What Due Diligence Cannot See
It All Begins Here
And Why That Gap Shapes Everything That Comes After
The Integration Playbook | Article 2 of 9 | This series examines the seven decisions that determine whether an environmental firm acquisition delivers value. Start with Article 1 here.
I was sitting in on a deal a few years back where the firm being acquired kept circling back to the same set of questions. They asked about technical problem-solving on complex projects. They asked about keystone work the acquirer was known for. They asked about the tenure and credentials of the technical staff. Different framings, same underlying question, asked repeatedly across multiple conversations.
The questions were not random. They revealed a culture, surfacing through the things this firm could not stop asking about. Deep technical expertise was what they valued most, and they were testing whether they were about to lose it.
What a firm keeps asking about tells you what they are afraid of losing. And due diligence, done honestly, is not just the acquirer evaluating the seller. Both firms are evaluating each other, and the structure of the process makes that hard for everyone.
The Information Problem
Every acquisition begins with an information problem. The acquirer needs to learn enough about the target firm to justify the price, plan the integration, and protect against surprises. The target firm needs to learn enough about the acquirer to know what they are signing up for. Neither side can fully accomplish this before close, and the structural reasons why are worth reviewing more closely.
Confidentiality. NDAs limit how much either side can share before the contract is signed. Client lists are masked. Compensation details are aggregated. Internal documents are summarized rather than disclosed in full. Both sides know this is happening, and both sides know they are making consequential decisions based on incomplete information.
Asymmetry. The acquirer typically has more deal experience, more resources, and more leverage. They have done this before. The selling firm is often doing it once in a career, while still running their business at full speed. They are negotiating with people who do this for a living, advised by lawyers and bankers they hired last month, on a timeline set by someone else.
Intangibles. Financial performance can be modeled. Client concentration can be measured. But the things that determine whether two firms work well together are harder to quantify. How decisions get made. Whether the leadership team trusts each other. What the firm tolerates and what it does not. These show up in conversations, not spreadsheets.
The result is that even rigorous due diligence leaves significant blind spots. According to a 2025 analysis published by the CFA Institute, between 70% and 90% of M&A deals fail to deliver expected value, and inadequate due diligence is consistently cited as a primary driver. McKinsey research finds that 95% of executives describe cultural fit as critical to integration success, while a study reported by MarshBerry found that 75% of people in key roles leave within three years of a merger. The gap between what gets evaluated and what determines success is not small.
What the Acquirer Misses
Most acquiring firms run financial due diligence well. They know how to read a P&L inside and out, audit utilization rates in their sleep, and stress-test a backlog without breaking a sweat. Where the process breaks down is everywhere else.
How decisions actually get made. Org charts describe authority. They do not describe how things actually happen. A firm whose principals make decisions collaboratively in long meetings will not integrate easily with a firm whose CEO makes calls unilaterally and expects them to be carried out. Neither approach is wrong. They are simply incompatible without a transition plan, and that plan is impossible to build if the acquirer doesn’t take this into account.
What the firm tolerates. Every organization has unwritten rules about what is acceptable. Some firms tolerate technical mediocrity if the relationships are strong. Some tolerate weak business development if the technical work is exceptional. Some tolerate neither, and some tolerate both. These tolerances shape who gets promoted, who gets protected, and who quietly leaves. They are typically visible only after months of observation.
Whether the leadership team actually trusts each other. In a small or mid-sized firm, the principals usually present a unified front during diligence. Whether that unity reflects genuine alignment or a temporary cease-fire built around a liquidity event is one of the most important questions in any acquisition, and one of the hardest to answer from the outside.
The client relationships that are actually transferable. Diligence usually examines client concentration and revenue stability. It rarely examines whether the relationship lives with the firm or with a specific person. A client who renews because they trust a senior project manager is a different asset than a client who renews because they trust the firm’s brand and methodology. The first one walks out the door if that PM does. The second one does not. Distinguishing between the two takes more than a contract review.
The hidden dependencies. Every firm has a few people who hold things together in ways that are not obvious until they leave. The longtime office manager who knows where every project file lives. The technical lead who quietly mentors the next generation. The principal whose relationships with regulators smooths permits that would otherwise take twice as long. Diligence rarely identifies these people because their value does not show up in titles or compensation. It shows up only when they are gone.
What the Seller Misses
The other side of the table is rarely written about with much honesty. The selling firm is also conducting due diligence, just with less infrastructure to do it well.
What the acquirer is actually buying. Many sellers assume the acquirer wants what they have built. In some cases, that is true. In others, the acquirer is buying capacity, geography, or a client list, and the culture the seller spent years building is incidental to the deal. Sometimes it is worse than incidental; sometimes it is an obstacle the acquirer plans to dismantle. Sellers who do not press hard on this question during diligence often discover the answer in year two.
Whether the integration plan exists. Does a plan exist, who is running it, and can we talk to people who have been through it with you? All three are questions a seller can legitimately ask. The acquirer’s response, including how readily they make those connections, tells the seller as much as the answers themselves.
What happens after the earnout. Many environmental consulting acquisitions include earnout structures that keep selling principals engaged for two to five years. The terms of the earnout get extensive attention. The question of what happens at year four, when the principal’s financial incentive begins to diminish, gets less. The acquirer is making a long-term bet. The seller, once the earnout closes, may have a very different set of options.
How the acquirer treats people during stress. Every firm looks good during diligence. The acquirer is on their best behavior, and so is the seller. What is much harder to see is how the acquirer treats people when a project goes badly, when a client leaves, when the market turns. This is not something a formal conversation will surface. It shows up in indirect signals: how the acquirer handles friction during the negotiation itself, and what happened to the leadership of firms they previously acquired.
The acquirer’s reputation as an employer. Sellers have few legitimate windows into the acquirer’s culture before signing. Glassdoor, LinkedIn tenure patterns, conversations with former employees, and press coverage of previous acquisitions are usually the best available signals. None of these sources is definitive on its own. Glassdoor reviews skew toward departures, sample sizes can be small, and older reviews may describe leadership teams that no longer exist. But sellers do look at them, and they form opinions. A weak employer reputation rarely kills a deal outright. It does shape how the selling principals feel about the deal they are signing, how confidently they communicate it to their own people, and how quickly the acquired firm’s talent updates their resumes once the news breaks. Employer brand is a strategic asset in M&A whether anyone formally treats it that way or not.
The brand question. If the acquirer’s long-term strategy involves consolidating multiple firms under a single platform brand, the selling firm’s name will eventually disappear. This is especially common in private equity-backed roll-ups, where the platform brand is the asset being built. Sellers who do not understand this going in, or who assume the transition period they were shown will be followed as presented, often find themselves resenting a decision they technically agreed to.
The Things That Cannot Be Learned Before Close
Some questions cannot be answered in due diligence, no matter how well it is run. Confidentiality limits do not allow for the kind of deep, sustained observation that would surface them. This is not a failure of the process. It is a structural feature of how M&A works.
The questions that fall into this category include how the combined firm will handle its first real conflict, whether the acquired firm’s people will actually trust the new leadership, how clients will react when they learn about the deal, what cultural friction will surface in the first six months, and which departures will catch everyone by surprise.
The firms that handle integration well know going in that due diligence cannot answer every question. They go in expecting to keep learning, and they build some kind of intentional process to do it. The specific mechanisms vary. What matters is the posture.
The firms that struggle treat the close as the end of diligence rather than the start of a new phase of it, and the things they could not see beforehand often become the things they cannot fix afterward.
What This Means for the Decisions That Follow
Article One in this series introduced seven decisions that determine whether an acquisition delivers value. Each of those decisions is shaped by what was learned, or not learned, during due diligence.
Brand decisions are easier when both sides surface their assumptions about the name before signing. Talent retention plans are stronger when the acquirer actually understands which people hold the firm together. Client communication works better when the acquirer learns which relationships are transferable and which are not. Organizational structure decisions are cleaner when both sides understand how the other makes decisions before they make them together.
