M&A & Integrations
The key determinant of successful M&A is the level of fit between the organisations involved.
The Importance of Experience
As organisations grow, they need to bring in external expertise to help manage new challenges. Mergers and Acquisitions are a prime example of the need to bring in experience. Buying another business or managing an effective merger can be fraught with difficulties, particularly if you don’t have an experienced M&A team within your organisation or are working with a firm unfamiliar with the industry’s nuances. Through our extensive experience of both independent veterinary and corporate M&A, on both sides of the deal, we understand the importance of getting your acquisition right.
Our goal is to bring clarity and confidence to your M&A journey, giving you the tools to create a robust growth strategy, assess potential acquisitions, and ensure that all activities align to your vision and are guided by sound reasoning. We focus on supporting organisations that don’t have their own M&A departments, however, we do also act as a fresh pair of eyes within an existing M&A team. Our service revolves around establishing a clear M&A strategy with supporting rationale and alignment to your vision and values, helping you to clearly narrate your objectives to stakeholders and/or board members.
Strategic Oversight
Organisations often seek advice at different stages of the M&A process. Holistically, we help you assess your M&A options by analysing your business model and the supply chains and value chains that interact with it, helping you identify the type of acquisition you’re looking for. We ask the right questions to give you clarity on your reasons for pursuing a particular direction and help you assess strategic and cultural fit – the 2 primary determinants of successful M&A.
We then help you come up with a compelling pitch to potential vendors, both to secure interest and to compete with rival bids. A key part of this is being able to address the common concerns of potential vendors, such as looking after their people post acquisition and speaking to their professional motivations and drivers. We will co-create a set of priorities, principles, and non-negotiables that you can discuss with potential acquisitions to ensure you get a good understanding of your target organisation, limiting the unknowns as much as possible. Our experience at both ends of the acquisition process enables us to identify key areas of consideration that are often intangible.
Finally, we can assist you in working alongside other stakeholders in the M&A process, such as legal and finance teams, help determine a post-acquisition strategy by examining the new competitive landscape, and crucially, help you plan for successful integration.
Managing Change
Integrations require excellent change management skills. This requires good planning, outstanding communication and leadership, a thorough understanding of existing organisational dynamics, and clarity on what needs to be implemented to achieve the desired position. We specialise in strategy, leadership, and culture, all of which play an integral part in achieving successful integration.
As tempting as it can be to want to implement rapid change, the key to smooth integration and a minimum of collateral damage, is putting yourself in the position of the recently acquired company’s employees. There will be a fair degree of anxiety; employees will be looking for clarity on what the future holds and where they fit into it, in order to return them to psychological safety. The skill lies in successfully allaying new employees’ fears, whilst achieving legitimate buy in to the new way of doing things. Our extensive experience of independent and corporate integrations means we are well versed in these challenges and how to successfully navigate them.
Our goal is to give you a clear integration strategy to ensure that all your strategic objectives are met whilst limiting common integration pitfalls such as resistance to change, staff turnover, drops in revenue, and changes in client relations.
The Right Approach
We help you establish what type of integration approach is required based on the degree of fit between the organisations and what your post-acquisition objectives are. We then undertake critical analysis to build up a picture of the change project. We look at such things as readiness to change among employees, analyse key cultural norms and processes, assess leadership capabilities, and perform stakeholder mapping to identify existing dynamics. Taking the time to gain a clear and objective understanding of the task ahead before any changes occur is hugely important. Not doing so can lead to avoidable errors and a lack of momentum.
Our analysis enables us to present a clear change project scope, identifying the “As is” and the “To be” and the steps in between. We report on what capabilities are required for the project, what constitutes cultural wins and losses, appropriate timeframes, communication strategies, which employees have power of influence, and many other critical factors that ensure effective on-boarding. We then carve the overall change project into sub projects that build momentum whilst ensuring that change occurs at a manageable rate.
We can also coach, mentor, or train your key personnel, upskilling them for future integration projects. This has the added benefit of enabling a consistent, methodical approach to integration that can be adopted by your organisation. Successful integration means successfully managing change by scoping out the task ahead, setting expectations, and delivering on promises. We will help you execute it efficiently and effectively for a smooth integration process.
Ready to Get Started?
Get in touch to have a confidential conversation about your current M&A approach and challenges.