Laamanen and Keil examined the most active acquirers across seven industry sectors and found that performance suffers not only when firms buy too fast but when they buy erratically, bursts and pauses, with acquisition experience, program scope and acquirer size softening but not erasing the penalty. The contribution is the frame: what matters is not any single deal but the design of the program, its pace, rhythm and capacity.
The Institute’s reading: this is the sobriety check for every roll-up thesis that crosses this site, and the empirical backbone for a judgment the practitioner shelf already holds: the capacity constraint in acquisitions is organizational digestion, not capital. For an owner planning several add-ons, the actionable translation is to set a pace the management bench can metabolize, keep it steady, and treat each completed integration, not each closing, as the gate to the next deal.