Due diligence is not a phase that ends at close. It is the foundation that determines how steep the integration curve will be. The firms that take it seriously, on both sides of the table, give themselves room to capture the value they paid for. The firms that treat it as a checklist spend the next two years discovering what they missed.
The next article in this series examines the brand decision, what both sides need to bring to that conversation, and how the firms that get it right structure the transition.
References
CFA Institute. (2025). What’s the Winning Ingredient in M&A? The Answer Lies in Due Diligence. Enterprising Investor. February 3, 2025. blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2025/02/03/whats-the-winning-ingredient-in-ma-the-answer-lies-in-due-diligence/
Knowledge at Wharton. (2025). Why Many M&A Deals Fail and How to Beat the Odds. Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. December 8, 2025. knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-many-ma-deals-fail-and-how-to-beat-the-odds/
MarshBerry. (2024). M&A Cultural Due Diligence: Don’t Forget the Culture. marshberry.com/resource/due-diligence-dont-forget-the-culture/
Stambaugh Ness. (2025). Building a Strong Foundation: Employee Retention Strategies for AEC Acquisitions. stambaughness.com.
PSMJ Resources. (2025). Before the Numbers: Why Cultural and Strategic Fit Must Come First in AEC M&A. psmj.com.
The Six Career Rules Nobody Teaches Women in STEM
They Did Everything “Right”. It Still Wasn’t Enough.
I spent the last several months talking to women in environmental science, health and safety, engineering, sustainability, finance, healthcare, logistics, and corporate operations. Thirteen conversations. Thirteen careers. All accomplished, high-performing women who did the work, earned the results, ran divisions, managed global teams, chaired industry events, and hit every goal that their companies set for them.
And almost every single one of them had a story about the moment the rules changed without warning.
Here is what I learned.
The Six Things They Learned The Hard Way
After thirteen conversations with high-performing women in technical and scientific fields, six patterns came up again, and again. These are not soft skills. They are not common sense. They are specific, learnable strategies that most women in STEM never encounter until they have already paid for not knowing them.
1. Communicating like a technical expert and communicating like a leader are two different skills. School teaches you to show your work and back up your claims with data. Leadership requires you to lead with your conclusion and anticipate the questions that follow. One approach builds credibility. The other delays it.
2. Your sponsor matters more than your performance review. Performance gets you in the room, but sponsorship keeps you there when the rules change. Most women spend their entire careers focused on the wrong one. Note – mentorship is not the same as sponsorship. A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor uses their political capital to advocate for you in rooms you are not in. Most women spend their entire careers building mentor relationships and wondering why it is not moving the needle.
3. Advocating for yourself is a skill, not a personality trait. Knowing when to push back, how to say no, and how to claim your value in real time can be learned. Most women wait until after the fact to wish they had spoken up. By then the decision is already made.
4. Visibility is a strategy, not a byproduct of good work. Good work does not speak for itself. If you are not building visibility deliberately, someone else is benefiting from it.
5. Personalities drive outcomes more than credentials do. The technical skills get you in the door. The ability to read and navigate the people around you determines everything after that. There is no training for this in any degree program.
6. Knowing when to leave is a strategy too. Recognizing when a culture has a ceiling and deciding to find a better one is not giving up. It is a calculated move.
One additional pattern that came up and deserves its own mention: female leaders who do not lift up other women. This is sometimes called the queen bee dynamic, and it is real. The Process Engineer watched a female executive come in, remove the existing executive team, which was gender-balanced, and surround herself with male leaders. But this dynamic does not start with the women who exhibit it. It starts with organizations that signal, implicitly or explicitly, that there is only room for one woman at the top. When scarcity is the message, some women protect their position by pulling the ladder up behind them. The solution is not to blame those women. It is to dismantle the culture that drives this behavior.
Every one of the six rules outlined above showed up in the conversations below. None of them are taught in school. All of them are learnable.
Why This Work Matters to Me
This is not research I did from the outside looking in.
I spent years in environmental consulting, working my way up through a field that is overwhelmingly male at the top. I know what it costs to figure out the unwritten rules alone, on your own time, after you have already paid for not knowing them.
At a former company, I chaired a women’s leadership group. I sat in rooms with talented, credible, accomplished women and repeatedly saw the same patterns. Women doing everything right and working harder than anyone around them. Unable to understand why their results were not translating into advancement the way they should.
Along with my passion for strategy, culture, and people, that work is why I left corporate to build Ascend Strategy Co., and it is why I spent the last several months sitting down with women across a range of technical and scientific fields to understand what they have been navigating.
What I found confirmed everything I had already lived.
But before we continue, I also want to be clear about something. This is not an indictment of men. Some of the greatest advocates and sponsors of my career have been men who saw my potential and used their influence to open doors for me. Same for the women I interviewed. The problem is not that men are working against women. The problem is that the system was built in a way that advantages men by default, often without anyone realizing it. And in my own experience, some of my most damaging career moments came not from men but from other women. That is not an excuse to point fingers. It is a reason to do this work. Women who advance need to bring others with them, not leave them behind.
The Numbers
Women make up just 26% of the US STEM workforce; that number has barely moved in over two decades. In leadership roles, it drops to 25% globally. The gender promotion gap in STEM sits at 16%, meaning that men are 16% more likely to be promoted into management roles than their female colleagues. And 35% of women with STEM degrees leave their fields within five years, compared to 26% of men.
Over the course of a career, the pay gap for college-educated women costs them more than $800,000 in lost earnings compared to their male peers.
These are real numbers, and sadly, they are the backdrop against which every woman I spoke with has built her career.
The Women I Talked To
These women are not early-career professionals still finding their footing. They are not people who coasted, complained, or failed to deliver.
The Industrial Hygiene Program Manager began in the Navy as a nuclear mechanic when women made up 7% of that workforce. She spent years teaching herself executive communication because nobody else did. Now she teaches what she has learned to the women on her team.
The Senior Sustainability Consultant set a goal and quadrupled it. Mid-year, her company decided the metric no longer mattered. The goalposts did not just move. They disappeared. As other staff have left the organization, her role has expanded, and her title has not.
The Senior Environmental Program Manager ran her own business before joining a consulting firm, where she has been promoted multiple times. She is the kind of leader her staff would follow anywhere. She brings them into the field, develops them, and genuinely loves the work. Now, after twenty years, she is being asked to expand her responsibilities and build a book of business, something she has never had to do in her entire career.
The Regional Manager built the majority of her nearly twenty-year career on relationships, helped a colleague get hired (and helped her negotiate a higher salary than she had asked for), and was eventually pushed out by that same person. Her explanation: “I guess I did not play the game appropriately.”
The Certified Industrial Hygienist has fifteen years of experience in the field and a CIH and CSP certification. The one thing nobody prepared her for: personalities drive the workforce more than performance does. That is, the people with the strongest ones often dominate the conversation and the direction.
The Senior Environmental Scientist had a boss who promoted her without her having to ask. When he retired, so did her momentum. She spent the next year and a half documenting her own workload just to get one hire approved to alleviate the burnout.
The Business Owner helped grow her division from $36,000 to $600,000 in revenue and was pushed out along with the colleague who helped build it. She was written up for submitting a timesheet on the day it was due, not because it was late, but because she was the last one to get it in. She eventually left and built something of her own.
The Senior Operations Manager moved from one division to another at a large global healthcare company and left behind a boss who was helping to build her career. Her new manager works his team hard to make himself look good, limits her visibility with leadership, and takes credit for her output. She is working more hours than ever. Her results are not reaching the people who need to see them.
The Global Team Lead built a team of nearly 50 people from the ground up at a global financial organization. Then she was tasked with laying off a significant portion of that team, with little support from leadership or HR. She is now considering leaving, not because she failed, but because she is exhausted from building things that others get to dismantle.
