Shannon Litton never planned to work in business. A former middle school teacher, she stumbled into the corporate world when her boss left to start a company and asked her to come along. “I was in my 20s, and he said to me, ‘I can’t pay you for a while, but maybe you can be an executive vice president,'” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘That sounds awesome. Sign me up!'”
Twenty-five years and several successful ventures later, Litton now leads 3LS Professional Services, an employee-owned organization bringing together marketing, digital strategy and employee stock ownership plan advisory services under one roof. Her approach to growth through acquisition puts people ahead of integration timelines and culture preservation ahead of consolidation.
Learning to Love the Unknown
After building and selling multiple successful agencies for over two decades, Litton found herself at a crossroads. She’d achieved enough success to consider retirement by 50, but when the opportunity arose to lead a division focused on acquisitions within an employee-owned holding company, something clicked.
“What drew me is that I knew nothing about it, and I was ready to learn something again,” she says. “When you’re an entrepreneur, I had the same kind of business for 25 years. At the end, I kind of would joke, like, ‘Every day is completely different, and they’re all exactly the same.'”
3LS Professional Services serves what it calls “changemakers”—organizations working in spaces like foster care, behavioral health and family services. “We say changemakers are those who work where life change happens,” Litton explains. “The definition of being a changemaker is that it’s hard.... It’s difficult work, but it’s worth it.”
The Nonnegotiables
When evaluating potential acquisitions, Litton’s criteria might surprise traditional dealmakers. Financial performance matters, but it’s not the starting point.
“People matter most,” she says. “We have to have people [who] will come in there [who] are really smart, but also humble enough to say, ‘I can work with other people and learn from other people.'”
Rather than operating as a traditional holding company focused purely on revenue aggregation, Litton uses the term “strategic holding company” to describe 3LS Professional Services’ approach. “If we can bring a company in and they grow faster because they’re in this group, then that’s really a win for everybody,” she says.
The Integration Myth
Ask Litton about post-acquisition integration, and she’ll challenge your assumptions. The conventional wisdom—swallow the acquisition, implement your processes, achieve synergies—runs counter to everything she’s learned.
“The No. 1 mistake is just thinking: We have to integrate them into us,” she says. “There’s this arrogance of, ‘I’m going to buy a successful company, but then I really know what they should do.' I think if we drop that, we’d be a lot better off.”
Litton’s playbook starts with understanding what makes the acquired company successful and protecting it. “We’re buying these companies because they’re successful,” she says. “So, the last thing we want [to] do is say, ‘Now, do it this way.'”
Instead of rushing to align systems, Litton advocates for patience. “Year one has to be, just leave the company as alone as you can leave it,” she says. “We’re here to help you, but nothing big has to change.”
That breathing room allows learning to flow in both directions. “Every acquisition, we learn something from them, and we take a piece of their culture and bring it into ours,” she says.
The ESOP Advantage
Litton discovered employee ownership about eight years ago and calls it “the answer to a lot of things I didn’t love about business.” She describes ESOPs as “a great get-rich-slow scheme”—retirement savings that employees don’t contribute to on top of a traditional 401(k).
“You now own this place,” she tells newly acquired employees. “And the first thing they do is look at you like, ‘What in the world does that mean?' The answer unfolds through storytelling sessions with longtime shareholders who’ve watched their retirement savings grow.
The ESOP structure shapes everything from layoff decisions to long-term planning. During COVID-19, employee-owned companies had “way fewer layoffs than the rest of the business world,” Litton notes. “It’s because we do value people over profit at the end of the day.”
Radical Transparency
Perhaps Litton’s most counterintuitive practice is her commitment to openness. “M&A is a world that loves to be secretive,” she says. “I am not comfortable operating that way.”
She describes making brokers uncomfortable by asking sellers directly about problems in their business–and sharing 3LS’s own challenges in return. “We have the best companies that come in when we’ve been honest about all of those things,” she says.
One recent acquisition exemplified this approach. The founder told his entire team about the potential sale 60 days before closing. “You don’t do that in M&A world,” Litton acknowledges. “But when that acquisition closed, they were ready. They had known; they processed it. They were ready to meet the rest of the family.”
For entrepreneurs considering growth through acquisition, Litton’s message is clear: “We make things secretive... We can be a lot more open and honest throughout the process and get better outcomes for both sides of the table.”
Image courtesy of 5BY5 Agency
This article was first published in the July/August 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
