When HomeToGo finalized its acquisition of Interhome, the company didn’t just double its headcount from 750 to 1,500 overnight — it inherited a workforce carved out of a large corporate parent, operating across multiple countries with fragmented HR systems, no unified performance framework, and deeply ingrained expectations around structure that HomeToGo itself was still building. Stephanie Frenzel stepped into the CPO role in the middle of this integration, and her challenge became one of the most complex people problems a scaling company faces: how do you build a cohesive group culture across brands that need to retain their own identity, while simultaneously establishing the shared infrastructure — leadership principles, performance processes, one HRIS — that makes a group actually function as one? Her approach, balancing standardization where it matters with deliberate restraint where it doesn’t, offers a playbook for any people leader navigating post-acquisition complexity at scale.

Topics Discussed

• Managing the people workstream of a major acquisition from day one in role
• Designing a group-level cultural integration roadmap across subsidiaries of vastly different sizes and maturity
• Determining which HR processes to standardize across a group versus which to leave locally autonomous
• Implementing quarterly all-hands communications to maintain alignment across a distributed, multi-brand organization
• Building performance management frameworks from scratch for entities that have never had them
• Consolidating fragmented, country-by-country HR systems into a single group HRIS
• Hiring for seniority and external experience as a company scales past the point where internal development alone can fill leadership gaps
• Defining and protecting cultural non-negotiables (cross-functional ownership, enabling each other to succeed) during rapid organizational change