Inside Arcus with Danny Walker – Integrating Trios
In August 2023, we announced the acquisition of the Trios Group in its entirety.
Over the last six months, we have been working hard behind the scenes to explore how we can best serve our customers and our people throughout the integration.
Leading the way in the integration is Danny Walker, our Integration Director. Find out more about the integration and Danny’s time with Arcus below:
I’ve been with Arcus since June 2023, joining ahead of the acquisition to learn about both businesses and how best to support this vital work. It was great to see Arcus take this proactive approach, allowing me to build relationships with the Senior Leadership teams at both businesses ahead of completing the deal.
A lot of the work since the acquisition completed is very much behind the scenes – ensuring we integrate our businesses as seamlessly as possible, with minimal impact on our customers, our people, and the service that we deliver.
A key focus throughout the last six months has been our unwavering commitment to the customers of both businesses. Arcus has always prided itself on its customer service and we wanted to ensure that experience remained our top priority with customer engagement and communication.
Ultimately, my role now is to understand and chart every aspect of both businesses because each thing we do, whether it be in IT or operations, will have an impact somewhere else. My job is to make sure all of those knock-on effects are understood and planned for. The key is to understand that things move and change, and we must move with them to ensure we are reaching the milestones we have set out.
The due diligence process carried out ahead of acquisition gave us a view of what synergies and opportunities were available to us, so the first thing we did post-acquisition was to embark upon a series of discovery sessions to set plans into motion.
The discovery sessions were really focused on the people. Before the acquisition, those outside of the leadership teams were names on paper and organisational charts but we wanted to put a face to names and get to know these amazing people who are experts within their departments.
People are the backbone of any successful venture. Integrating talent from both companies and fostering an environment of learning and growth has been paramount.
These sessions didn’t just meet our expectations of the business we acquired, but also brought to the fore a range of other exciting opportunities to explore.
Thanks to these sessions, we were very quickly able to integrate the support functions under the Arcus banner; HSQE, Fleet, Logistics, Supply Chain, Business Development, and HR all operating as one just six months on.
One of the biggest successes to date was being able to integrate AMS, a business that Trios owned but hadn’t yet integrated into their operations, into Arcus. We’re excited to take the learnings from this piece of work into the rest of the integration journey as we start to work with operations teams across the Trios business to plan their ultimate integration into Arcus.
It’s not only the integration that’s going to plan – Trios saw record months of turnover at the end of 2023, and that’s all down to the people. Everyone has been working hard and we’re starting to really see what can be done with a great group of engaged colleagues.
Throughout this process, it’s been great to see how keen everyone is to get stuck in. From across all levels of the business and especially the C-Suite, it’s been all hands-on deck and that’s made this one of the most enjoyable integrations I’ve worked on, and I look forward to celebrating the next stages of the integration as we focus on systems and infrastructure, and then the wider Trios operations.
