THE MECHANICS OF GROWTH (PART 5) – GROWTH ACCELERANTS
How M&A and Partnerships Amplify Growth
In the first four parts of this series, we established the foundation of sustainable growth: protect the base, increase market share, expand wallet share, and enter new markets. Each engine builds sequentially, creating a disciplined approach to organic growth.
But when you study high-performing organizations that compound value over long time horizons, you notice an additional layer that sits above the engines, cutting laterally across them. This layer is not about building from within. It is about accelerating from the outside.
This is where Acquisitions and Partnerships enter the equation, the strategic practice of buying or renting capabilities, clients, channels, and innovations to compress time and reduce the inherent risks of building everything organically.
While the four growth engines work sequentially, M&A and partnerships work diagonally, amplifying all engines simultaneously when deployed with discipline.
Why External Acceleration Matters
Growth rarely unfolds in a straight line. Markets shift. Competitors innovate. Technology disrupts. Customer expectations evolve. Organic engines are essential, but they are often slower and more resource-intensive than the external environment allows.
Acquisitions and partnerships counterbalance this constraint through four mechanisms:
1. Speed
Time is the scarcest resource in growth. Acquisitions and partnerships allow a company to compress years into months, achieving market entry, capability development, or customer acquisition at a pace that organic investment cannot match.
Consider the alternative: building a sales team in a new geography might take 18-24 months to reach productivity. Acquiring a regional player with established relationships delivers that outcome in 90 days post-close.
2. De-Risking
Organic growth is inherently uncertain. New offerings, new geographies, and new buyer personas all carry execution and adoption risk. External moves allow leaders to buy proof rather than build it.
When Salesforce acquired Tableau, they didn’t gamble on building analytics capabilities from scratch. They bought a proven solution with an established user base and immediate credibility. The risk profile changed from “Will this work?” to “Can we integrate this effectively?”
3. Capability Lift
Some competencies, such as advanced technology, specialized expertise, and cultural DNA, are difficult to build from scratch or incompatible with the existing organization. External leverage solves this gap without destabilizing the core.
For example, Google’s acquisition of Android didn’t just accelerate its mobile strategy; it imported an entire ecosystem and engineering culture that would have taken a decade to develop internally.
4. Market Positioning
Strategic moves signal to the market who you are becoming, not just who you are. Smart acquisitions and partner ecosystems shift perception, elevate relevance, and strengthen competitive defensibility.
When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, it didn’t just buy users; it also repositioned itself as a professional productivity platform rather than just an enterprise software vendor.
Acquisitions and partnerships are not a growth engine on their own. They are an accelerant that simultaneously overlays all four engines.
How M&A and Partnerships Amplify Each Growth Engine
Engine 1: Protecting the Base
Most organizations overlook this application: external moves can reduce churn and strengthen retention.
Through Acquisitions:
● Acquiring complementary solutions that expand stickiness and raise switching costs
● Buying technology that fills product gaps, causing customer attrition
● Consolidating fragmented vendor relationships through portfolio expansion
Through Partnerships:
● Integrating with ecosystem providers to embed deeper into customer workflows
● Using service partners to increase delivery quality and consistency
● Creating referral networks that strengthen customer relationships
Engine 2: Increasing Market Share
This is where acquisitions and partnerships are most visible:
Through Acquisitions:
● Buying into core or adjacent customer segments to accelerate participation rates
● Acquiring sales channels or specialist teams that improve early-cycle coverage
● Consolidating competitors to reduce fragmentation and increase market power
Through Partnerships:
● Partnering with distributors or platforms to increase reach and awareness
● Co-selling arrangements that combine complementary solutions
● Channel partnerships that access buyer networks you don’t own
In highly contested markets — where demand creation is essential — external leverage serves as a multiplier, widening the funnel and improving win probability.
HubSpot’s partner ecosystem is a perfect example. Rather than building sales capacity in every market, they empowered agencies and consultants to generate demand on their behalf and expanded their participation rate without a proportional increase in headcount.
Engine 3: Increasing Wallet Share
Acquisitions and partnerships are powerful tools for expanding revenue inside existing accounts:
Through Acquisitions:
● Adding capabilities that broaden your solution footprint within accounts
● Creating cross-sell and up-sell pathways that didn’t previously exist
● Enabling bundling strategies that raise lifetime value
Through Partnerships:
● Bringing in specialists who elevate conversations and unlock latent demand
● Co-innovation that expands what’s possible for shared customers
● White-label arrangements that extend your portfolio without full ownership
Organizations that under-earn in existing accounts often lack portfolio depth. Buying or partnering solves this elegantly.
