Build vs. Buy vs. Partner: How Operators Decide

Build vs. Buy vs. Partner Is Not a Scoring Exercise

A lot of corp dev teams treat the three modes as parallel options to score against the same criteria. Speed, cost, control, IP risk, weight everything, declare a winner. The exercise looks rigorous on a slide. It almost always produces a build recommendation, because build scores well on the criteria most companies feel comfortable measuring.

The mistake is treating build, buy, and partner as substitutes. They're not. Each fits a different problem. Build works when the underlying capability is something you already do, the people who can extend it are sitting at desks down the hall, and you have time. Buy works when speed matters, the asset is already in market, and you can run it better than its current owner. Partner works when the question is still open — when nobody, including you and the target, has enough information to commit yet.

Robert Lovegrove, now CEO of The ChemQuest Group and previously VP of Corporate Strategy at Milliken & Company, talked through this on the M&A Science Podcast. He framed the  $1B Milliken acquisition around four questions: focus, internal alignment, what the company was buying, and what it was deliberately not. The questions ran first. The mode followed.

The Three Variables That Decide the Mode

Edge. Where is the durable advantage, and who has it? If the target has the technology and you have the customer relationships and domain depth, an acquisition combines two things neither of you can produce alone. If you have the edge and the target just adds throughput, you're paying a premium for what a partnership would deliver cheaper. If neither side has the edge yet, you're either building carefully or partnering to learn.

Time and commercialization risk. Being late has a cost, and that cost determines what's available to you. Commodity businesses run into this constantly. You can innovate on product all day, but the ceiling is structural — you're a price taker until something fundamental changes the inputs. Chandradev Mehta, SVP Strategy and Business Development at Hexion, walked through that calculation on the podcast. Building chemistry-as-a-service internally would have taken years before a customer saw it. Acquisition compressed the timeline. Time mattered, so build was the wrong mode.

Combination value. When your asset and theirs sit next to each other, what becomes possible that wasn't before? This is the test most teams skip, because it forces them to admit how much of their value math is wishful. The cleaner question is one your customer can answer: what do they get from the two of you together that they don't get from either of you apart? If that answer holds up in a sentence, the combination is real.

Run the three variables and the answer usually steps forward on its own. When two agree and one resists, that's where you do harder work on must-believes.

When Build Wins

Build wins when the capability is something you already do, the timeline isn't pressing, and you have the people who can deliver. The conditions are clear. The mode is also the most over-chosen one in corp dev.

Across 400+ practitioner conversations on the M&A Science Podcast, Kison Patel sees this play out the same way. Teams default to build because it doesn't require committing to a counterparty. You can pause, redirect, or quietly drop a build project. That same flexibility is why it's the mode most likely to slip a deadline.

A working test: can you name the capability, the person who owns delivery, and the milestone where you'd kill the project? If you can, build is real. If "build" is what's left after you've talked yourself out of acquiring and out of partnering, you defaulted instead of choosing.

When Buy Wins

Buy wins when speed is doing real work, the asset is already in market or close to it, and you can credibly be a better owner than whoever holds it now.

Hexion's AI and MarTech acquisition is a useful example. The company is a global thermoset resin manufacturer moving from product sales into chemistry-as-a-service. Internal R&D could have produced a version of the offer eventually; the market wouldn't have waited. Buying a target already in market let Hexion lay its domain expertise on top of working technology — one plus one equals four, in Chandradev's framing on the podcast. Each side carried something the other couldn't.

Repeat-buyer discipline shows the same pattern from another angle. Matt James, EVP, CFO and Chief Acquisition Officer at Oakbridge Insurance, has closed 60+ acquisitions since co-founding the platform in 2020. The filter that holds across that volume isn't financial. It's binary on culture. "If we can't get past that, we don't move on to the other criteria," Matt told Kison. Front-of-funnel conviction is what stops a buy program from collapsing into a numbers game.

The "better owner" question is the one acquirers ask least honestly. Can you do more with this asset than the founder, the existing PE backer, or the next bidder — through distribution, procurement, customer reach, or talent? If yes, the deal compounds. If no, you're paying for someone else's work and hoping you don't break it on the way home.

Duncan Painter's How to Make Transformative M&A Successful on M&A Science walks through what this looks like when the buy is meant to change the company, not just add to it.

When Partner Wins

Partner wins when the constraint is learning. The technology is too new to assess from outside. The customer or ecosystem hasn't been brought along yet. Neither side has enough information to commit. Acquisition is premature. Building alone is slower than the market will tolerate. Partnership lets both sides learn on real work while keeping options open.

Booz Allen Hamilton runs the mode deliberately. Chrissy Cox, VP & Head of Corporate Development, described it as partnering before purchasing on the podcast. Partnerships do the relationship-building, the culture testing, and the early diligence in real time, on real work. By the time an LOI shows up — sometimes years later — most of the surprises have already happened. The same logic carries over to the customer side: in markets where buyers haven't yet paid for what you're selling, co-developing the model with them is what builds adoption, and adoption is what justifies the pricing later.

The trap is treating partnership as a low-risk version of buying. It isn't. Partnerships have their own failure modes: governance disputes, funding asymmetry between the parties, exits nobody negotiated hard enough. A partnership that should have been an acquisition usually costs more time and creates more friction than the acquisition would have. Partner when the learning has to be joint. Don't partner because you couldn't decide.

The Discipline Layer

The framework picks the mode. Discipline keeps you there once the heat is on.

For whichever mode you chose, write down the convictions the choice depends on. Practitioners call these must-believes — the small set of assumptions where if one breaks, the deal breaks with it. Test them after IOI. Defend them through diligence. Walk when one fails in a competitive process.

The hardest part is the walk. Birgitta and Lars Elfversson of Netlight Consulting described what gets in the way.. Teams fall in love with deals. Once that's happened, walkaway points stop being operational and become talking points in a board memo. Their answer is to set guardrails before any specific target is in the funnel, agree on them at the board level when nobody is emotionally invested, and revisit them when the team needs them most. The framework chooses the mode. The guardrails hold the line.

If you can't write the must-believes for your chosen mode in three sentences, you haven't decided yet. How to build and validate an M&A deal thesis covers how to construct convictions that hold under pressure.

Walkaways are how you protect the deal in front of you, and how you stay credible for the deal after that.

Picking the Mode Is Step One

The decision doesn't get easier with seniority. The dollars get bigger, the modes start to look more alike under pressure, and the political weight on each option grows. What changes for the operators who get this right is the depth of the foundation underneath. Once the mode is chosen, the work shifts. Build is about people and the roadmap. Buy is about cultivation, trust, and integration planning that starts during diligence rather than after close. Partner is about governance and the unwind conversation no one enjoys but everyone needs.

The teams that run this decision well aren't running on better frameworks. They're running on better fundamentals. They know what every term in their thesis means, what every step in their process is doing, and what each side of the table is trying to accomplish. That's Buyer-Led M&A™ in practice — the operator runs the work, the banker doesn't.

The M&A Fundamentals Certificate is five hours covering the full deal life cycle: vocabulary, process, both sides of the table. It's the foundation most practitioners never get, and it's what separates good corp dev teams from great ones. Included with M&A Science membership, alongside DealPilot, certifications, templates, and live operator sessions.