Thesis Notebook
What the academic literature explains—and where it still falls short—about buy-and-build
Buy-and-Build strategies are widely practiced, frequently discussed, and unevenly understood. In practitioner writing, they are often presented as playbooks or deal patterns. In academic research, they appear across multiple literatures—strategy, corporate finance, organizational learning, and mergers and acquisitions—but rarely as a unified phenomenon.
The purpose of the Thesis Notebook is to sit between those worlds.
This section does not aim to produce a comprehensive literature review, nor does it attempt to prescribe best practices. Instead, it uses established academic theory to clarify the mechanisms, constraints, and trade-offs that shape Buy-and-Build strategies as they are actually executed. Each note isolates a specific lens and asks what it helps explain—and where it strains—when applied to serial acquisition environments.
Three principles guide the Notebook.
First, Buy-and-Build is treated as a system, not a deal type. Value creation does not arise from any single acquisition, but from the interaction of strategy, selection, integration, learning, and governance over time.
Second, theory is used as a diagnostic tool, not an answer key. Each lens highlights certain dynamics while obscuring others. The goal is not theoretical completeness, but sharper judgment.
Third, organizational limits are taken seriously. Much of the divergence between intended and realized outcomes in Buy-and-Build strategies can be traced not to poor strategy, but to constraints on attention, learning, integration capacity, and sequencing.
The six essays in this Notebook build a cumulative argument around these ideas.
How the Thesis Notebook Is Structured
Resource-Based View Revisited
establishes the primary theoretical lens. Buy-and-Build is framed as a process of accumulating and recombining heterogeneous, imperfectly mobile resources under constraint. Advantage lies not in assets acquired, but in the system’s capacity to reconfigure them repeatedly.
Real Options and Buy-and-Build
examines a commonly invoked but often overstated framework. While Real Options Theory offers a useful way to think about uncertainty and staged investment, it frequently overestimates reversibility and discretion in serial acquisition contexts. In practice, organizational commitments narrow flexibility faster than financial theory implies.
Absorptive Capacity under Cumulative Load
addresses learning directly. Acquisition experience does not always compound. Under sustained integration pressure, absorptive capacity can plateau or degrade, limiting a platform’s ability to benefit from additional deals despite growing experience.
The Pre-Deal Phase and Target Selection
shifts attention upstream. Target identification expands the opportunity set; target selection constrains it. In Buy-and-Build strategies, selection is the first integration decision, embedding assumptions about feasibility, governance, and uncertainty long before diligence begins.
From Selection to Integration
bridges pre- and post-deal phases. Drawing on process research in post-merger integration, it shows how relational signals and early commitments formed during selection and negotiation shape integration dynamics well after close.
Buy-and-Build in the Literature
steps back to assess the field itself. The literature is strong at documenting prevalence, drivers, pricing, and outcomes, and weaker at explaining how repeated acquisition remains additive rather than degrading over time. The gap is not empirical coverage, but mechanism-level understanding.
Taken together, these pieces do not form a grand theory. They form a map of where Buy-and-Build strategies tend to hold, strain, or fail.
How to Read the Notebook
The Thesis Notebook is not meant to be read linearly or exhaustively. Readers may find certain lenses more relevant depending on their role:
Investors may gravitate toward pricing, selection, and system-level constraints
Operators may focus on integration, learning, and cumulative load
Scholars may engage with the boundaries between theory and observed behavior
What unites these perspectives is a shared problem: how to make sound decisions under uncertainty when organizational capacity, not opportunity, is the binding constraint.
That is the problem Buy-and-Build surfaces most clearly—and the problem this Notebook is designed to illuminate.
Conclusion
Buy-and-Build strategies reward clarity more than cleverness. They expose where theory aligns with operating reality and where it does not. By grounding discussion in established research—while remaining honest about its limits—the Thesis Notebook aims to improve judgment rather than prescribe solutions.
If Buy-and-Build is a system, then theory is most useful when it helps us see that system more clearly.
This is a section introduction. If you’re new to The Industrialist, the best place to begin is the “How to Read This Project” page, which outlines the structure and reading paths across the work.