The System Part Is Easy. The People Side Is What Actually Matters.

Most people assume the hard part of an acquisition is the tech. Sergiy Bondarenko has done the work enough times to know it isn't.

Sergiy is Senior Manager Marketing Operations at Compass Digital in Vancouver. He spent almost seven years in PE-backed companies that grew through acquisitions, including a stretch at Kaseya where he led MOps across three business units and migrated all of them to a new platform. When I asked what goes through his mind when an acquisition is announced, he didn't hesitate.

"Here we go again. We have the playbooks."

That's not arrogance. That's someone who's done it enough times to know exactly what the next few months look like.

Don't touch anything yet

Before Sergiy talks to anyone on the acquired side, he talks to the people who were in the room when the deal was signed. Because the team you're about to integrate might have been told something very different about how the integration is going to work. They might think they're keeping their systems. They might not even know what's happening yet.

Walk in with assumptions and you can create chaos in the first week. The people side, he says, is always the most sensitive part. Before you touch a single platform, you need to understand the lay of the land: not the version on the website, but what's actually been communicated, to whom, and when.

The perfect excuse

Here's something I didn't expect to hear: Sergiy loves a tech stack migration.

Not because it's easy. Because it's an opportunity.

"This is probably the best opportunity you will have to dedicate time to auditing your existing processes and making them better."

In normal operations, you're always moving. Optimizing the lead processing chain is always something you'll get to next quarter. The migration forces the issue and gives you a legitimate reason to fix what's been broken.

And there's a second thing worth knowing: every company you acquire is doing something you haven't thought of. Sergiy's rule is to never dismiss an acquired company's approach just because it's not "best practice." Look for the one playbook worth stealing and bring it into the combined stack.

The agent of clarity

When a company gets absorbed into a larger organization, the people there are dealing with the unknown. New tools. New processes. Uncertain job futures. That's a lot of stress packed into a very short window.

Sergiy's framing stuck with me: be the agent of clarity. Don't show up and tell people what's wrong with their setup. Meet them where they are. Acknowledge that what they've built means something to them. Then bring them along, making it clear what's flexible and what isn't.

In his experience, most people are far more receptive than you'd expect. Often they've known about the problems for a while and just needed someone with time and authority to fix them.

Selling it upward

At some point, you're going to need more time than the executive team wants to give you. Sergiy's advice: never blindside them. Flag risks as early as possible, even amber ones. Use project check-ins to walk leadership through decisions, not just updates. And know your non-negotiables before you get in the room.

He described a situation where he needed more time to investigate a compliance issue: unsubscribed contacts that might have been incorrectly flagged by a system error. No timeline pressure was going to move him on that. When he explained why, leadership was fine with it.

The key is knowing the difference between "I'd prefer more time" and "this is a compliance issue we cannot skip." One is negotiable. The other isn't.

The playbook

If Sergiy were writing a MOps acquisition playbook from scratch, it would have three steps:

Discovery. Overspend time here. Have a document ready before you start. Everything downstream gets easier when you've found all the closets, including the ones nobody documented.

Inventory. Map everything, not just what the acquired company has, but your own system too. The migration is a full audit, not just an import.

Migration plan, synced with CRM. This is the one Sergiy is strict about. Whatever you do on the MOps side has to align with the CRM timeline. If CRM is delayed, you delay too. The dependencies are real and they will hit you.

And then, plan for hyper care. The first two to three weeks after go-live are intense. Things will break. You need to be available to fix them fast. Plan for it rather than hope it goes smoothly.

The bottom line

Acquisitions are a test of the MOps function. Not just technically, but in how you communicate, handle uncertainty, and work across teams under pressure.

"The system part is pretty easy. The people side is always the most important."

That's the part that doesn't show up on the project plan.

Find Sergiy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sergiybondarenko