Projects — RBFCU Services (CUSO), 2015–2020
Acquisition & Integration.
Most of what gets written about an acquisition is about the deal — the price, the terms, the announcement. The deal is the easy part. The hard part starts the morning after, when two sets of books have to become one, and the only people who notice whether you got it right are the ones who have to live with the numbers.
Annual sales volume the brokerage was moving at acquisition
Agents brought inside the consolidated reporting
Offices integrated — four in San Antonio, four in Austin
What we went there to look at.
RBFCU Services was the CUSO arm of Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union — a cooperative that grew from $6 billion to more than $10 billion in assets across my five years there. In that stretch we went out and bought a real-estate brokerage.
The brokerage was moving more than $1.7 billion in property a year. Almost none of that touched its own balance sheet, and that's the whole problem with pricing a business like this. There isn't much on the balance sheet to look at. The value is in people who can leave, offices under lease, and a commission structure that decides how much of every dollar the business actually keeps. None of that is visible from a conference room.
So we went on-site. We reviewed the financials and the cash flow, then went past them into how the business actually ran day to day. We went through the staff and the commission structure — what the top producers were earning, what the bottom of the roster was earning, and what that spread meant for the economics we'd be inheriting. And we priced the footprint: eight offices, four across the San Antonio metroplex and four across Austin, and what it cost to stay in each one. All of it before the acquisition was final, not after.
The morning after.
An acquisition doesn't close when the papers are signed. It closes the first month the acquired business reports on your calendar, in your format, and the consolidated statements tie.
Getting there was the conversion. My job was to get their financials onto our books, and to get them there on time — which meant setting what they owed me and when: a reporting deadline they hit every period, in a shape I could consolidate. Once that cadence held, the integration was real. One set of books, and a close that didn't wait on anybody.
Then the part that made it worth doing. Reporting nobody uses is just overhead, so I built performance metrics on top of the consolidated numbers — a view of how each of the eight offices was actually doing. That turned the integration into a management tool. Underperforming offices were visible now, so I could go work on their productivity instead of guessing at it. And where an office was outperforming, we could find out what it was doing differently and push that across the board.
Any acquirer can close a deal.
Two halves of the same job. Diligence is knowing what you're buying before the price is set, and the only way to know is to go look at it — on-site, in person, down to what an agent earns and what an office lease costs. Integration is what makes the purchase real: their financials on your books, on your calendar, in one consolidated set of statements.
Then the part most acquirers skip. Once the reporting works it stops being compliance and starts being leverage. You can see which offices are struggling and which are winning, and move the second toward the first.
The deal is a transaction. What you can see afterward is the return.
Have a deal in front of you?
If your institution is looking at an acquisition — or living with one that never fully got integrated — this is the kind of work I do.