Being asked to do more with less

I've had over a hundred conversations with prospects over the last few months, and one theme keeps showing up in some form or another: “we’re being asked to do more with less”.

Usually the person saying it isn't complaining, they're describing a mandate. Budgets are tighter, headcount isn't growing, and the deal or portfolio work still has to get done, faster and more efficiently than before, ideally with fewer people touching it.

What's most interesting to me about this common mandate is watching two very different responses to it: one I can see getting teams into trouble and one that seems to actually be working.

The first response: strip it all back down

Some teams respond to "do more with less" by doing less, period. I've talked to people who went from a proper deal pipeline tool back to a shared spreadsheet, or in a couple of cases, something closer to a cocktail napkin and sticky notes. It looks like savings on a budget line, but it rarely ends up that way.

That move just shifts the work somewhere invisible. Diligence takes longer because nobody can see what's already been reviewed. Deals stall because the one analyst who remembered the details of a target left the company. The cost shows up later, as a slower process or a deal that suddenly falls apart, and it's much harder to point back to the decision that caused it.

The second response: consolidate

The response I'm seeing more often from teams that are actually pulling this off is different. They're consolidating dozens of tools for a smarter way of working.

A typical stack I hear described sounds something like this: a CRM that wasn't built for deals, a shared drive full of spreadsheets doing double duty as a data room, a standalone VDR for anything sensitive, a separate project management tool for post-close and integration, and, more often than I expected, an outsourced analyst brought in just to reconcile numbers across all of it.

That's at least five relationships, five logins, and five places for information to drift out of sync, just to run one deal process. The teams cleaning up their disconnected SaaS instances and redundant tools are folding all of that into one tool that can hold the strategy, the pipeline, the diligence, and the post-close plan in a single place. No more point solutions and instead, a Swiss Army knife for the whole deal lifecycle.

The effect is fewer invoices, fewer siloes that stall work and frustrate everyone, plus a more tailored view of the work for whoever's doing it. All that creates a meaningful jump in how much a small team can actually get through, because nobody's losing an afternoon reconciling three versions of the same spreadsheet.

"Buy it nice, or buy it twice" applies here too

There's a refrain I keep hearing from PE-backed operators specifically, where the instinct under budget pressure is to go with whatever's cheapest, so long as it can technically "get the job done.” I get the logic. But most of the people who've been through it once describe the same pattern: the cheap point tool covers maybe sixty percent of what's needed, the team builds workarounds for the rest, and eighteen months later they're buying and spending time migrating over to the better tool anyway, on top of what they already spent.

That same instinct to undercount what happens later shows up somewhere else too: in when people think the deal work actually ends.

The part people undercount: what happens after close

The conversation used to stop at signing. It doesn't anymore, and I'd argue that's the bigger shift.

More of the teams I talk to are being measured on whether the assets they've already bought are being run efficiently, not just on how many deals they closed this year. That means real ongoing portfolio management: tracking whether the synergies underwritten in the model are actually showing up, catching the businesses that are quietly drifting off plan, and doing it across a portfolio, not one company at a time.

This is also where AI and analytics are starting to earn their keep, less as a diligence shortcut and more as a way to surface which parts of the portfolio need attention before a quarterly review forces the question. When you're managing more with the same number of people, that kind of early flag is the difference between catching a problem and explaining one.

Buying the right company still starts with not rushing the wrong one

I'll say the less flattering version of this too: some of the teams I talk to are dealing with the consequences of moving backward, not forward. Diligence got rushed to hit a timeline, the wrong company got bought, and now the org is spending its "do more with less" budget cleaning up an integration that probably never should have started.

Value tracking and synergy capture in PMI aren't separate from the sourcing and diligence discipline that came before them, they're the report card for it. A tool that only helps you win the deal and disappears after signing is answering half the question.

That's really the shift I'd point to across all hundred of those conversations. The teams that seem to be holding up under real budget pressure are choosing a platform they can use as a strategic portfolio management tool, as well as one that supports the process of buying a company—one that's still doing work for them long after the deal closes.

If "do more with less" is the mandate on your desk right now, it's worth seeing what doing it right looks like in practice.

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This is the second in an occasional series on what we're seeing across the consolidation economy. Read the first here.