →
Two findings came out of the structure itself rather than from any single source.
Integration is consistently identified as both the most important and the most difficult phase — and it’s where success or failure becomes visible. But laying the factors out chronologically makes something else obvious: almost every condition for a successful integration has to be established in the phases before it. Key personnel identified during preparation. Cultural differences surfaced during diligence. Retention programmes agreed during negotiation.
By the time a buyer reaches integration and discovers the problem, the window to have prevented it has usually closed. That is the practical argument the whole checklist is built to make.
Because the six categories map onto real company functions, the checklist can be split across a deal team rather than sitting with one person. Leadership, People and Control & Planning assign cleanly to the managing director, HR and controlling respectively.
Strategy, Organization and Culture deliberately do not — they cut across several functions, and that is itself the signal: those three are where cross-functional teams are required, and where a Mittelstand buyer running the deal out of one office is most exposed.
A checklist in three hierarchy levels — phase, then function, then the individual measure — with every measure phrased as a closed question that can be answered yes or no and ticked off.
The format is plain enough that any user can extend it, and the analysis chapter works as the reference volume behind each line.
Not a process manual. The literature already contains those, and the checklist assumes the buyer has that knowledge or has hired it.
It exists to run alongside a properly prepared, externally advised process, asking one thing at each step: has this been adapted to the fact that the buyer is a Mittelstand company and the deal is a horizontal one?
The methodology imposes real constraints, and the thesis names them rather than working around them.
Neither the literature-based factors nor the ones I derived myself were tested against data. The self-identified factors are argued from the underlying analyses, but there is no evidence of their practical relevance — which is a pointed limitation for a tool whose entire claim is that it is practice-oriented.
Case studies were largely unavailable for a structural reason: Mittelstand transactions attract very little public attention, so the material simply isn’t in the open.
Source selection was subjective. Sources were cross-checked against each other during factor identification, but a self-selected corpus carries a direction of view, and contradicting work may have been missed despite the search.
No factor is ranked. The thesis quantifies nothing and establishes no hierarchy — it offers no answer to which of these factors matters most, which is exactly what a buyer with finite attention would want to know first.
Deliberately non-transferable. Specializing on horizontal acquisitions and the German Mittelstand is what made the contribution possible, and it also means the factors can’t be lifted onto other deal types, acquirers or markets without re-testing. Relative importance may also shift over time.
The obvious extension is the empirical work this thesis didn’t attempt: validating the factors quantitatively and qualitatively, and building the case-study base that doesn’t currently exist for this segment.
Most useful of all would be quantifying and ranking the factors, so the checklist could tell a buyer where to spend attention rather than treating every line as equally weighted.
Writing this is what pushed me toward acquisition work in the first place.
The screening and prioritization I later did at Viega is the same question from the other side of the desk: which of these targets is actually integrable, and what would it take.