The National SVP had a track record that included ten years of “exceeds performance” reviews, correlated with progressive raises and promotions. She had recently been recognized by leadership for her outstanding results and was told she was ready for expanded responsibility. New leadership came in shortly after. In less than a year, she was pushed out.
The Global Logistics Director spent twenty years in an industry where women hold less than 10% of the leadership roles. She watched her good ideas get dismissed, and the one leader who advocated for women get quietly pushed out. She walked into a meeting one day and found HR already on the phone. Her honest reflection afterward was that she had not pushed back enough. The moment she got to her car, she felt completely free.
The Process Engineer spent nearly twenty years at a large global financial institution before being laid off in what leadership called a restructuring but was really just a reduction in force. A new female executive came in, replaced the leadership team with male executives, and targeted people with tenure. The culture shifted from collaborative to what she described as "execution theater." When she tried to move to another division, another executive blocked the transfer and buried her in her old responsibilities under a new title.
The Senior Environmental Services Manager built her career servicing regional and national clients and navigating some of the most male-dominated field environments in the industry. She learned early that reading the room, picking her battles, and knowing which relationships were worth investing in was just as important as technical expertise. Her philosophy: collect data, make the case, and know your value.
Thirteen women. All accomplished. All credible. All navigating a system that was not built with them in mind.
What Their Stories Actually Show
The sayings are everywhere.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”
But knowing the saying is not the same as knowing what to do with it.
On communicating like a leader: The Industrial Hygiene Project Manager stopped explaining how she got to a decision and started leading with the point, then anticipating every question that would follow. That shift helped her launch and turn around a $2.5 million project in six months. The National SVP learned the same lesson the hard way during a meeting with the CFO where she was asked to stop explaining a concept in front of the entire C-suite. Leading with the conclusion feels unnatural when you have been trained to show your work. But the higher up you go, the less patience anyone has for the buildup. Saying less, and saying it first, is what gets you heard. She got good at it, and credits the ability with much of her career growth. It is also not enough on its own.
On sponsorship: The Senior Environmental Scientist had one boss who promoted her without her having to ask. When he retired, that protection disappeared. She spent more than a year documenting her workload just to get one additional hire approved. The Senior Operations Manager is living the same reality in real time. One manager saw her. The next one is using her. The National SVP had just been told she was ready for more. New leadership came in and pushed her out in less than a year, not because her work changed, but because she lost her sponsor.
On advocating for yourself: The Global Logistics Director's most honest reflection after being let go was not about the company. It was about herself. She had not pushed back enough. She knew it while it was happening and did not have the framework to do anything differently. The Regional Manager chaired an event, planned every detail, and executed it from start to finish. Someone else received the recognition. She thought about saying something and did not. Advocating for yourself in real time, without burning a relationship or starting a conflict, is a skill. It can be taught. Most women learn it the hard way, or not at all.
Visibility is a strategy, not a byproduct of good work: The Senior Environmental Scientist held her division together so effectively that leadership did not believe she was overloaded until she documented every task in writing. The Senior Operations Manager is delivering results that her manager is presenting as his own. Nobody above him knows she is the one doing it. Good work does not speak for itself. If you are not building visibility deliberately, someone else is benefiting from it.
On personalities: The Certified Industrial Hygienist identified this as the one consistent thread across fifteen years and multiple companies. Technical skills got her in the door. Reading and navigating the people around her determined everything after that. The Senior Operations Manager is experiencing the same dynamic in reverse. Her manager is not technically strong. He is politically skilled. He keeps his high performers visible enough to make him look good and invisible enough that they cannot threaten him. That is personalities driving outcomes.
On knowing when to leave: The Senior Sustainability Consultant hit every target and still had the finish line moved. The Regional Manager got pushed out by someone she had gone to bat for. The National SVP was pushed out months after being told she was ready for more. The Global Team Lead is weighing whether an organization that hands her the hardest tasks and the least support is worth staying in. The Business Owner saw clearly that her environment was not going to take her where she wanted to go and left. Recognizing when a culture has a ceiling is not failure. It is data.
This is the gap. Not effort. Not talent. Not even ambition. The gap is strategy.
Specifically, the kind of strategy that men in technical fields absorb informally, through mentors who look like them, through being included in conversations women are not invited to, through sponsors who advocate for them in rooms they are not in.
I experienced this firsthand. A former manager took his male direct reports on a fishing trip twice a year. No women were invited. Not because anyone said women were excluded. Because it simply never occurred to anyone to include them. Those trips were not just vacations. They were relationship-building, career conversations, and access, all wrapped in something that looked like recreation. That is how the informal curriculum gets taught. And that is exactly what women in most technical fields are missing.
Women in STEM get the technical training. They get the credentials. They get the work ethic. What they do not get is the informal curriculum that actually determines who moves up.
The System Was Not Built for Women. That Is Not an Excuse to Stay Stuck.
The problem is real. Women in technical and scientific fields are promoted less, paid less, and held to a higher standard of proof than their male peers. A woman who makes a mistake in a room full of men carries that mistake longer and harder than any man in the same room would.
Having coached and worked alongside women in technical fields over the last decade, I have watched companies quietly and consistently pass over women for leadership without anyone naming it as a pattern. Most of those companies did not even know they were doing it. That is what makes it so hard to fight. It is not a policy. It is a culture. And cultures do not change on their own.
Waiting for companies to fix their cultures is not a strategy.
The women in these conversations who advanced did not wait. They figured out, usually the hard way and usually alone, that the game has rules nobody writes down. They learned to build visibility intentionally, not accidentally. They learned that sponsorship matters more than performance. They learned to speak up in rooms that were not designed for them to lead.
They learned it late. They learned it painfully. And most of them said some version of the same thing: I wish I had learned this sooner.
The Real Cost of Figuring This Out Alone
The $800,000 pay gap is the financial number. That is how much more a college-educated man will earn over his career compared to a woman in the same field. But the real cost runs deeper than money.
It is the energy spent decoding a system that defies logic.
It is the opportunity that went to someone else while you were still trying to figure out the politics.
It is the years of wondering if you were doing something wrong, when the rules of the game handicap you from the start.
It is the mental load that never fully turns off.
It is the meeting you replayed on the drive home, wondering if you said it right.
It is the promotion cycle you prepared for and did not get, with no real explanation.
It is the slow erosion of confidence in someone who started out certain of her abilities.
It is the career that stalled a decade too early.
It is the VP title that went to someone less qualified but better connected.
It is the seat at the table that was never offered because nobody thought to offer it.
It is the expertise that never got the platform it deserved.
And it is the cost the world does not see.
What is that cost? Many women in STEM do not choose their fields solely for the paycheck. They choose them to make a difference. Every year they spend navigating a system that was not built for them is a year their full contribution is muted.
One of the women I spoke with shared the best piece of advice she ever received: this job will never love you back. It will take everything you give it, and then some.
Most of the women in this article loved their work. That is not a weakness. That is exactly why they stayed as long as they did, gave as much as they did, and absorbed more than they should have.
Loving your job is not the problem. Loving it without a strategy is.
You can care deeply about your work and still know your worth. You can be loyal and still have boundaries. You can want to make a difference and still demand to be compensated fairly for making it.
The women I talked to are not outliers. They are a sample of what is happening across environmental consulting, engineering, geoscience, healthcare, finance, corporate operations, and every other technical or scientific field where women are underrepresented at the top. They are talented. They are credible. They work hard. And they have been navigating a system without a guidebook for their entire careers.
That is exactly what I am here to change.
What Comes Next
I built The Ascend Method for exactly this reason, and I am opening a new case study group this month to support women who want to overcome the challenges that I have discussed in this article.
It is a 12-week program for high-performing women in technical and scientific fields who are doing the work, hitting the targets, yet still not moving forward as they should. We build your visibility strategy, identify who in your orbit can sponsor you, and give you a concrete plan for advancing in the role you want, not just the one you have.
