Fractional leadership for acquired penetration testing teams
Acquiring a penetration testing company is the easy part.
The hard part is what happens next.
Different teams arrive with different ways of working, different reporting styles, different expectations, and different client relationships. Senior people get pulled into firefighting. Delivery becomes fragile. Clients notice.
Conversec provides fractional leadership to stabilise and integrate acquired offensive security teams so that delivery, culture, and client trust survive the transition.
What Usually Goes Wrong
After an acquisition, pentest teams often struggle with:
- Conflicting methodologies and reporting styles
- Unclear ownership of delivery and client relationships
- Sales and delivery drifting further apart
- Senior consultants overwhelmed by integration work
- Junior staff unsure how they now fit
These issues are not theoretical. They show up as missed deadlines, frustrated clients, and rising attrition.
How Conversec Helps
We step in as experienced, independent leadership.
Our role is to stabilise delivery first, then align teams, and finally create the conditions for sustainable growth.
That means working directly with:
- Delivery leads
- Senior consultants
- Sales and account teams
- Newly acquired staff
To make sure the organisation can operate as one, without losing the strengths that made the acquisition valuable in the first place.
Stabilise Delivery
The first priority is always client trust.
We focus on:
- Clarifying ownership of engagements
- Aligning how work is scoped, run, and reported
- Reducing friction between sales and delivery
- Creating predictable, defensible delivery standards
This prevents integration from damaging reputation or revenue.
Align Teams and Ways of Working
Once delivery is under control, we work on alignment.
This includes:
- Bringing different methodologies into a single, workable model
- Creating shared expectations around quality and communication
- Supporting leaders who suddenly find themselves managing larger, more complex teams
- Helping people understand where they fit in the new organisation
The goal is not uniformity. It is coherence.
Protect and Develop Key People
Acquisitions often fail because the people who matter most leave.
We focus on:
- Reducing burnout in senior consultants
- Giving junior staff clarity and development paths
- Building trust across previously separate teams
- Creating a culture that feels stable, not temporary
This is what protects the real value of the acquisition.
Who This Is For
This service is designed for:
- Investors and acquirers integrating one or more pentest firms
- Founders and directors inheriting larger, more complex delivery teams
- Heads of Offensive Security responsible for making the new structure actually work
If delivery feels fragile, people are confused, or clients are starting to feel the strain, this is the moment to intervene.
Pre-Acquisition Delivery Risk
Knowing what you are buying matters. Knowing what will break matters more.
Before a deal closes, investors often receive technical and financial diligence. What is usually missing is a clear view of delivery and team risk.
As part of post-acquisition integration, we can also support pre-deal assessment by looking at:
- How the team actually delivers work
- How consultants communicate with clients
- Whether senior people are overloaded or acting as bottlenecks
- How consistent reporting, scoping, and quality really are
- How resilient the team will be once leadership, structure, or incentives change
This gives investors a realistic picture of whether a pentest business will hold together after acquisition, not just whether it looks good on paper.
It also allows integration planning to start with facts, not surprises.
The Result
A single, coherent offensive security function that:
- Delivers consistently
- Communicates clearly with clients
- Retains key people
- Can scale without constant firefighting
Turning multiple acquired teams into one trusted consulting organisation.
