Cited from real sources
·5 min read·Written by Arun Agrahri·Updated October 2026
A framework by Brad Jacobs
Brad Jacobs's Roll-Up Playbook: Buying Is Easy, Integration Is the Work
Brad Jacobs's roll-up playbook is how he built United Rentals, XPO and QXO, with about 500 acquisitions since 1989. He picks a large, fragmented industry before he picks a company. He buys companies at a lower multiple than the one he raises capital at. Then he puts each one on the same systems from the day the deal is signed. In his telling, buying was always the easy part.
Before the first deal
Ten years, zero acquisitions.
Jacobs spent 1979 to 1989 in oil trading and grew it all organically. Since 1989 he and his teams have done about 500 deals.
Brad Jacobs on The Knowledge Project·The Relentless Obsession of Brad Jacobs·
Watch at 55:01
The framework
Buying is the easy part
Most roll-ups have not beaten the market, Jacobs told James Altucher, because money people and promoters ran them instead of operators. In his telling, buying a company takes a wire transfer and a 30- or 40-page contract.
The real challenge starts after you bought the companies and now you have to integrate them.
The industry comes first. Before he started QXO, Jacobs spent a year studying dozens of industries. Each had to pass four tests. It had to be big and fragmented, and a bigger company had to run cheaper than a small one. It also had to be slow on technology, so his tech-first companies would have an edge. The test sits one level above Jim Collins's Hedgehog Concept: it judges the industry before it judges any company in it.
Building products distribution passed all four. Distributors sit between the manufacturers and the contractors and home builders who buy from them. Jacobs counts about $800 billion of them across North America and Western Europe, roughly 20,000 companies. A 6% share gets him to the $50 billion company he wants.
The industry also needs demand that grows on its own. On Odd Lots in March 2025 he pointed to a US shortage of about 4 million homes, and to 40 million homes over 40 years old that will all need new roofs.
you can do a thousand things right but if the underlying trend is in your face is coming the wrong way that's tough
Then comes the price. Jacobs names two levers that create most of the value. The bigger one is the gap between what his capital costs and the multiple he pays for a company. The second is how much he improves each company after he buys it.
Step 1
Industry
Large and fragmented, cheaper to run at scale, behind on technology, with demand growing.
Step 2
Companies
A reason for every deal: why it helps customers, and how it will integrate.
Step 3
Price
Pay a lower multiple than the price of the capital you raise.
Step 4
Integration
One set of systems and one culture, starting the day the deal is signed.
How to apply it
How do you run a roll-up the way Jacobs does?
The first two steps happen before any money moves. The rest start the day a deal is signed.
1
Pick the industry before any target.
Run the four tests on the industry first, then look for companies inside it.
2
Look at many companies at once.
Jacobs says his teams studied thousands in depth to close about 500. Each deal needs a reason: why it helps customers, why it fits what you own, and how it will integrate.
3
Do diligence by interview.
Jacobs skips the long diligence memo that, in his words, nobody important reads. He talks to the people who run the company.
4
Integrate from the signing.
Use one ERP so the books close right after month end. Build standard dashboards so every location can be compared with every other one. Run one HR system, one CRM and one internal social network.
5
Listen first, then rebuild every role from a blank page.
Ask staff what to keep and what to fix. Then sort every position into must have, nice to have, and not needed. Jacobs says the cuts usually land in middle and upper management, and the field is often short of people.
6
Give every lever an owner.
Once the plan is set, each lever gets one person and a bonus tied to it.
7
Pace the deals.
Jacobs prefers two deals at a time to five.
In diligence he interviews the people at the top of the company he is buying:
I like to interview the top 15 or so people one-on-one like an hour hour and a half and I like to ask them if this was your money would you buy this company
He also asks each of them what they would change, and what a buyer would be crazy to change. After a deal he puts the same two questions to the whole company. In March 2025, days after QXO agreed to buy Beacon, he spent hours on Zoom calls with 15 or 20 branch managers and salespeople at a time.
what's going great in the company that we'd be crazy to change
Brad Jacobs on his first calls with Beacon staff·
Watch at 6:02
The integration starts before the deal closes:
I integrate from the moment that we agree to buy a company we're starting the integration process and the day we close the acquisition gazam we're in there
Jacobs warns about the private equity version of the first failure. A fund buys companies earning $5 to $20 million each and stacks them until the whole earns $100 or $200 million and sells at a bigger multiple. He calls the result a mess, and whoever buys it inherits the cost of standardizing everything.
Jacobs also looks for messes he can fix. When he looked at Con-way's org chart in 2015, he saw dotted and squiggly reporting lines all over the page.
this is a messed up org chart which is great for making money if you can find something that's messed up and easy to unmess up
XPO bought Con-way for about $3 billion. In 2024 Jacobs put it at about $15 billion, after about $5 billion of net cash came out of it.
The press ignored one part of the playbook, Jacobs says. At United Rentals his team did about 200 acquisitions and about 200 greenfields, new branches opened from scratch. He says they made a lot more money on the greenfields, because a new branch takes far less capital than paying ten times profit for someone else's. QXO plans to do both.
Where operators disagree: integrate every acquisition, or leave each one alone?
Brad Jacobs
puts every company he buys on one ERP, one HR system, one CRM and one culture, starting the day the deal is signed. He calls a roll-up that leaves its companies on separate systems a mess that whoever buys it next has to fix.
Michael Girdley
runs his holding company radically decentralized. On Greg Isenberg's How to start a Holding Company episode he pointed to Berkshire Hathaway, Roper and Andrew Wilkinson, who keep purchasing, HR and finance inside each company instead of centralizing them.
Girdley names the deciding variable himself: how alike the assets are. Fourteen fast-food franchises should share bookkeeping and ordering; a spread of unrelated businesses should not. Jacobs only buys inside one industry, so his companies are near-identical by design. If your targets do the same work, integrate from day one. If they do different work, keep the center thin.
Useful? Pass it to a founder who is about to buy their first company.
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