If any of what you read here sounds familiar, I would like to talk.
Book a discovery call with me.
A sincere thank you to the thirteen women who shared their stories with honesty and generosity. This article exists because of them.
References
1. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Special Topics Annual Report: Women in STEM. eeoc.gov/special-topics-annual-report-women-stem
2. STEM Women. Women in STEM Statistics: Progress and Challenges. stemwomen.com (2026). Women now make up 26% of the STEM workforce.
3. Journal of Corporate Finance. Gender promotion gap in STEM calculated at 16%. Referenced in Brighterly STEM Gender Gap Statistics 2025–2026. brighterly.com/blog/gender-gap-in-stem
4. Society of Women Engineers (2023). 35% of women with STEM degrees leave their fields within five years, compared to 26% of men. Referenced in STEMblazers Women in STEM Statistics 2025. stemblazers.org
5. Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). The Impact of Equal Pay on Poverty and the Economy. IWPR #C455 (2017). College-educated women lose nearly $800,000 over the course of their careers due to the gender wage gap. iwpr.org
6. Economic Policy Institute (EPI). What is the gender pay gap and is it real? epi.org. Corroborates IWPR $800,000 lifetime earnings gap figure for college-educated women.
7. National Science Foundation. The STEM Labor Force: Scientists, Engineers, and Skilled Technical Workers. NSB-2024-5. ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20245
Ascend Strategy Co works with high-performing women in STEM, technical consulting, healthcare, finance, corporate operations, and scientific fields who are ready to stop waiting and start advancing
Seven Decisions That Make or Break an Environmental Firm Acquisition
It All Begins Here
And Why the Order Matters
The Integration Playbook | Article 1 of 9
Environmental consulting M&A has never been more active. Mid-market firms are acquiring specialty practices, private equity is rolling up regional players, and the largest firms are using acquisitions to enter new technical markets faster than they can build organically.
And yet, the majority of these deals fail to deliver the value that justified them.
Not because the firms were wrong for each other. Not because the price was off. Because the decisions that determine whether an acquisition succeeds or fails are not financial decisions. They are operational, cultural, and strategic decisions, and most acquiring firms make them too late, in the wrong order, or not at all.
There are seven of them. They compound. Get the first one wrong, and you make the second one harder. Defer all of them until after close, and you spend the next two years managing the fallout instead of capturing the value you paid for.
But before the seven decisions, there is a precondition that makes them all possible: due diligence.
The Precondition: Due Diligence
Most firms do rigorous financial due diligence and superficial cultural due diligence. They can tell you the target firm's utilization rate and aged receivables. They cannot tell you whether the principals trust each other, how decisions actually get made, or whether the two firms share a common view of what good client service looks like.
That gap is where integration problems begin. Every one of the seven decisions below is easier or harder depending on what was learned, or not learned, before closing.
There is also a structural reason why due diligence falls short: confidentiality requirements limit how much either side can share before the contract is signed. Leadership teams are making consequential decisions based on incomplete information, and both sides know it. The learning that matters most often happens after close, when it is already too late to factor it into the deal structure.
Due diligence is also a two-way process. The acquired firm is evaluating the acquirer just as carefully. Will our culture survive inside this organization? What happens to our people and our brand? Do we trust this leadership team to do what they say they will? What does life look like in year three, after the earnout ends?
Those questions rarely get answered fully before signing. When they go unanswered, they surface later, at exactly the moment the combined firm can least afford the distraction.
Article Two in this series will examine due diligence in full, from both sides of the table.
A Note on Private Equity
If a private equity firm is involved, every one of the seven decisions becomes more complex.
In the AEC space, most strategic acquirers conduct integration activities over roughly a year. Some things move fast by necessity: insurance, benefits, email systems, and legal entities. The rest requires learning that can only occur after the contract is signed, because pre-close confidentiality limits what either side can share. Integration cannot be fully planned in advance. It has to be discovered in stages.
PE-backed acquirers often lack that runway. Hold period economics compress the timeline, whether the firm is ready or not. Decisions that a strategic acquirer might work through methodically get forced into 90-day sprints. That pressure distorts priorities and shortens the window for getting things right.
Brand decisions carry additional weight in PE-backed roll-ups, where the long-term strategy often involves absorbing multiple firms under a single platform brand. Principals who sold may not have fully understood that implication when they signed. Resentment follows.
Incentive structures are also split in PE environments. Principals who received liquidity at close are financially insulated in ways that the rest of the acquired workforce is not. That divide surfaces quickly and affects retention, morale, and client continuity on both sides.
The framework below applies to all acquisition types. Where PE dynamics create specific complications, they are noted.
The Seven Decisions, In Order
These are not a checklist to run simultaneously. They are a sequence to be run in an ideal order, though each acquisition can also present unique circumstances. Each decision creates the conditions for the next.
Decision One: Brand
Whose name goes on the door, and when does the old name come down?
This is not a marketing question. It is a revenue question. In environmental consulting, the acquired firm's brand often carries real market equity: agency relationships, a technical reputation, a regional identity that clients associate with the people who built it.
It is also one of the most emotionally charged decisions in any acquisition. Founders and principals have spent years, sometimes decades, building a name. Letting it go does not feel like a business decision. It feels personal.
The firms that handle this well surface the brand conversation during due diligence, not aggressively, but deliberately. They test the other side's expectations and work toward alignment before close. By Day One, both sides understand what happens to the name, on what timeline, and with what client communication plan attached.
The firms that struggle avoid the conversation because they fear losing the deal. That fear is not irrational. Push too hard on brand during negotiations, and the selling firm walks. So, acquiring firms defer, tell themselves it can be sorted out later, and close the deal with the most loaded question still unanswered.
Later is harder. What felt manageable before close becomes an entrenched internal negotiation with real stakes on both sides. The discussion lingers. Clients sense the instability. The integration drags.
Article Three will examine the brand decision in full, including what both sides need to bring to that conversation and how the firms that get it right structure the transition.
Decision Two: Talent Retention
The acquired firm's best people are the assets. They are also typically the first ones to leave.
Uncertainty moves faster than communication in a post-close environment. If principals, project managers, and technical leads do not hear a clear story about their roles, compensation, and future within the first days after close, they fill the silence themselves. The story they tell themselves is rarely optimistic.
Stambaugh Ness, which advises AEC firms on integration, notes that fear of the unknown, concerns about job security, and potential cultural clashes can trigger a mass exodus of valuable personnel after an acquisition. In a relationship-driven business where a senior hydrogeologist or remediation specialist carries years of client trust, losing that person does not just affect morale. It affects revenue.
The employee communication plan needs to be ready before Day One, not drafted in response to the first resignation.
Article Four will examine talent retention in full, including what the communication plan needs to contain and how to structure the first 90 days.
Decision Three: Client Communication
Who tells the clients, what do they say, and how fast does it happen?
The answer to the first question should almost always be: the person who has the relationship. Not a press release. Not a letter from the acquiring firm's CEO whom the client has never met.
A PwC study on M&A customer experience found that more than half of executives identified failure to retain customers as the primary reason their deals underperformed. In environmental consulting, where a client's trust in a firm is often in specific individuals, that risk is acute. A client who learns about an acquisition from someone other than their primary contact feels like an afterthought. In a competitive market, that feeling has consequences.
Article Five will examine client communication in full, including sequencing, messaging, and handling the clients most at risk.
Decision Four: Organizational Structure
Regional or practice-based? Or some combination of both?
This is where most integration discussions start. It should not be. Structure is downstream of brand, people, and client relationships. Getting those three right creates the conditions in which a rational structure decision is possible.
The core tension is this: a regional structure is built to capture market share. A practice structure is built to capture margin and defend technical differentiation. When the acquiring firm and the acquired firm organize around different principles, one has to give. That decision is almost never made cleanly, and the firms that defer it tend to bear the costs of both models while capturing the full benefits of neither.
