IT Star Ahead CEO On Acquisition Strategy That Led To $4B In Revenue

Dan Adamany, founder and CEO of channel partner juggernaut Ahead, explains how he successfully grew his company into a $4 billion IT superstar thanks, in part, to Ahead’s successful acquisition strategy over the past five years.

Ahead’s founder and innovative CEO, Dan Adamany, knows what it takes to not only acquire a company, but successfully integrate it and drive revenue and long-term growth.

“You can really screw up an acquisition,” said Adamany. “The biggest way you can screw it up is people leave. Because in our business, we’re a services business, it’s all about the people. So you can flush money down the toilet pretty quickly if you buy a company, you don’t approach it right, you don’t integrate it right—you lose all the people. Then you’re worse off than when you started.”

Adamany’s acquisition strategy, paired with the Chicago-based company’s internal innovation and sales growth efforts, has made Ahead into a nearly $4 billion IT powerhouse who is one of the largest channel partners in North America.

This year, Ahead pulled the trigger on one of its largest acquisitions ever with the purchase of fellow channel partner all-star CDI.

“[CDI] added about $1 billion dollars in revenue for us. But, most importantly, they’re making us a better company. We’re learning a lot of things from them,” said Adamany.

With the successful integration of CDI, Ahead now has over 2,500 employees globally across 40 locations worldwide. Thanks to Adamany’s and his teams expertise, Ahead expects total 2024 revenues to reach almost $4 billion.

With the financial backing of private equity firms over the years, including Berkshire Partners, Ahead is making bold acquisitions that continuously take the company to the next level. Since 2019, the company has made a total of 10 strategic acquisitions.

In an interview with CRN on stage at XChange Best of Breed last week, Adamany explains Ahead’s successful M&A and integration strategy, how Ahead is leverage generative AI internally to drive efficiencies, and what drives the founder to continue to push the IT envelope.

“For me personally, in the business we have about one-third of our employees are equity holders,” he said. “What really motivates me and puts pressure on me is I feel accountable to a third of our employees.”

If you want to know how to successfully grow and lead a tech company into the future, you need to listen to Ahead’s founder and CEO Dan Adamany.

Ahead made a bold acquisition this year by buying CDI. What made you pull the trigger on such a big channel M&A?

After a few years with private equity, we started doing acquisitions. So CDI was our tenth acquisition. So we started in 2019. We’ve learned along the way.

Acquisitions aren’t for the faint of heart. You really have to think about, 'OK, why am I doing this? Do I want to do this? Is this a cultural fit?’ So we’ve gotten a lot better over 10 of them.

The way we’re approaching our integrations have gone better. So the reason we like CDI is they were in a geography that we weren’t in: so predominantly New York, Philly, Jersey, etc. and they also had a lot of cool capabilities. So we had known [former co-founder] Eric Bakker who started it, [CDI CEO] Rich [Falcone] was running it—it just made a lot of sense for us. It was the right time in our cycle.

It added about $1 billion dollars in revenue for us. But, most importantly, they’re making us a better company. We’re learning a lot of things from them. They’re doing a lot of cool things. I think Ahead was doing a lot of cool things, but it’s made us a better company.

We’re working through the integration now. So it should be all wrapped up by early next year.

How should the channel partner community, in general, view acquisitions right now and looking ahead into 2025?

The bigger you get, it’s harder to grow at a really aggressive rate.

So for us, we look at acquisitions as a strategic growth muscle that we had to build. We’ll be almost $4 billion by the end of the year. It’s hard to grow 20 percent per year on $4 billion revenue.

So we look at it as, ‘This is a tool that we can use to help scale and grow, and gain expertise and all these other things.’ So it depends on the size. It also depends on what you’re trying to get done with your company.

We didn’t do any acquisitions for 11 years from when we started the business to when we did our first acquisition. It really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish as a business.

Are you doing it to get into a specific area? Do you want to get into security so you looking at a security acquisition? It really depends on the business.

I would just say that, you can really screw up an acquisition. The biggest way you can screw it up is people leave. Because in our business, we’re a services business, it’s all about the people. So you can flush money down the toilet pretty quickly if you buy a company, you don’t approach it right, you don’t integrate it right—you lose all the people. Then you’re worse off than when you started.

So how do you successfully integrate a company? You acquired CDI. How do you keep people on board?

This is kind of a mindset or an approach thing. When we make an acquisition, and you can’t fake this, you have to look at the business and truly say, OK, we’re running a business. They’re doing some things better than we are. We want to learn from you. We want to understand what you’re doing. We’re going to educate you on how we run our business. But how does this make us both better?’

