High Performance Integration
By Jim Jeffries, Chairman of The M&A Leadership Council and a member of the Board of M&A Standards
When I established my consulting organization in hopes of improving the Integration practices of corporate buyers, extensive research made it clear that poor results in mergers and acquisitions were because of the lack of one or more key elements. I call these the Five Missing Links, and I’m confident that they remain true today.
- Formal orientation and training
There was virtually no training available at the time, and this became the primary reason for founding the M&A Leadership Council. All team leaders should go through one to two days of orientation and training just to develop a baseline of understanding the complexity, requirements and workflow for merging companies. A deeper dive is now available through The M&A Leadership Council's The Art of M&A Integration.
- Playbook
Any company who plans on doing a merger or multiple acquisitions should have a detailed, repeatable and well-documented process for the integration. It should incorporate best practices and be easily understood and articulated by the IMO and all integration team leaders. Additionally, playbooks that don't have the ability to flex with different “deal types” are of little use. There is not a single playbook that can be utilized for all deals because each one has its own challenges and complexities.
About Jim Jefffries:
Jim is chairman and co-founder of the M&A Leadership Council, a global organization delivering best-practice training to the M&A community. He spent 25 years leading consulting companies in performance improvement, private equity and M&A, providing advice to Fortune 1000 C-level executives on M&A valuations of more than $23B. Jim is a regular presenter at The Art of M&A training events provided by the M&A Leadership Council.