Convergint Damage Control

When non-security corporations get into the integration game, bad things tend to happen for both the clients and employees who built the foundation which made the acquisition attractive in the first place.

Good point and I agree with you.

I do think it's worth emphasizing who the 'bad things' happen to in this case.

For financial investors, they see more profits - which is a 'good thing' to them. For the end users, they see lower quality and often higher prices - 'bad thing'.

The difference is that the investors are willing to tradeoff reputation and customer satisfaction for more profits, which is the typical driving factor.

To be clear, I do not see that as a risk for Convergint today. However, that is the risk long-term that ultimately the investors push to optimize the business to make more money / profits at the expense of decreasing 'costs' that help serve customers and extracting more revenue out of customers that have some level of lock-in to the company.

Another negative Glassdoor review. While the reviewer praises "Annual company community service. Free food at meetings. Quarterly and annual meetings. Employees are nice to each other face to face. Excellent 401K," s/he criticizes various organizational problems:

Is it common for the acquiring company to offer a "stay on" bonus, or is it considered uncalled for if the senior management requests one?

There's no audited public data, since Convergint is a private company.

However, based on their public statements, a few things can be reasonably discerned. They have acquired 16 total integrators. Assume average integrator revenue is just under $20 million and that is $300 million in acquired business. 

Convergint also cited revenue last year of ~$750 million, so $300 million is a pretty sizeable share of that. Convergint also says they are growing organically at double digits (whether that is 10% or 25% is not disclosed).

But with the new owner's backing and given their public statement that they are continuing this integrator acquisition strategy, I think they could acquire integrators doing another $500 million or so in revenue. Combine that with modest organic growth and they can reasonably be at $2 billion.

The bigger question, to me, is how they scale their culture and operations up with all these different acquisitions, all these people, etc. It does not look easy.