If you have a bolt-on mentality where, ‘Hey, I’m just going to buy you. It’s going to add revenue. It’s a roll up strategy. It’s a synergy.’ Like, if that’s your mentality, I think that’s how you screw the company up, because that’s when people don’t feel valued.

They don’t feel like this is a good home for them, and they leave.

For me, I often say as we’re doing an acquisition is my goal is that, ‘In a year from now, after we acquired the business, you’re going to be glad to be acquired.’ If I can get 90 percent of the people to feel that way, then they’re going to stay. They’re going to be excited about the future.

If they are pissed that we bought them and they miss the old days and they don’t like the way it is, then they’re eventually going to leave or they’re going to be canceled within the organization. So I think it’s all about the approach. And you have to believe in it and behave that way to actually have them feel like they’re valued and they’re happy to be a part of the business.

What types of acquisitions are you looking at in 2025? What are you feeling for next year?

We’re always looking, regardless of where we are in recycling. We’re always looking for good opportunities. I don’t really want to get too into it.

But it’s really about are they going to help us grow? And are they going to help us be better? So that might be a capability. That might be a geography.

Like right now, I’m actually not looking at a lot of new capabilities. It’s more of expanding or doubling down in the verticals we’re in. So right now, it would be more about growth.

As a business, I never want to have to do an acquisition. That’s the other thing, people are like, ‘Man, we’re not growing. We’re not doing this. We need to go do an acquisition.’

That’s a really bad position to be in, because it’s a position of weakness.

And I feel like those acquisitions don’t typically go well, because you’re basically marrying somebody to make you feel better. That’s not a good reason. You got to be happy yourself before you before you take that on. I never want to have to do an acquisition. I want it to be more, ‘Hey, this is good for us.’

Is there any GenAI that Ahead is using internally to help your business?

Yeah, 100 percent.

One of the benefits right now with the CDI acquisition, we’ve actually been revisiting a lot of our processes internally, like, ‘How are we doing this? What system are we on? How do we make this more efficient?’

And that opens up the opportunity to revisit our tooling, or are there AI-specific tools that we can start leveraging in some these processes? So whether it’s our service desk, creation of SOWs (statement of work), even servicing clients.

We acquired a company called MBX, now called Foundry. It’s a facility where they integrate technology and we also do custom manufacturing—we’re implementing AI there. From a efficiency perspective, we had to tool called Hatch. So how do we start integrating it to make that tool work more efficiently? SKUs, etc.—a lot of this busy work that there wasn’t a better way before that, but there is now.

It’s more of an efficiency and productivity internally. So it’s about how are we reimagining the way we run the business to be more effective?

What’s the focus for Ahead in 2025? How are you going to continue to grow as a $4 billion company next year?

There’s still a lot of data center modernization and optimization out there.

I think AI is actually bringing some of that back. We all heard cloud-first forever. I think that’s kind of settled a little bit, people are having a more pragmatic approach for the most part, especially with larger clients.

Our clients have like data centers and a massive presence. How do you continue to modernize that? How do you make it more efficient?

It’s becoming also about efficiency like, ‘How do you operate it better?’ So that’s where we grew up. That’s going to continue to be a big opportunity for us and doing a lot more edge work as it relates to that too.

Cloud is amazing because every client I meet with, they might be spending $50 million a year in cloud, but they’re still figuring things out. So whether that’s application monetization, migration, efficiency, Greenfield—the landscape is changing so much, so we have a big focus in that space.

We’ve been focused on that for the last 10 years, but I feel like it’s actually getting a little clearer, and we’re getting more helpful to our clients.

Then lastly, security—that’s a huge space. We’ve been focused heavily on operationalizing recovery. So that’s been a big focus on the second half of this year.

You’ve been running Ahead for 17 years now. What gets you excited? What keeps you going?

Me personally, I always had these finish lines in my mind. It’s like you cross a finish line and then you draw another finish line, or the mountain analogy, or whatever. There’s always a number.

What’s interesting with us now for me personally, in the business we have about a one-third of our employees are equity holders.

What really motivates me and puts pressure on me is I feel accountable to a third of our employees.

Obviously Berkshire Partners too I feel accountable to them to do the right things for the business.

But like the fact that people are coming to work every day and they’re participating in something that’s going to ultimately lead to a meaningful event in their life. For me, that’s meaningful from an employee perspective.

And then there’s the client’s part. I love meeting with clients and helping them solve problems. So I love really understanding a client’s business and trying to figure out how to help them. As technology evolves, and as we get more relevant, we can even impact their clients more than we could 10- to 15 years ago.