For example, when Intuit acquired Mailchimp, it didn’t just acquire an email platform; it also created new revenue streams within its existing QuickBooks customer base by offering integrated marketing capabilities.
Engine 4: Target Market Expansion
This is the most intuitive overlay. Acquisitions and partnerships are vital when expanding into new industries, geographies, use cases, or customer sizes.
Through Acquisitions:
● Acquiring a foothold player with credibility and relationships in the target segment
● Buying local expertise and regulatory knowledge for geographic expansion
● Purchasing technology that enables new use cases
Through Partnerships:
● Partnering with channels that already own the trust of the new segment
● Joint ventures that share risk in uncertain markets
● Renting access and validation rather than building from zero
For example, Amazon’s partnership approach to international expansion is instructive. Rather than building retail infrastructure in India from scratch, they partnered with local logistics providers and sellers, renting capabilities while they learned the market.
In expansion, external leverage isn’t a shortcut, but rather a strategic accelerator that dramatically reduces failure risk.
The M&A and Partnership Decision Framework
Not every growth challenge requires external acceleration. The question is: When should you build, when should you buy, and when should you partner?
Build When:
● The capability is core to your competitive differentiation
● You have time and resources to develop expertise internally
● The market is stable and doesn’t require speed
● The cultural fit of external options is poor
Buy (Acquire) When:
● Speed is critical, and time-to-market matters more than cost
● The capability is difficult to develop organically
● Competitive dynamics require consolidation
● You have capital and integration capacity
Partner When:
● You need access, but not ownership
● The relationship is complementary, not competitive
● Integration overhead would be too high
● You want to test before committing to a full acquisition
The best organizations use all three approaches simultaneously—building core capabilities, buying strategic accelerants, and partnering for expanded reach.
Common M&A and Partnership Mistakes
Even with good intentions, companies make predictable errors:
1 – Acquiring for Revenue, Not Strategic Fit
Buying customers without buying capability creates short-term gains and long-term pain. If the acquired product doesn’t integrate with your platform or the sales motion doesn’t align with your go-to-market, you’ve bought a liability.
2 – Partnering Without Clear Economics
Partnerships fail when the value exchange is unclear. Who owns the customer? Who gets the economics? Who handles support? Ambiguity kills partnerships faster than misalignment.
3- Underestimating Integration Complexity
Acquisitions fail due to integration more than to diligence. Systems, cultures, processes, and teams don’t merge automatically. Without a clear integration plan and dedicated resources, value leaks out quickly.
4 – Overestimating Synergy
1+1=3 projections are usually fiction. Real synergy requires real work, such as cross-training teams, aligning incentives, integrating products, and managing change. Most synergy cases are overstated by 30-40%.
5 – Moving Too Slowly Post-Close
The first 90 days post-acquisition determine success. Waiting to integrate, announce changes, or align teams creates uncertainty and attrition. Speed matters.
How This Fits Into the Growth Operating System
External accelerants don’t replace the disciplined sequencing of the four growth engines—they amplify them. M&A and partnerships integrate into the growth system as follows:
In Sequencing: Acquisitions and partnerships should reinforce the current stage, not replace missing foundations. Don’t acquire to fix a broken base. Don’t partner to avoid building demand creation capability.
In Measurement: Track acquisition performance separately—new customer retention, revenue synergy realization, integration milestones, time to productivity.
In Governance: M&A and partnerships require board-level oversight. Create clear criteria for what you’ll acquire, what you’ll partner on, and what you’ll never touch.
In Resource Allocation: Reserve 10-20% of growth investment for external acceleration. Don’t starve organic engines to fund deals.
In Drift Prevention: Every acquisition should map to one of the four engines. If it doesn’t accelerate base protection, market share, wallet share, or expansion — don’t do it.
The Alchemy of Internal and External Growth
The most successful growth strategies blend internal capability building with external acceleration. They use M&A and partnerships not as replacement strategies, but as force multipliers that compress time, de-risk expansion, and amplify what’s already working.
When combined with the four growth engines and a disciplined operating system, they create something rare: a company that grows not sporadically but systematically — building from within while accelerating from outside.
At BETR, we help organizations evaluate acquisition targets, structure partnership models, and integrate external accelerants into their Growth Operating System. If you’re considering M&A or partnerships as part of your growth strategy, we can help you assess fit, structure the deal, and execute the integration.
Up Next In the Series
In our conclusion, Part Six of our series, we examine The Growth Operating System, the underlying scaffolding that ensures all engines work together and prevents organizations from drifting into chaos as they scale.