That statement deserves more than an assertion. Article Six will substantiate it with AEC-specific financial benchmarking data and examine the three structural models firms use when their clients and their acquisition’s clients buy differently.
Decision Five: Pricing and Rate Alignment
The two firms almost certainly bill at different rates. Harmonizing them is unavoidable. How and when you do it determines whether you retain the clients and the people you just paid to acquire.
The client-facing risk is real. Raise rates too quickly on the acquired firm's clients, and you signal the acquisition was about extracting margin rather than delivering value. Absorb the acquired firm's higher rates into your own structure, and you risk eroding the premium positioning they spent years building.
But the internal risk is equally significant and less often discussed. Billing rates in AEC firms are tied to salary multipliers. When two firms merge and begin working staff from both sides on the same accounts, people start to see the math. Someone discovers they are billing at the same rate as a colleague but earning meaningfully less, or vice versa. That conversation happens whether leadership intends it or not, and it directly affects the retention problem you are already managing in Decision Two.
Rate harmonization is not just a pricing decision. It is an employee relations decision with client-facing consequences. Article Seven will examine it on both dimensions.
Decision Six: Ownership and Incentives
The principals who built the acquired firm likely had equity, profit participation, or both. Once they are inside your structure, that changes.
Retention packages help, but they address the symptom rather than the underlying question: Does the combined firm's incentive structure reward the behavior you actually need? Cross-selling, client stewardship, knowledge transfer, and long-term relationship investment require a different kind of motivation than utilization targets and local billing goals.
If the incentive structure rewards the wrong things, that is what you will get. And the principals who matter most, the ones whose client relationships justified the acquisition price, will find that the financial rationale for staying has quietly eroded.
Article Eight will examine ownership and incentive structures in full, including how PE-backed structures create specific risks that standard retention packages do not address.
Decision Seven: Systems and Back Office
Project accounting, timekeeping, CRM, proposal platforms. These need to be integrated, but they should come last.
System migrations are disruptive. They create errors, change the way people work, and generate client-facing problems when invoices change format or project history becomes inaccessible. Doing this too early, before the more important decisions are settled, compounds disruption at precisely the moment you most need stability.
Back-office integration is more of a sequencing problem than a technical one. The firms that handle it well treat it as the final phase of integration, not the first visible sign that a deal has closed.
Article Nine will examine systems integration in full.
The Order Is the Strategy
None of these decisions exists in isolation. Brand shapes how clients receive the employee changes. Employee retention determines whether client communication works. Client stability creates the conditions in which a rational structure decision is possible. Pricing follows structure. Incentives follow pricing. Systems follow everything.
Firms that treat integration as a checklist, running all seven decisions simultaneously in a compressed sprint, tend to get most of them wrong. Firms that understand the sequence and make each decision with the next one in mind protect the value they paid for and have a genuine shot at creating more.
The articles that follow take each decision in turn: what good looks like, the most common failure modes, and what firms that get it right do differently.
That starts with due diligence, from both sides of the table.
References
Note on sourcing: Integration timeline reflects practitioner experience in the AEC and environmental consulting space. AEC-specific financial benchmarking data referenced in Articles Six and Seven draws on Zweig Group's Financial Performance Report of AEC Firms (2025) and EFCG's proprietary industry database.
Bain & Company. (2023). M&A Practitioners Survey. Bain & Company, Inc.
PwC Consumer Intelligence Series. Customer Experience in Mergers and Acquisitions. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/customer-experience-in-mergers-and-acquisitions.html
Stambaugh Ness. (2025). Building a Strong Foundation: Employee Retention Strategies for AEC Acquisitions. stambaughness.com
PSMJ Resources. (2025). Before the Numbers: Why Cultural and Strategic Fit Must Come First in AEC M&A. psmj.com
Zweig Group. (2025). Financial Performance Report of AEC Firms. zweiggroup.com
Environmental Financial Consulting Group (EFCG). AEC Industry Overview and Proprietary Benchmarking Database. efcg.com
The Acquisition Playbook: Why Specialty Firms Get Bought and Generalists Get Left Behind
It All Begins Here
Something has shifted in how environmental consulting firms get valued and acquired. Specialty firms are attracting buyer interest. Generalists, even well-run ones, are getting less attention. The pattern has been building for nearly a decade. Understanding what changed, and why, matters whether you are planning a sale or not.
Era One: Scale Was the Strategy (2010 to 2015)
Go back ten to fifteen years, and the M&A logic in environmental consulting was simple: bigger meant better. The dominant strategy was consolidation at the top, with large generalist firms absorbing other large generalist firms to gain headcount, geographic reach, and contract capacity.
The numbers tell the story. Between 2010 and 2015, the largest environmental consulting firms aggressively consolidated through megamergers that reshaped the industry. AECOM acquired URS Corporation in 2014 at an enterprise value of approximately six billion dollars, creating a firm with more than 95,000 employees operating in 150 countries. WSP acquired Parsons Brinckerhoff from Balfour Beatty for $1.24 billion. Arcadis acquired Hyder Consulting for £296 million. Ramboll purchased Environ, adding more than 1,500 environmental and health science specialists in 21 countries. CH2M and Jacobs were each making acquisitions of their own during this period before Jacobs ultimately acquired CH2M in 2017 for $3.27 billion.
The pitch to clients and investors was the same across all of these deals: full service, global reach, one firm for everything. The pitch to employees was stability through scale. The pitch to sellers was a premium for size.
What nobody questioned at the time was whether scale alone created strategic advantage or whether it simply created complexity.
Era Two: Specialty Is the Strategy (2018 to Present)
The logic has largely flipped.
Private equity entered environmental consulting in a serious way beginning around 2018 and brought a different set of questions to the table. Rather than asking how many service lines a firm could offer, buyers started asking what a firm was known for. Rather than assembling generalist scale, acquirers began building portfolios of recognized specialists.
The roll-up platforms that have emerged in the current era look nothing like the megamergers of Era One, and the most active ones are operating right here in the U.S.
Montrose Environmental Group, originally backed by Oaktree Capital and now publicly traded on the NYSE, has completed more than 50 acquisitions since its founding in 2012 by targeting niche specialists in air measurement, laboratory analytics, PFAS treatment technology, and emergency response. Montrose did not grow by becoming a generalist. It grew by assembling a portfolio of firms that were each known for something specific.
Verdantas, backed by Sterling Investment Partners, has taken the same approach at a faster pace. Founded in 2020, Verdantas completed 18 acquisitions and grew to more than 1,450 professionals in just four years by acquiring founder-owned firms specializing in environmental science, water resources, groundwater, geotechnical engineering, and remediation.
True Environmental, backed by Halle Capital, is building its platform by partnering with founder and employee-owned environmental consulting and engineering firms across the U.S. and Canada, providing capital and management support to accelerate growth while facilitating ownership transitions.
Trinity Consultants has built its platform through more than 40 acquisitions since 2008, expanding from its core in air quality consulting into acoustics, water and ecology, and industrial automation. Each acquisition added a specific technical discipline, not generalist headcount.
None of these acquirers are buying scale. They are buying specificity.
A 2025 market analysis by Environment Analyst tracking 495 deals from 2019 to 2024 confirmed what practitioners already suspected: the environmental and sustainability consulting sector is a seller’s market, with acquisition multiples on an upward trajectory, and buyer demand concentrating specifically on niche players.
Why the Logic Shifted
The change is not arbitrary. It reflects something real about how sophisticated clients make buying decisions.
When a municipality needs PFAS remediation, they are not looking for a firm that can do everything. They are looking for the firm that has handled the most complex PFAS sites. When a manufacturer is facing environmental litigation and needs expert testimony, they are not looking for a generalist. They are looking for the firm whose experts have testified on exactly this type of contamination. When a mining company needs geotechnical support, they call the firm that has built its reputation on that specific problem.
