How to successfully manage an acquisition – TechCrunch

Corporations make acquisitions for a number of causes. Typically it’s about filling a gap in a product street map, or increasing market share, or discovering good individuals.

Discovering the appropriate firm to amass takes particular expertise. However as soon as the deal is thru, it takes talent and a deft hand to combine the acquired firm easily into the mothership with out shedding key expertise or making its employees really feel like they’ve gone from constructing one thing nice to being cogs in an enormous machine.

The acquirer has to determine whether or not to include their tradition into the acquired firm or let it preserve its personal tradition and identification. It may be a tough line to stroll, and the success of the transaction can typically hinge on how nicely the cultural integration is carried out.

Past tradition and other people, although, there’s additionally a vital nuts-and-bolts aspect to acquisitions. Do you retain the identical advantages and compensation packages in place, or do you progress individuals to new plans? That course of could be disruptive for workers. Worst of all, do you lay individuals off?

Then there’s tooling. Every firm has its personal approach of doing issues, and has distinctive instruments utilized by gross sales and advertising and marketing, HR and finance. The acquirer and bought firm have to take a seat down and determine which instruments they’ll hold or abandon with out making the smaller agency really feel prefer it’s a “my approach or the freeway” scenario — until that’s the way you do enterprise.

It’s a balancing act. If you happen to care to make the corporate you’re buying really feel a part of the group somewhat than a bolted-on element, all the train will get tougher.

In an effort to reply all these questions, we’re inspecting how good acquisitions work in a two-part sequence. For this primary half, we spoke to executives from three corporations which have made many acquisitions to get their tackle the method and the way they make sure the post-deal integration goes easily.

Within the subsequent half, we are going to characteristic executives from three corporations that have been acquired by the identical organizations.

It’s price noting that everybody concerned right here is making an attempt to place their greatest foot ahead, and no one goes to air any soiled laundry on both aspect of the acquisition equation. The objective of those articles is to be taught what the method is like for either side of the transaction, and simply how a lot of a problem this entire enterprise could be after the contracts are signed and the checks clear.

In search of the appropriate firm

Whereas there isn’t essentially a method for locating good corporations, the executives we spoke to all mentioned a course of that they’ve developed over time primarily based on their experiences buying corporations.

Ashley Andersen Zantop, COO at edtech agency Cambium Studying Group, has been concerned in a lot of acquisitions in her time with the corporate. She mentioned Cambium has pursued an acquisition technique over time to enhance the corporate’s natural development, and for starters, a great match can be digital edtech companies aimed on the Okay-12 market.