Insights

Focus is subtraction: How transaction teams hit their 2026 acquisition targets

Higher acquisition targets, more competition, but no more time. Who wins in 2026 is decided not by working more – but by ruthless subtraction.

Matthias Erhart

By Matthias Erhart · 2 April 2026

Do you have ambitious acquisition targets for 2026?

CHF 200m? 300m? 400m?

Most transaction teams are facing the same reality right now: higher targets, more competition, but no more time. And that's exactly where focus decides everything.

Focus is subtraction

Focus is fundamentally subtraction, a simple but extremely powerful mental model.

Focus doesn't mean doing more. Focus means consistently leaving things out. Simplifying. Delegating.

In the day-to-day of transactions, this means one thing: focus on core business, not admin work. Everything that consumes attention without direct deal impact needs to be simplified and delegated.

The three central questions

Take a CHF 400m acquisition target in a highly competitive market. Three questions come first:

  1. What is your acquisition strategy?
  2. What process do you use to systematically generate opportunities?
  3. Which activities are you focusing your scarce time on?

Only then comes the tool question: which stack supports your strategy, processes, and activities in a way that directs time where it creates the most value?

What we see almost everywhere

  • Manual triage, search profile matching, and fragmented processes cost hours every day.
  • Document requests, rejections, and email ping-pong scatter attention.
  • Data capture and analysis is necessary, but often a massive time sink.
  • Excel tracking quickly becomes unmanageable.
  • Pipeline meetings mean tool-hopping.
  • Reporting is built by hand and delivers almost no real insights.

Historically grown Excel setups cost focus, speed, and time.

Subtraction doesn't mean fewer deals

Subtraction means: simplifying processes. Delegating admin work, to a system, to automation, to seamless workflows.

That's exactly why we're building AssetOS. Inspired by the real day-to-day of transaction teams. Built for modern, AI-driven ways of working.

So that transaction managers can delegate: triage, data capture, deal tracking, project coordination, reporting, insights. Not to Excel, but to a purpose-built system for deal flow management.

Without months-long Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics projects. Without endless requirements workshops.

So there's more time for what actually matters: building relationships, making decisions, winning deals.


The most interesting question for 2026 isn't: "How do you close more deals by working more?"

It's: What can you consistently simplify or delegate today to hit your ambitious acquisition targets?