The Question-First Approach to Data Integration That Multiplied Company Value by 20x

When mid-market companies acquire multiple businesses, data integration becomes the biggest barrier to realizing synergies.

But if those business units can't share information or create integrated products, the acquisition becomes a collection of separate entities rather than a unified powerhouse.

This puts operations directors and CTOs in an impossible position. Under pressure to demonstrate acquisition value quickly, many rush into expensive ERP replacements or data mapping exercises. However, these technical solutions often fail to unlock new business capabilities like imagining how business units can interlock vs. overhauling them, resulting in massive investments with minimal returns.

Jeff Spence, a private equity investor with 25-30 years of experience buying, building, and selling companies, has navigated this challenge across multiple industries. At a €100M Scandinavian transportation logistics company, he discovered that technical data mapping was the wrong approach entirely. Instead, his team achieved an 18-22x return on their €8M transformation investment by taking a question-first approach to integration.

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Key Takeaways:

• Traditional data mapping exercises fail because they focus on technical alignment rather than business outcomes, limiting companies to incremental improvements instead of transformational growth.
• Question-first integration allows companies to leverage existing systems while creating new strategic capabilities that no individual business unit could deliver alone.
• Mid-market companies can achieve 18-22x returns on data transformation investments by defining strategic vision first, then working backward to data requirements.

When Roll-Up Acquisitions Become Value Traps

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Companies acquire multiple businesses to gain market share, expand capabilities, or achieve economies of scale. But when those acquisitions operate as separate entities, the expected synergies never materialize.

Jeff encountered this exact scenario with a €100M Scandinavian transportation logistics company built as a roll-up of different transportation companies handling shipping, trucks, and trains across Europe. As he explains: 

"The data was completely just wonked and destructive. The company was successful only because it was extremely well managed. When I say managed, I mean chaperoned. They weren't even involved, they were just basically watching these companies run and making sure they didn't go off the rails."

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The individual companies were profitable, but they couldn't function as an integrated business because:

• No data synchronicity existed across acquired companies
• Each company operated different systems with unique data structures
• No ability existed to create integrated products spanning multiple business units
• They couldn't win larger contracts requiring multi-modal transportation
• The business remained limited to the sum of individual parts rather than leveraging combined capabilities

This created a dead end where profitable individual units couldn't generate the enterprise value that justified the acquisition.

So what was Jeff’s solution?

Questions.

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The Question-First Integration Framework

Define Strategic Vision Independent of Current Capabilities

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Before touching any technology, executive teams must define what the company should become as a unified entity.

"We asked ourselves ‘what is important?’ as a whole,” says Jeff.  “We needed to figure out as a company, not as an individual business unit, what we did for a living, what kind of products we wanted to sell, what kind of customers we were serving, and what problems were we solving for those customers.”

This involves identifying:

• Target customer segments for the unified business
• Desired product offerings that utilize newly combined capabilities
• Competitive positioning as an integrated entity
• Strategic problems only the combined business can solve

The key is defining these questions without considering current data limitations or technical constraints that might hold back bigger picture thinking.

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Challenge Each Business Unit with New Strategic Questions

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Using the strategic vision as a guide, create specific information requirements that each unit must satisfy using their existing systems.

“We asked our brand new, net new questions of these individual companies,” says Jeff. 

Each business unit receives identical strategic questions but must find unique ways to answer them using their current data and systems. 

This reveals which information exists but remains trapped in silos, while identifying what new insights the unified business requires.

The goal is to ensure each unit can contribute to company-wide strategic answers instead of the focus being on standardizing how they collect or store data.

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Allow Organic System Integration Based on Business Needs

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Rather than forcing system replacement, build connective infrastructure that enables each unit to contribute to company-wide capabilities while preserving their operational systems. Jeff explains:

"We actually just took the existing systems they were using, we didn't beat these guys up. But we just used that data in a way, and created the APIs and all the tools to answer these really cool questions."

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Focus on creating APIs and integration tools that:

• Preserve existing operational systems that work well
• Enable cross-unit data sharing for strategic questions
• Allow each unit to maintain their operational excellence
• Create the technical foundation for new business capabilities

Launch Integrated Business Capabilities

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Use newly integrated data systems to enable capabilities that no individual unit could deliver alone, targeting higher-value market segments.

The Scandinavian company leveraged their integrated capabilities to pivot their business model. "We ended up morphing the business," explains Jeff. "We started focusing on specialty shipping, things like pharmaceuticals that needed to remain refrigerated and specific scientific equipment." 

This strategic shift enabled them to win specialized contracts that required seamless service integration across their previously siloed divisions. They were able to target high-value segments like pharmaceuticals and scientific equipment that demanded sophisticated multi-modal tracking, provide environmental controls across different transportation modes, and ultimately create new revenue streams from data services and tracking capabilities that emerged from their integration efforts.

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From Value Trap to Strategic Powerhouse

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When operations directors and CTOs focus on business outcomes first, data integration becomes a strategic capability and growth accelerator.

Jeff's question-first approach delivered remarkable results for the Scandinavian logistics company.

"That €8 million investment probably generated a... €150 to €175 million lift in value over the course of the next 5 years."

Beyond financial returns, the company evolved. The four disintegrated entities were indeed profitable, but they transformed into a single entity with the ability to create new products, as well as sell data, data plans, and tracking. They became a technology-enabled logistics provider, with integrated data capabilities at their core. 

The transformation created lasting value because it fundamentally changed how people related to data—shifting from a tracking hassle to a strategic tool that freed them to grow the business in entirely new directions. The integrated data systems became strategic assets that opened new markets and revenue streams that individual business units could never access alone.

By following this question-first framework, the company could win contracts an order of magnitude larger than any of the groups had ever done in the past, fundamentally changing their competitive position and strategic options.