Clients hire confidence, not capability. And confidence comes from recognized expertise in a defined domain.
Strategic acquirers understand this. They are not buying firms to add service lines they already have. They are buying firms to acquire a reputation they cannot build on their own in a reasonable timeframe. A firm that is recognized as the go-to resource for a specific contaminant type, client sector, or regulatory context has something an acquirer cannot replicate internally without years of investment.
That is what commands a premium.
What Makes a Firm Worth Acquiring
The firms drawing serious buyer interest in the current era share a few common traits, and none of them are about size.
Recognizable position. Buyers want to acquire something they cannot build quickly on their own. That means your firm needs to be known for something specific, whether that is a contaminant type, a client sector, a service methodology, or a geography. If someone in your target market cannot immediately name what your firm is known for, that is a positioning problem that affects your value whether you are planning to sell or not.
Recurring revenue. Firms with long-term compliance work, multi-year contracts, and repeat clients command significantly higher multiples than those dependent on one-off project work. Recurring revenue gives a buyer the ability to forecast cash flow with confidence, which dramatically reduces their perceived risk.
Transferable client relationships. Firms that are overly dependent on founder relationships face what valuation professionals call a key-person discount, which can reduce acquisition value by 20 to 40%. If your clients follow you personally rather than the firm, a buyer is not acquiring a business. They are acquiring a retention risk.
Intellectual property. Proprietary frameworks, methodologies, tools, or certifications that a competitor cannot easily replicate add meaningful value. They represent something a buyer genuinely cannot purchase anywhere else.
The Strategic Lesson for Firm Leaders
You do not need to be planning a sale to benefit from thinking like an acquirable firm.
The disciplines that make a firm attractive to buyers are the same disciplines that drive organic growth, higher win rates, and better margins. Clear positioning reduces your cost of business development because the right clients find you. Recurring revenue smooths cash flow and reduces the pressure to chase every opportunity. Transferable client relationships build institutional resilience that survives leadership transitions. Recognized expertise in a defined domain allows you to charge more and compete less on price.
The firms that have built real momentum in this industry made deliberate choices about where to focus. Geosyntec built its name in solid waste and geotechnical work. Brown and Caldwell focuses almost exclusively on water and environmental and has for decades. Terracon built its reputation on geotechnical expertise. AEI and Partner built dominant positions in environmental due diligence for commercial real estate. Apex has been quietly building a water practice that is growing fast. None of them got where they are by trying to serve every client in every sector.
The acquisition market is simply rewarding a decision those firms made long before any buyer came knocking.
The question worth asking is whether your firm is making that decision now.
Positioning strategy is one of the highest-leverage conversations a firm can have. If you are thinking through where your firm should focus, or how to build the kind of recognized expertise that drives both growth and enterprise value, I would love to connect.
References
AECOM. "AECOM to Acquire URS Corporation for US$56.31 Per Share in Cash and Stock." Business Wire, July 13, 2014.
WSP Global. "WSP to Acquire Parsons Brinckerhoff." Globe Newswire, September 3, 2014.
Arcadis. "ARCADIS Completes Hyder and Callison Acquisitions." Arcadis, October 20, 2014.
Ramboll. "Ramboll Acquires US-Based ENVIRON to Enter Global Elite Within the Environmental and Health Consultancy Market." PR Newswire, December 17, 2014.
Jacobs Engineering Group. "Jacobs to Acquire CH2M." Engineering News-Record, August 2, 2017.
Montrose Environmental Group. SEC S-1 Filing, 2020. Company press releases and investor presentations, 2019 to 2025.
Sterling Investment Partners. "Sterling Investment Partners Acquires Verdantas." PR Newswire, May 7, 2024.
True Environmental. Acquisition announcements via Business Wire, 2024 to 2025. Including Triton Environmental, GKY & Associates, Great Ecology & Environments, and Ensero Solutions.
Trinity Consultants. Mergers and Acquisitions overview. Accessed April 2025.
Environment Analyst. "M&A Opportunities in the Environmental and Sustainability Consulting Sector." Data pack covering 495 deals, 2019 to 2024. Published 2025.
Culture isn’t a Perk, It’s a Strategy
It All Begins Here
A note for environmental consulting and engineering firms, and for any organization trying to grow in a market where talent is the product.
The environmental consulting and engineering industry is booming. The U.S. market grew at nearly 10 % annually over the past three years, expanding to more than 27 billion dollars in 2024. Global demand for environmental services is projected to grow steadily through the end of the decade, driven by regulatory complexity, infrastructure investment, and corporate sustainability commitments.
That growth sounds like good news. And it is, until you try to staff it.
What the Market Is Telling Us
The environmental consulting sector is facing a talent problem that is structural, not cyclical. An aging workforce is retiring faster than it can be replaced. The pipeline of new environmental scientists, engineers, and geologists is competitive. And the firms that rely on compensation alone to recruit and retain are discovering that it is an increasingly expensive and unreliable strategy.
The firms pulling ahead are doing something different. They are treating culture as a competitive asset, building organizations where people feel ownership, purpose, and genuine investment in the outcome. And the results show up in the numbers that matter most: retention rates, client satisfaction scores, and revenue growth.
Not convinced yet? Consultants surveyed by The Barton Partnership said the top reason they would consider leaving their current firm was higher pay. But close behind? Better company culture.
And here is what the data actually shows about what drives people to stay. According to Aon's 2025 Employee Sentiment Study, after compensation, the top factors influencing employee choices are:
A fun, engaging place to work (21 percent)
Strong value fit (20 percent)
Support for wellbeing (18 percent)
Flexible working (17 percent)
Nearly a third of that list has nothing to do with pay. It is about feeling like you belong somewhere that reflects who you are.
For environmental firms, this is especially true. The people drawn to this work are often mission-driven. They studied ecology, hydrology, environmental science, and engineering because they wanted to do something that mattered. When your firm's culture actually reflects that, when it walks the talk on purpose, you become a magnet for exactly the people you want.
Who's Getting It Right
AEI Consultants: Culture as an Executive Priority
AEI Consultants has been employee-owned since 2012. But what distinguishes them is not just the ESOP structure. AEI has a Chief Resilience Officer whose formal mandate includes guiding the firm's culture and organizational sustainability. That title, and the intentionality behind it, signals something important: at AEI, culture is not managed informally or delegated to HR. It is an executive-level responsibility with a named leader accountable for it.
Holly Neber, who formerly served as AEI's President and CEO and who now holds that role, brings more than 25 years of environmental consulting experience to it. She represents AEI in the industry, provides training on environmental due diligence and leadership, and serves on boards and committees that shape the profession. The Chief Resilience Officer role reflects a firm that understands culture and organizational health as long-term strategic investments, not short-term fixes.
I have watched Holly and AEI grow and flourish over the past decade. Seeing how intentionally they have built their culture, how clearly it shows up in the way their people talk about the firm and the work, and the growth they have experienced along the way has been an incredible thing to witness.
SWCA Environmental Consultants: 25 Years of Proof
SWCA Environmental Consultants has been employee-owned for more than 25 years. That longevity is not incidental. It reflects a sustained commitment to a model that aligns the interests of the firm with the interests of the people doing the work.
SWCA has received consistent recognition as a Best Place to Work across multiple markets. Their retention numbers reflect what happens when employees have genuine ownership in the outcome. And their growth reflects what happens when a firm is built on a foundation that clients and employees both trust.
If you are wondering whether the ownership culture at firms like SWCA and AEI is actually driving retention outcomes, the research says yes, decisively. According to the National Center for Employee Ownership, voluntary quit rates at ESOP companies are approximately one-third of the national average. A Rutgers University study found that employee-owned companies retained jobs at a four-to-one rate compared to non-employee-owned counterparts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Median job tenure at ESOP firms is 8.5 years, three years longer than at other companies. And nearly 80 percent of ESOP company leaders believe their ownership structure gives them a competitive edge in attracting and retaining top talent.
