This is a remote position.
Our new client is a rapidly growing, private equity-backed startup in the travel experiences industry. The company pursues an international buy-and-build strategy, acquiring established, founder-led tour and experience businesses and working with their leadership teams to accelerate growth, professionalise operations and build scalable group capabilities.
As its international portfolio expands, the Integration Management Office ensures that acquisitions deliver sustainable value while preserving the entrepreneurial strengths, local expertise and customer experience that made each business successful.
The Role
We are looking for an experienced Integration Manager to lead post-merger integration programmes across the group’s growing portfolio.
Reporting to the VP, Integration & Operations, you will work across the full M&A lifecycle: partnering with the M&A team before close to validate integration assumptions and develop integration and value-creation plans, then leading execution alongside acquired company management and group functional leaders.
You will combine strong programme management with commercial and operational judgement. This means understanding how an acquired business operates, helping define its future Target Operating Model, translating the investment thesis into a practical Value Creation Plan, and ensuring that synergies and transformation initiatives deliver measurable results.
Key Responsibilities
M&A & Integration Planning
- Partner with the M&A team during due diligence and pre-close planning to assess integration requirements, risks, dependencies and implementation costs.
- Translate deal assumptions and the investment thesis into a practical post-close integration roadmap.
- Develop Day 1, 30/60/90-day and longer-term integration plans appropriate to each acquisition.
- Identify integration complexity early and establish appropriate resources, ownership and sequencing.
- Support integration-related inputs into Investment Committee and transaction planning where required.
Post-Merger Integration
- Own and manage end-to-end integration programmes for newly acquired businesses.
- Establish clear workstreams, milestones, dependencies, governance, decision rights and accountabilities.
- Coordinate functional integration across Finance, People, IT, Data, Commercial and Operations.
- Run integration governance with acquired company leadership, group functional owners and senior management.
- Maintain clear visibility of progress, risks, issues and decisions, proactively driving resolution.
- Manage multiple integrations concurrently as acquisition activity increases.
Target Operating Model & Transformation
- Work with functional leaders and acquired management teams to define appropriate Target Operating Models.
- Assess existing processes, organisational structures, systems and capabilities, identifying the changes required to reach the target state.
- Help determine what should be standardised or centralised at group level and what should remain local.
- Support process standardisation, shared-service implementation, systems migration and organisational redesign.
- Ensure transformation initiatives are practical for small and medium-sized founder-led businesses.
Value Creation & Synergy Tracking
- Translate the investment case into a measurable Value Creation Plan.
- Establish clear baselines, targets, owners and delivery plans for revenue, cost and operational synergies.
- Track synergy capture and implementation costs against the deal case.
- Work with Finance and functional leaders to validate realised benefits.
- Identify delivery gaps early and drive corrective action.
- Develop reporting that gives leadership clear visibility of integration progress and value creation.
Integration Capability Building
- Help develop and improve the group’s integration methodology, playbooks, templates and governance.
- Build a repeatable integration approach that can scale with increasing acquisition activity.
- Capture lessons learned from each acquisition and incorporate them into future due diligence and integration planning.
- Help establish a strong integration culture across the group and its portfolio businesses.
Requirements
- Strong experience managing complex cross-functional programmes, ideally including post-merger integration, transformation or business change.
- Excellent project and programme management skills, with a demonstrated ability to turn strategy into structured execution.
- Experience working with senior stakeholders across multiple functions and geographies.
- Strong analytical and commercial capability, including confidence working with financial and operational KPIs.
- Experience defining or implementing Target Operating Models and/or organisational transformation.
- Experience developing Value Creation Plans, business cases or structured transformation roadmaps.
- Strong understanding of synergy identification, baselining, tracking and benefits realisation.
- Confidence operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where processes and structures are still developing.
- A highly organised, pragmatic and delivery-oriented approach.
- Based in the UK and comfortable travelling internationally as required.
- Spanish language skill is must.
Highly Desirable
- Experience within a private equity-backed buy-and-build or roll-up environment.
- Direct experience of M&A due diligence and post-merger integration.
- Experience integrating founder-led small and medium-sized businesses into a larger platform.
- Experience in travel, tours, attractions, experiences, hospitality or another multi-site consumer services business.
- Italian language skill.
- Experience with shared services, technology transformation or international operating-model design.
Benefits
- A key role in a rapidly growing, private equity-backed travel experiences startup.
- International exposure across a growing portfolio of acquired businesses.
- Close collaboration with senior leadership, founders and functional teams.
- Ownership across the full integration lifecycle, from pre-acquisition planning to measurable results.
- The opportunity to shape the group’s integration approach, playbooks and operating models.
- Location: United Kingdom
- Long-term assignment
- Permanent/B2B Contract
- Ful-time role
