Acquisition, sale, new markets, what could go wrong...?

Entering a new market, an acquisition, a strategic alliance, launching a new product: these pivotal moments often determine a company's trajectory for years to come. For the CEO of a tech startup or SME, they represent as much opportunity as risk.

Why Pilota?

During these periods, a CEO or executive has to manage several fronts at once: keeping the strategic course, reassuring investors, maintaining day-to-day operational performance, and steering a project that demands significant time and expertise. Internal teams, often optimized for daily execution, rarely lack motivation but frequently lack availability, perspective, or specific experience with this kind of transformation. The leader needs an outside perspective, able to structure the approach, anticipate obstacles, and free up management's time for high-value decisions — without fully outsourcing control of the project.

Impact and Effectiveness

Unlike a traditional consulting firm, an internal consultant becomes immersed in the company, understanding its culture, constraints, and human dynamics, while retaining the independent judgment of an outside perspective. They bring a proven methodology drawn from dozens of similar transitions: project scoping, change management, stakeholder coordination, and progress tracking.

Two concrete examples:

• Launching a tech product: a consultant who has already led several go-to-market efforts knows how to quickly identify early target customers, prioritize high-potential segments, and avoid the classic pitfall of a team spreading its sales efforts too thin before validating its positioning.

• Acquisition or alliance: drawing on due diligence experience, they know which questions to ask early in the evaluation phase (cultural fit, technical dependencies, how realistic the projected synergies really are) and can prepare a realistic integration plan, rather than discovering friction points after the deal is signed.

This cross-industry experience, often built across multiple sectors or growth companies, also allows skills to be transferred to internal teams rather than simply delivering a one-off output.

Strategic and Financial Advantages

The most tangible benefit is a reduced risk of failure. Research on mergers and acquisitions is telling here: Harvard Business Review, drawing on decades of research, reports an M&A failure rate of between 70% and 90%, largely due to poorly managed integration (1). A KPMG study points the same way, finding that most deals fail to durably improve shareholder value (2). Two examples of what an internal consultant concretely changes when facing this kind of risk:

• In an acquisition: by challenging synergy assumptions early and steering a 100-day integration plan, they help avoid rushed decisions made right after signing — often the leading cause of value destruction.

• In a product launch: by setting a clear scope before teams get fully engaged, they help avoid costly delays caused by late pivots in positioning or target market.

Financially, this approach generally costs less than an external firm billed by the project, or a dedicated hire, while avoiding the hidden costs of a failed transition — loss of key talent, delayed time-to-market, or diluted value from an acquisition. Having this kind of profile in place also tends to reassure investors and partners, who see it as a sign of more mature project governance.

Finding the Right Fit

The success of this approach largely depends on choosing the right consultant: someone who has already navigated comparable transitions in scale and sector, who can integrate quickly into the leadership team, and who has a genuine ability to transfer their methods rather than create dependency. A well-scoped engagement, with a clear mandate and a defined timeframe, makes the most of this approach: focused support that durably strengthens internal capabilities, well beyond the transition itself.

References and further reading:

(1) Clayton M. Christensen, Richard Alton, Curtis Rising, Andrew Waldeck, "The New M&A Playbook," Harvard Business Review, March 2011. (2) KPMG study on mergers and acquisitions and shareholder value creation, cited in Lakelet Capital, "Reasons Why Mergers & Acquisitions Fail and Succeed." On the specific role of the internal consultant within organizations: "Consultant interne : l'expert secret des grandes boîtes," Scolaconsult, 2025 — scolaconsult.fr