That is not a soft benefit. That is a structural advantage in a market where replacing an experienced environmental professional takes time and money that most firms underestimate.
Tetra Tech: Culture Built Around Excellence
Tetra Tech takes a different approach. They are not employee-owned in the ESOP sense, but they have built a culture around a specific and clearly articulated value: technical rigor. That clarity of identity attracts people who care deeply about doing excellent work and creates an environment where excellence is the norm rather than the exception.
The result is an 80 percent repeat client rate and consistent recognition as a top-ranked environmental and sustainability firm. Their clients stay because their people stay, and their people stay because the culture reinforces what drew them to the work in the first place.
Tetra Tech reported 4.2 billion dollars in revenue in 2024, up 15% year over year. That growth is not purely a function of market conditions. It is a function of a firm that has built something people want to be part of and clients want to come back to.
What Culture as a Strategy Actually Looks Like
Firms that treat culture as a strategy do not leave it to chance or assume it will develop on its own. They make deliberate choices about what they value, communicate those values clearly and consistently, and build systems that reinforce them over time.
That might mean an ownership structure like an ESOP, which aligns the financial interests of employees with the long-term health of the firm. It might mean a formal role dedicated to organizational resilience, as AEI has done with their Chief Resilience Officer. It might mean building a culture around a specific professional identity, as Tetra Tech has done with technical rigor.
What it does not look like is a set of values posted on a wall, a one-time offsite, or a benefits package assembled to match competitors. Those things are not culture. They are the surface of culture. The firms that are pulling ahead understand the difference.
The Business Case Is Not Complicated
Culture drives retention. Retention drives institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge drives client relationships. Client relationships drive repeat work. Repeat work drives profitability and growth.
Every link in that chain is measurable. And the firms that have invested in culture as a strategy are outperforming those that have not on almost every dimension, from revenue growth to win rates to employee tenure to client satisfaction.
Think about it from a client's perspective. When you're selecting a firm for a complex environmental permitting project or a multi-year remediation effort, you're not just buying technical expertise. You're betting on a team. You're asking: Will these people care about my project the way I do? Will they still be here in Year 3?
The Bottom Line
The environmental consulting and engineering market will keep growing. Regulatory complexity, PFAS, water scarcity, climate adaptation demands, ESG reporting requirements; all of it is expanding the addressable work.
The question isn't whether there's enough work. The question is whether your firm will have the people to do it, and whether your clients will trust you to do it year after year.
Because the firms winning right now are not simply the ones with the best technical capabilities. They are the ones people actually want to work for. And those firms have figured out something that most leadership teams are still treating as secondary: culture is not a byproduct of a healthy business. It is a driver of one.
If your firm is navigating talent challenges or thinking through how to build a culture that becomes a competitive advantage, I would love to connect.
The Danger of Being Full-Service in Environmental Consulting
It All Begins Here
For years, “full service” has been positioned as a strength in environmental consulting and engineering firms.
More services. More opportunities. More revenue.
In practice, I’ve seen the opposite happen more often than not.
Firms that try to be everything to everyone often struggle to clearly articulate their value, compete effectively, and build real momentum in the market. And the cost of that lack of focus is higher than most teams realize.
What the Market Actually Hears
When a firm calls itself full-service, it's trying to signal capability.
But what clients often hear is:
"We're not known for anything."
"We're not the obvious choice."
"We look like everyone else."
Clients don't just hire capability. They hire confidence.
They want to work with specialists in their problem, not generalists who can "figure it out."
Where It Breaks Down
The risks show up in predictable ways:
Weak positioning. You can't clearly answer: Why you?
Scattered growth efforts. Marketing spreads thin across too many services and industries.
Lower win rates. You're pursuing opportunities that don’t fit, and as a result, you’re losing to firms that feel more aligned with what the client actually needs.
Internal misalignment. Teams pursue different markets without a unified strategy.
What Focus Looks Like in Practice
Golder Associates (now WSP) built its reputation over 60 years around geosciences and mining, developing such deep expertise in mine waste management, geotechnical engineering, and hydrogeology for resource extraction clients that WSP paid $1.1 billion to acquire them in 2021. That kind of valuation doesn’t happen for firms known for everything. It happens for firms known for something.
Geosyntec has spent more than 30 years establishing itself as the go-to firm for solid waste. Many of the waste containment system design methodologies they pioneered in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are today the standards of practice in the field. When a client has a complex landfill challenge, Geosyntec is the name that comes to mind, and that kind of top-of-mind positioning is worth far more than a long service list.
Tetra Tech built its entire identity around water — wastewater, stormwater, drinking water — and stayed relentlessly focused on it. In 2025, they were ranked the #1 U.S. environmental and sustainability consultancy, with the top position in water and waste services. They now have 30,000 employees. Focus didn’t limit their growth; it fueled it.
Apex Companies had a strong base in stormwater management and made a deliberate strategic choice: double down on water. Since 2021, they’ve executed a focused acquisition strategy, bringing in firms specializing in water resources, stormwater compliance, hydrogeology, and water and wastewater treatment. Every acquisition reinforces the same core identity. Having seen this strategy play out up close, the intentionality behind it is what makes it work. The result is a firm building real national scale not by doing everything, but by going deep on one thing.
Terracon has anchored its identity to geotechnical, environmental, facilities, and materials services since 1965, with geotechnical as its clear calling card. That focused positioning has helped them grow to over 7,000 employees, 180+ locations, and nearly $2 billion in revenue. Focus didn’t cap their ceiling. It built it.
Both AEI Consultants and Partner Engineering & Science built their reputations squarely around environmental due diligence for commercial real estate: Phase I and Phase II ESAs, property condition assessments, and transactional risk advisory. Partner has ranked as the #1 environmental due diligence provider in the U.S. for five consecutive years. When a lender or investor needs due diligence, these are two of the top names that come to mind first, a direct result of deliberate focus.
For each of these firms, the formula was the same: go deep in a niche, build unmatched credibility, and let that reputation do the business development.
Focus Doesn’t Mean Limitation
One of the biggest concerns I hear from firm leaders is: “If we focus too much, we’ll miss opportunities.”
In reality, the opposite is almost always true.
Focus creates:
Stronger, clearer messaging
Higher-quality leads from the right clients
Better alignment between marketing and business development
Greater client trust and faster buying decisions
And importantly, it gives you a foundation to expand strategically, rather than reactively.
The Better Question
Instead of "How do we offer more?"
Ask: "Where can we be the best?"
In this market, being known for something specific is worth far more than being able to do a little bit of everything.
Clarity creates momentum. And momentum is what drives growth.
Why Cross-Selling Is So Difficult in Environmental Consulting Firms
It All Begins Here
Cross-selling is often seen as one of the most straightforward paths to growth for environmental consulting firms.
If you already have a trusted client relationship, it should be easier to introduce additional services, right?
In practice, it rarely works that way.
Why It Feels Like It Should Work
Environmental consulting firms often offer a wide range of services.
In theory, clients benefit from working with a single firm that understands their business and can support multiple needs.
More services should mean stronger relationships and more opportunities to grow.
But that assumption overlooks how firms are typically structured and how clients actually make decisions.
Why It Breaks Down
Cross-selling is rarely a sales problem. It is usually a reflection of how the organization is set up.
Most firms build their capabilities over time. New services are added to meet client needs, expand into new areas, or through acquisition.
From the inside, this looks like a broad set of capabilities.
From the outside, it can feel fragmented.
At the same time, value is often defined differently across teams. Those doing the work often emphasize technical expertise, while those selling the work focus on responsiveness or relationships.
Without a shared definition of value, it becomes difficult to tell a consistent story to clients.
