Thesis Notebook

What the academic literature explains—and where it still falls short—about buy-and-build

Buy-and-build has been practised longer than it has been well theorised. The strategy is widely used, frequently discussed, and unevenly understood. Practitioner writing usually presents it as playbooks or deal patterns; academic research touches on it across several literatures — strategy, corporate finance, organisational learning, M&A — but rarely as a unified phenomenon. The Thesis Notebook exists to sit between those worlds.

Neither a comprehensive literature review nor a set of best practices, the Notebook uses established theory to clarify the mechanisms, constraints, and trade-offs that shape buy-and-build as it is actually executed. Each note isolates one academic lens and asks what it helps explain — and where the lens strains when applied to serial acquisition environments.

Three commitments shape the Notebook:

First, buy-and-build is treated as a system, not a deal type. Value creation arises from the interaction of strategy, selection, integration, learning, and governance over time — not from any single acquisition.

Second, theory is used as a diagnostic tool, not an answer key. Each lens highlights certain dynamics and obscures others, and the aim is sharper judgment rather than theoretical completeness.

Third, organisational limits are taken seriously. Much of the divergence between intended and realised outcomes in buy-and-build traces to constraints on attention, learning, integration capacity, and sequencing — not to bad strategy.

The six essays in the Notebook

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. The advantage sits in the system’s capacity to reconfigure those resources repeatedly — not in the assets themselves.

Real Options and Buy-and-Build examines a framework that is frequently invoked but often overstated. Real options theory offers a useful way to think about uncertainty and staged investment. It also systematically overestimates reversibility and discretion in serial acquisition contexts — organisational commitments narrow flexibility faster than financial theory implies.

Absorptive Capacity under Cumulative Load addresses learning directly. Acquisition experience doesn’t always compound. Under sustained integration pressure, absorptive capacity can plateau or degrade, limiting the platform’s ability to benefit from additional deals despite growing experience. (Related: integration capacity as the binding constraint.)

The Pre-Deal Phase and Target Selection shifts upstream. Target identification expands the opportunity set; target selection constrains it. In buy-and-build, selection is the first integration decision — embedding assumptions about feasibility, governance, and uncertainty long before diligence begins. (Related: motives before targets.)

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 academic 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 shows up at the mechanism level, not in the empirical coverage.

Taken together, these pieces don’t form a grand theory. They map where buy-and-build tends to hold, strain, or fail when read through the available academic work.

How to read the Notebook

The Notebook isn’t meant to be read linearly or exhaustively. Which lens is most useful usually depends on the reader’s role: investors gravitate toward pricing, selection, and system-level constraints; operators focus on integration, learning, and cumulative load; scholars engage with the boundaries between theory and observed behaviour. What unites these perspectives is a shared problem: how to make sound decisions under uncertainty when organisational capacity, not opportunity, is the binding constraint. (If you’re new here, How to Read This Project lays out the full structure and the recommended reading paths across sections.)

Buy-and-build rewards clarity more than cleverness. The Thesis Notebook is my attempt to use established research to improve the quality of that clarity — while staying honest about where the research itself hasn’t yet caught up to what operators are actually dealing with.