220 Deals. One Playbook. How to Scale M&A Without Losing Control

Shawn Rodricks, Head of M&A - Independent Consultant

If you scale the deal flow without the operating infrastructure to match it, things break fast. The playbook is a document nobody opens, closing weeks turn into fire drills, and the returns you modeled start to slip.

Shawn Rodricks, Head of M&A - Independent Consultant, built the infrastructure before the volume hit. He closed 220 acquisitions across two organizations, 37 at Rexall in pharmacy and 183 at Amerivet Veterinary Partners, by wiring in the operating system from the start.

What You'll Learn

• The five-part operating model behind 220 acquisitions
• How to hire for biz dev vs. corp dev roles in a lean M&A team
• How to build a closing-week SWAT team and keep finance aligned on timing
• Why qualitative diligence feeds directly into your forecast and purchase price
• The pre-close vs. post-close integration framework
• Why roll-ups that confuse acquisition with strategy fail
• What Shawn got wrong in year one and how it shaped every program since

If you're scaling a deal function and want the operating framework behind Shawn's approach, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the Buyer-Led M&A™ Certification, built from 400+ practitioner interviews into a framework you can actually run.

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Episode Chapters

[00:00] Intro

[03:33] From Biochemistry to 220 Acquisitions

[06:02] The Operating Model for Serial Acquisitions

[09:40] Hiring: Biz Dev vs. Corp Dev

[13:03] Staffing as Deal Volume Scales

[15:08] What a Playbook Actually Is

[18:43] Managing Ebbs and Flows in Deal Volume

[22:12] Cash Flow and Finance Partnership

[23:44] The Underestimated Side of Diligence

[27:25] Key Person Risk and Pre-Close Retention

[31:41] Post-Close Monitoring and the First 90 Days

[35:17] Pre- vs. Post-Close Integration Priorities

[37:53] What Roll-Ups Mistake for Strategy

[39:21] Integration as the Conversion Engine

[42:48] The Year One Mistake That Bit Us

[44:12] When Deals Get Strange