AltaviseAdvisors

A worked example

Inside a People Synergy Audit.

To show exactly how we work, here is a full engagement, worked end to end, based on a real lower-middle-market merger. The two firms and the deal are real and public; the people data and dollar figures are illustrative, built to demonstrate the method.

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The situation

Two regional firms combining, on the worst possible date.

Two established accounting firms merged into a single firm of roughly 160 people across eight offices, with one firm bringing a specialized government and nonprofit audit practice the other lacked. The deal logic was strong: complementary geography, a net-new capability, and back-office scale.

The catch was timing. The combination closed on January 1, the day before tax busy season, when capacity is tightest, a departure does the most damage, and a replacement is nearly impossible to hire. That single fact shaped everything that followed.

The engagement

  • Scope. A fixed two to three week People Synergy Audit of the combined firm.
  • Inputs. The combined employee register, partner client books, comp, org charts, and leadership interviews.
  • Question. Who stays, where the risk sits, is the synergy deliverable, and what to do in the first 100 days.
  • Output. Six deliverables, from a retention model to a board-ready readout.
$3.8M
of combined-firm value exposed to people risk over 12 months
$2.1M
of annual run-rate synergy the deal could create
$850k
one-time investment to protect the exposure and unlock the synergy

What we found

Five findings, in priority order.

1

Leadership continuity is the deal

Value was concentrated in a small partner group and the specialist audit leaders. Locking them in was the single highest-return action.

2

Flight risk was real and mistimed

39 people sat at Elevated or High flight risk, heading straight into busy season, when a loss hurts most.

3

The synergy was complementary, not consolidation

Little geographic overlap meant modest cost synergy and a much larger cross-sell prize.

4

Comp was misaligned where it mattered

Several critical, at-risk roles sat below market, and two different partner-comp models had to be reconciled.

5

Culture was an identity event

A 100-plus-year-old firm retiring its brand needed the change managed deliberately, not assumed.

The insight

The whole engagement makes one comparison.

The value the combination could create versus the value its people risk could destroy, and the small, well-timed investment that protects it. Read those three numbers together and the recommendation makes itself: proceed, with active retention.

The people lens is also what revealed the sequence. A team running only financial diligence would have scheduled the redundancies for Q1 and walked straight into busy season. Instead: protect value first, do no harm through April, capture cost synergy in the back half of the year.

The deliverables

  • Findings & recommendations report.
  • Retention & flight-risk model with a critical-talent watchlist.
  • Org overlap & redundancy map and synergy bridge.
  • Compensation benchmarking and harmonization plan.
  • 100-day integration plan.
  • Board-readout deck.

Note: the firms and deal facts referenced are drawn from a public merger announcement. All employee-level data, risk scores, and dollar figures are synthetic and illustrative, created to demonstrate the Altavise method, and do not represent the firms' actual people, pay, or plans.

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