There's a moment in most agency mergers, usually about three weeks in, where someone on one side uses the phrase 'them and us' in a meeting.
Sometimes they catch themselves. Sometimes nobody else notices. Either way, the dynamic just got named, and naming a thing makes it real.
We've watched this happen often enough that we now flag it as the single biggest risk in any merger we advise on. Not the financials. Not the integration plan. The story.
When two founder-led agencies decide to combine, multiple audiences are watching at the same time. Both client lists. Both teams. Both supplier networks. The wider market. Eight populations of people, give or take, all trying to work out what the new thing is and whether they're better or worse off because of it.
If both founders walk into that moment without an aligned story, the audiences make up their own.
The problem with 'we're combining forces'
It sounds reassuring. It says nothing.
The phrase is a placeholder, a way for both founders to feel like they've communicated when in fact they've just delayed the actual communication. And the silence is what gets exploited.
A senior creative on one side hears 'we're combining forces' and translates it as 'I might be reporting to someone I've never met by January.' A long-standing client on the other side hears the same phrase and translates it as 'the people I trust might not be running my account anymore.' A competitor hears it and translates it as 'this is the moment to start poaching.'
Three audiences, three translations. None of them what either founder actually meant. And every one of those translations starts shaping behaviour before the deal has even closed.
Why mergers go wrong even when the numbers are right
In our experience, mergers fail for one of two reasons.
The first is that the founders never genuinely agreed on what the new entity is. They agreed on equity splits and operational structure, which felt like they'd agreed on everything. But they hadn't actually had the conversation about what the merged business stands for, who it's for, and what it does that the two original agencies couldn't.
The second reason follows from the first. Without a clear story at the top, every layer below makes one up. And those made-up stories never align.
One side's account director tells their client 'don't worry, nothing changes.' The other side's account director tells the same kind of client 'we've got exciting new capabilities we can bring you.' Both are trying to be reassuring. Both are saying opposite things. The clients compare notes at an industry event six weeks later and realise the merged entity doesn't seem to know what it is.
That's when the deal stops being about combining forces and starts being about damage control.
What aligned communication actually looks like
The version that works isn't more communication. It's communication where both sides are saying the same thing, at the same time, with the same intent.
That's harder than it sounds. Both founders have spent years building the thing they're now combining. They have language they default to. They have stories about the business that they tell instinctively, and those stories were originally designed to make their agency sound distinctive, not aligned with someone else's.
Getting two founders speaking from the same script takes work. Sometimes it takes a week of locked-room sessions. Sometimes it takes mediation. It always takes someone in the room whose job is to spot the moments where one founder's instinctive description of the new entity quietly contradicts the other founder's.
Once the story at the top is locked, the rest follows. Both leadership teams get briefed using the same words. Both sets of senior staff get the same talking points for client conversations. Both client lists hear the announcement on the same day, in the same form, with the same answer to the inevitable 'so what changes?' question.
It's not glamorous, but the absence of contradictions is what stops the 'them and us' dynamic from forming.
The launch moment matters more than people think
Most merger announcements get treated as a single press release with some social posts attached. That's a mistake.
The launch is the only moment when both audiences hear the story at the same time, in the form you intended. Every conversation that happens after the launch is shaped by what people remember of that moment.
If the launch lands cleanly, with both founders publicly aligned and the story coherent, every subsequent client meeting and team conversation has a foundation to build on. Account directors can refer back to it. Senior staff can echo it.
If the launch lands clumsily, with two slightly different press releases or two founders giving subtly different interviews, every subsequent conversation has to work around the cracks. And cracks get wider, not narrower, the longer you leave them.
What we do about it
When we advise on a merger, the first thing we ask both founders to do is tell us, separately, what the new entity is. Not what it's called. What it is.
Then we put them in a room and show them the differences in their answers.
Sometimes the differences are small and easy to resolve. Sometimes they're significant, and resolving them takes longer than either founder expected. Either way, we don't move past that conversation until both founders are saying the same thing in the same words.
From there, we build the comms architecture: the team announcement, the client letters, the supplier briefings, the press launch. All of it written from one source, both founders signed off, both leadership teams briefed in parallel.
We also plan the first ninety days post-launch in detail, because that's when the 'them and us' moments are most likely to surface. Quarterly check-ins with senior teams from both sides. A flagged calendar of moments where the new entity needs to be visibly aligned. Internal town halls where both founders show up together, repeatedly, until it stops being a question.
It's a lot of orchestration. But mergers either signal growth or signal chaos, and which one they signal is decided in the first six weeks.
The takeaway
A merger should make both businesses worth more than they were before. That's the whole point.
But valuation uplift only happens when the market believes the new entity is genuinely a stronger proposition. And the market only believes that if both sides are telling the same story, at the same time, with the same intent.
Anything less, and you've spent six months and a lot of legal fees creating a slightly bigger version of two agencies that don't quite fit together.
If you're considering a merger as part of your exit strategy, talk to us first. Most of the work that determines whether it succeeds happens before the announcement.
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