Relationships add another layer of complexity. In environmental consulting, they are often built over years and are closely managed. Introducing another team into that relationship can feel risky if there is not confidence in a consistent client experience.
Even when firms encourage cross-selling, structure often works against it. Incentives, ownership, and time constraints make collaboration harder than expected.
And perhaps most simply, clients only know what they have experienced. They do not see the full picture of what a firm can offer.
What Actually Works
Firms that cross-sell effectively approach it less as a sales initiative and more as an outcome of how they understand and serve their clients.
It starts with a clear understanding of client needs.
I have seen teams struggle to collaborate around cross-selling, and I have also seen it work very effectively. The difference is rarely effort. It usually comes down to how well the organization understands the client and how that understanding is shared.
One of the most common challenges is that firms try to introduce services they believe are relevant, rather than grounding those conversations in what the client actually needs.
In many cases, there are different buyers within the same organization, each with their own priorities. A service that makes sense from a technical perspective may not align with how the client defines value.
Cross-selling becomes more effective when it starts with clarity around:
who the decision makers are
what problems they are trying to solve
how success is defined
It also happens naturally within the work itself.
Teams that are close to the client, especially on-site, often see adjacent risks or opportunities first. When they are trained to recognize and raise those observations thoughtfully, it becomes a value-add rather than a sales effort.
For example, a team performing compliance work may identify operational gaps or risks that could be addressed through additional services.
Finally, consistency requires alignment.
Teams need a shared understanding of how the firm defines value, how services connect, and how to introduce those services in a way that feels cohesive.
Without that, cross-selling remains inconsistent.
Closing
Cross-selling is often positioned as a growth strategy.
In reality, it is an outcome.
When a firm has clarity around its value, alignment across its teams, and a structure that supports collaboration, cross-selling becomes much more natural.
Without those elements, it remains difficult, no matter how much effort is put behind it.
Why Environmental Consulting Firms Struggle to Articulate Their Value
It All Begins Here
Environmental consulting firms are filled with deep technical expertise. Yet many still struggle to clearly explain why clients should choose them over competitors.
This is not because the work lacks value. In most cases, the opposite is true. The challenge is that the value has not been clearly defined, aligned, or communicated in a way that resonates with the market.
The Symptom: Everyone Sounds the Same
Many firms describe themselves in similar ways:
high-quality services
experienced professionals
innovative solutions
These statements are not wrong. They are simply not differentiating.
From a client’s perspective, it becomes difficult to understand what truly sets one firm apart from another.
Why This Happens
This challenge is rarely just a marketing issue. It is usually rooted in how the organization understands itself.
Technical Expertise Does Not Translate Easily
Consulting firms are structured around disciplines and service lines. Internally, this makes sense.
Clients, however, are focused on outcomes:
reducing risk
meeting regulatory requirements
keeping projects on schedule
avoiding costly surprises
When firms communicate capabilities instead of outcomes, the value becomes harder to recognize.
Differentiation Has Never Been Clearly Defined
Many firms have strong capabilities, but have never clearly answered: What do we do better than anyone else, and for whom?
Without that clarity, messaging defaults to broad statements that could apply to any competitor.
Firms Try to Serve Too Many Markets
It is common for consulting firms to pursue a wide range of industries and project types.
While this creates flexibility, it can dilute positioning. When a firm tries to be relevant to everyone, it becomes harder to stand out to anyone.
Marketing Is Asked to Solve a Strategic Problem
Marketing teams are often responsible for messaging, but they are working with inputs that are not fully defined.
If leadership has not aligned on priorities, target markets, and differentiators, marketing will naturally revert to generic language.
Why This Becomes Harder as Firms Grow
This challenge often becomes more visible at critical growth points.
As firms reach a certain size and begin to scale, the identity that defined them early on no longer fully supports where they are trying to go. What worked in the beginning can start to create friction as the organization grows.
This is where a more intentional growth strategy becomes essential.
The Identity Shift of Growth
Growth requires firms to make choices.
In some cases, that means narrowing focus. Firms may need to prioritize a smaller set of services or markets where they can truly differentiate, even if it means stepping away from areas that have historically been part of the business.
These decisions can feel uncomfortable. For many smaller firms, they can seem at odds with the values that led founders to build the company in the first place.
Value Drives Growth
At the same time, growth is ultimately shaped by where value is created.
Firms need to understand:
where their strongest client relationships exist
which services generate the most meaningful margins
where they have a clear competitive advantage
Strategy becomes a process of aligning the organization around those realities.
This sometimes means letting go of services that are not performing or are no longer strategic.
A System, Not a Set of Decisions
Decisions about services, markets, and growth cannot be made in isolation.
They require a holistic view of the organization, including:
Strategy
Operations
Client relationships
Competitive dynamics
Without that perspective, firms can unintentionally create new challenges while trying to solve existing ones.
What Clients Are Actually Looking For
Clients are not evaluating consulting firms in abstract terms. They are trying to answer a practical question: Can this firm help me solve my problem better than the alternatives?
The firms that stand out tend to communicate:
the clients and industries they understand deeply
the problems they are best equipped to solve
the outcomes they consistently deliver
Clarity in these areas makes it much easier for clients to recognize when a firm is the right fit.
The Impact of Clarity
When a firm clearly articulates its value, it shows up across the organization:
business development becomes more focused
proposals become more compelling
teams align more easily around shared priorities
clients better understand why they should engage
This is not just a marketing improvement. It is a strategic one.
Stepping Back to See It Clearly
One of the reasons this challenge persists is that organizations are often too close to their own work to see it clearly.
Leaders are focused on growth and delivery. Teams are focused on execution. Marketing is translating complex expertise into external messaging.
Without stepping back, it is difficult to see where the real differentiators lie.
The firms that take the time to ask these questions often discover that their strongest advantages were already there. They simply had not been clearly defined.
Closing
Many environmental consulting firms are doing excellent work for their clients. The opportunity is not to change the work, but to clarify how that work is understood, communicated, and aligned across the organization.
That clarity is often what turns strong capabilities into meaningful growth.
An Introduction to Ascend Strategy Co.
It All Begins Here
A Career Shaped Across the Industry
Over the past two decades, I’ve had the opportunity to work across many parts of the environmental consulting and sustainability industry. I’ve spent time in technical environments, operations, business development, marketing, and growth leadership, and along the way I’ve had the privilege of working with incredibly talented engineers, scientists, and industry professionals.
Through those experiences, I began noticing the same growth challenges appearing across many firms, regardless of their size or focus.
A Pattern Across High-Performing Firms
Organizations with deep technical expertise were often doing excellent work for their clients, yet still struggling with growth and positioning.
Common challenges I observed include:
Clearly explaining what makes them different
Identifying the right opportunities for expansion
Aligning teams around a shared strategy
Over time, these patterns sparked a deeper interest in how consulting firms grow, how they communicate value, and how leadership teams navigate the decisions that shape their organizations.
Why Ascend Strategy Co. Was Created
Those observations ultimately led me to start Ascend Strategy Co.
Through Ascend, I work with environmental consulting, engineering, and related firms that want to take a step back and think more intentionally about growth. This often includes exploring questions such as how a firm differentiates itself in a crowded market, where its most meaningful opportunities for organic growth may lie, and how teams across the organization can better align around a shared strategy.
I’m particularly interested in the role culture and operations play in making those strategies real, and in the intersection between what organizations aspire to become and how they operate day-to-day.
What You’ll Find Here
This blog is a place where I’ll be sharing some of the patterns I’ve observed across the environmental consulting industry, along with ideas and perspectives on topics such as positioning, growth strategy, acquisitions, leadership, and the evolving landscape of the industry.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of reflections on some of the growth challenges I’ve seen across environmental consulting firms and the patterns that often sit behind them.
What We’ll Explore First
The first topic I’ll explore is something I’ve seen across many organizations in the industry: why firms with strong technical expertise sometimes struggle to clearly articulate the value they bring to clients.