IT’s First 100 Days at a Platform Company: Between the Buyouts and the Breakdowns

You didn’t sign up to babysit the brand—or untangle marketing and sales chaos. But here you are.

First, what's a "Platform" company?

In private equity, a “platform” company is the one you build everything else on.

It’s not just another acquisition—it’s the cornerstone. The flagship. The company with the leadership, infrastructure, and potential to scale. You buy it because it’s strong enough to stand on its own—and smart enough to grow through bolt-ons. From there, you stack on strategic acquisitions. You bring in new products, new markets, new customers. And suddenly, you’re not just investing in a business—you’re building a category leader.

That’s the platform. It’s the launchpad for something bigger. But without the right brand, message, and go-to-market engine... it’s just a pile of parts.

And, in most cases the technology isn't ready for aggressive growth. That’s where IT comes in.

When private equity chooses a company as a platform, there’s no parade. No balloon drop. Just a calendar filling up fast and a thousand moving parts with no labels.

The CEO is pitching bold growth numbers. The sales team is racing to unify pitches. And the CTO? The CTO is somewhere under the hood—trying to get six tech stacks to speak the same language, merging websites built on 2009 logic, and quietly wondering what fresh hell “rebrand” will mean this time.

Because when your company becomes a platform, what you’re really inheriting is a pile of other companies. Each with its own tools. Its own tech debt. Its own people, processes, and politics.

It’s a beautiful mess. And if you're the one wearing the CTO or IT badge, it's your mess to clean up.

Here’s what you’re up against—and how On-Target! helps turn that chaos into momentum.

1. A Frankenstack of Systems, None of Them Talking

Let’s start with the obvious.

Every acquired company shows up with its own set of tools—CRM, CMS, ERP, email, analytics. And not one of them integrates with anything else. You’ve got HubSpot over here, Zoho over there, a rogue Airtable in the corner, and someone still swears by Excel for “reporting.”

You didn’t sign up to be a referee for SaaS sprawl, but here you are.

• What On-Target! does:
  We help rationalize your martech stack. That means identifying what stays, what goes, and what needs to be bridged. We don’t push shiny new tools—we work with your current environment, connecting the dots and building workflows that actually reflect how your business functions today.

2. Website Madness

There’s the main site. Then the two legacy acquisition sites. Then the microsite someone’s nephew built. And the whole thing’s held together with duct tape and expired plugins.

Worse, your dev team’s getting pinged to create landing pages, fix button colors, swap logos, and update copy... instead of building the product that's needed.

• What On-Target! does:
  We step in as your external web team—owning front-end design, CMS management, and UX optimization. We streamline and centralize your digital footprint, so you’re not maintaining five websites for one company. And most importantly, we stop marketing requests from clogging your engineering pipeline.

3. Data, Data Everywhere… But No One Trusts It

Lead sources are mislabeled. Conversion paths don’t track. Revenue attribution is a guessing game. When you try to pull a simple report, you get four different answers.

That’s not just annoying—it’s dangerous. You can’t scale what you can’t see.

• What On-Target! does:
  We clean the data. We create dashboards that actually tell you something useful. We integrate your CRM with your marketing automation, build clean attribution models, and finally give you the kind of reporting that lets you make decisions with confidence, not crossed fingers.

4. Shadow IT and Rogue Tools

Marketing signed up for some software without telling you. Sales is using a freemium CRM because “it’s faster.” And now there are 17 logins floating around with no admin oversight and no plan to consolidate.

• What On-Target! does:
  We help bring governance back. We assess what’s in use, evaluate risk, and help standardize the tools your teams rely on every day. No more shadow platforms. No more unknowns. Just clarity and control.

5. Product Messaging That Doesn’t Match Reality

You hear it in the sales calls. You see it in the website copy. “Industry-leading platform.” “Leading edge solutions.” “Fully integrated.” But under the hood, you know the truth.

It’s not lying. It’s marketing and sales. But the dissonance creates friction—and friction creates churn.

• What On-Target! does:
  We speak both languages—product and marketing. We sit down with your doers, understand what’s actually delivered, and then craft messaging that reflects the truth in a way buyers understand. It’s not about hype—it’s about clarity.

6. No Time to Build a GTM Engine—But the Clock’s Ticking

Everyone wants a scalable go-to-market motion. But no one has time to stop and build it. Your team is buried in sprints, fixes, and integrations. There’s no room left for GTM thinking.

• What On-Target! does:
  We handle it. From onboarding sequences to drip campaigns, vertical landing pages to case studies, we create the full GTM toolkit that supports sales without eating up dev resources. Your job is to build the product. Ours is to build the engine that sells it.

7. Internal Team Burnout

Your developers are exhausted. They’re tired of patching up broken marketing forms, digging through analytics errors, and re-explaining why a Wix site isn’t a scalable solution.

They signed up to build something that matters. But right now, they’re stuck babysitting ops.

• What On-Target! does:
  We protect your tech team’s time. We become the front line for marketing execution—handling design, front-end changes, analytics fixes, and campaign implementation. Your engineers finally get room to breathe—and focus on the product that’s supposed to change everything.

8. Post-Acquisition Paralysis

After the deal closes, everything’s supposed to get better. But in reality, people freeze. Teams are unsure what’s changing. Communication slows. And that new roadmap? It starts collecting dust.

• What On-Target! does:
  We bring energy, direction, and accountability. We help craft internal rollout communications, clarify priorities, and make sure the new brand, product, and GTM strategy don’t just sit on a slide—they get launched, measured, and improved.

The Reality Check

Being the CTO at a platform company isn’t about just managing tech. It’s about stitching together chaos into something coherent. It’s about protecting your developers, guiding the roadmap, and somehow keeping the trains running while new tracks are being laid underneath them.

But here’s the good news: You don’t have to do it alone.

What Makes On-Target! Different

We’re not a “full-service agency.” We’re not here to sell you slogans or color palettes.

We’re a "Growth Company" here to make your job easier, because tech scales. We’re the partner that steps in between marketing, sales, operations, customer service, and tech—and keeps all from drowning. We speak product. We understand process. We know how to move fast without breaking things that matter.

And we’ve done it before—for platform companies backed by private equity, venture capital, and founders just trying to scale smarter.

If you're trying to scale fast without losing your grip, let's talk. We’ll bring the roadmap. You bring the reality.

On-Target!
We bring order to the chaos—so your platform can perform like one.

Want to explore how we can help?