Motherson
43 deals, one thesis
From a wiring harness maker to India's largest auto ancillary through recorded acquisitions and investments, many of them turnarounds bought because a customer asked.
VECTORS · CORP DEV AS A SERVICE
M&A is an active strategy.
Not an inorganic footnote.
Most companies treat buying as an event that happens between planning cycles. The companies that compound treat ownership moves as a discipline that never sleeps. Vectors installs that discipline: one senior team, one pipeline, three tracks, from mandate to integration.
0–0%
of acquisitions fail to create value for the buyer. Harvard Business Review.
0%
of frequent acquirers meet or beat the gains their deal models promised. Bain, 2026.
0 days
from 4,232 companies mapped to 3 negotiations opened, on one Prequate mandate.
I
What the research says
Active acquirers win. Episodic acquirers pay tuition.
Two decades of research, one conclusion: buying regularly, against a standing thesis, beats buying occasionally, under pressure. Pick an acquirer type.
01 / 04 · First-time buyer
Chance the first deal creates value
23%
First-time acquirers succeed roughly 23 percent of the time. Not because they are less able, but because deal-making is a practised capability, and the first rep is paid for in real capital.
The record, when ownership is run as a strategy.
Piramal
Sold at 31x earnings
A formulations business built over 22 years, substantially by acquisition, sold to Abbott for $3.72 billion at nine times sales.
Info Edge
₹86 crore became ₹39,250 crore
An operating company, not a fund, took a minority position in Zomato between 2010 and 2013 and held with discipline.
Capital Cities
19.9% a year, for 29 years
Tom Murphy acquired patiently against fixed return hurdles for decades, then bought a network several times his company's size. The value logic existed before any target did.
Teledyne
130 acquisitions. Then none.
Henry Singleton bought roughly 130 companies in the 1960s, then stopped entirely and bought back his own stock for a decade, compounding near 20% a year.
Indian public markets also carry a decade of cycle-top acquisitions still being digested: bought at the moment of maximum confidence, with no integration owner named before close. The difference was never intelligence. It was standing discipline.
Further resources are on the reading page.
II
How it runs
Your objectives can change.The discipline stays active.
I am looking at
Buying a company
Establishing equity strategy
What should ownership do that operations cannot?
The standard approach
Most corporate development teams start with a target list. The mandate gets written afterwards, to justify a deal that already has momentum.
The Prequate approach
We write the mandate first: what ownership must achieve, the walk-away rules, and the critical success factors from acquirers who came before you, before a single target is named.
You leave with: One-page equity strategy, evidence screen, pre-committed gates
How we can work togetherSee it work
The single mandate
One deal, end to end, all five stages. For the board that wants to watch the machinery run before standing it up. Integration is priced as its own module so it cannot be negotiated away.
Commercial terms
Runs light on commitment. Grows stage by stage. Success linkage only at close.
Why active matters
Five questions that make the difference between reacting to a deal and being ready for one.
III
EVALUATE YOUR READINESS
The M&A Game
Run one acquisition through seven decisions. Your live readout changes with every choice and with the deal context you share.
IV
What the record teaches
Ten rules, paid for by other people's deals.
Drawn from the largest evidence base in deal-making and from transactions the world watched. Swipe, drag, or use the arrow keys. Full references sit on the reading page.
01 / 10
Write the mandate before the target exists.
The board that asks sharp questions at the approval meeting looks diligent. The board that set a clear acquisition mandate eighteen months earlier, so the deal arriving on the table was the right kind of deal, did the real work, invisibly.
Most value destruction traces to why a company bought. Mandate questions, not diligence questions.
V
Start here
Three ways to start. Pick the one that's right for you.
Each one starts the same short form, tailored to what you actually need. Ten questions at most, every one a tap.