Retention plans fail when they start with the org chart. Start with the five to ten people who actually hold the operation together, and design retention for each one.
Two employees. Same tenure, same strong performance reviews, same answer in the town hall about being "excited for the next chapter." A year after the acquisition, one of them is carrying the integration. The other one is gone — or worse, still there and gone.
A founder's engagement after the deal closes is not a soft metric. It is shaped less by strategy decks than by a handful of specific things said in the wrong way, at the wrong moment.
Most conversations about employee retention post acquisition focus on the people who have been there the longest. That focus is correct, but incomplete.
The org chart looked clean. The retention packages were structured. And then, quietly, the business that generated the EBITDA you paid a multiple for started to look different from the business in...