Mapping a strategic flight path through M&A

Acron Technologies is the product of M&A.

According to a company description, the aerospace and defense technology platform, which is owned by private equity firm TJC, is an assemblage of more than 17 acquisitions tracing back to 2013. But a formative moment came in March 2025, when TJC acquired L3Harris Technologies’ commercial aviation solutions business for $800 million, and renamed it Acron Aviation.

Acron kept up its acquisition spree with two more deals in April, leading up to its announcement in July that it had combined over a dozen portfolio companies under the Acron Technologies corporate brand. It announced it was selling its commercial training solutions business in August. Per a news release, the divestiture “sharpens” Acron’s focus on two segments: aerospace solutions, and defense and rescue technologies.

“All those transactions have built us to where we are today,” Acron CFO Jack LeMay, who joined the company in late July, told CFO Brew.

In a recent interview, LeMay walked us through Acron’s strategy moving forward and his focus in the coming months.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you give me an overview of the company’s strategic plan over the next couple of years? Particularly under PE ownership, what is TJC’s exit strategy? Is Acron being built up for a potential IPO?

As we look forward, we continue to see really solid growth within our portfolio, both inorganically and organically. As far as an IPO, it’s certainly an option that could be potentially available to us in the future. But there’s no decision made. This is my third CFO role in a PE portfolio company; I think everyone is very similar in the fact that you really don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or five years from now. So we try to make the best business decisions we can to put ourselves in a situation to be able to do whatever the market dictates at that point. But no real plans either way today, and I think that’s typical of PE.

How do you see recent M&A deals as fitting into that overall strategic direction of the company?

We intentionally bring together companies that can benefit from each other. We have some businesses that do use AI and technology, and we have 14 different businesses that are strong in their markets, and we are trying to give opportunities for those businesses to benefit from each other. To the extent that these businesses fit well with the rest of the portfolio, we like to think about them as maybe potential M&A targets, as with the ones that we just acquired earlier this year.

How do you see your position as CFO in driving strategic objectives?

[With] a lot of transactions that have occurred over the past, we are making sure that we have the fundamentals and process and systems in place to enable us to be nimble and get information quickly, as well as building a team. We have a very lean corporate structure, and we operate a decentralized business structure. So we have finance people across our businesses that are embedded with the operating leaders to help them make decisions and enable us to grow profitably. But one of the things that we’re making sure we can do is we can bring everything together on a consolidated basis and make sure that we are reporting as quickly as we can.

As you’re consolidating, what opportunities do you see to also incorporate AI into the finance function?

We use AI a lot. I would say we use it mostly today for reporting and doing a lot of ad hoc analysis or presentations that we create. I think that’s probably us [just] touching the surface, but we do leverage it today, and I think as we get more structure in place, that’ll enable us more time to really work and see what other processes we can automate across the portfolio.

How do ongoing macro headwinds, such as interest rate actions and geopolitical tensions, impact your business? And how do you help navigate those as CFO?

Where it does change is, in some cases that may require us to look at our cost structure differently and try to offset some of those price increases or inflation that we’re receiving from, whether it’s oil [prices] or other other other drivers out in the environment.