M&A Blog and News
May 30, 2017
Insights from the 2016 Global Workforce Study
By Willis Towers Watson, a Partner of M&A Leadership Council
Successful M&A transactions often depend on their impact on employees, and effective leadership and communications make a critical difference to their engagement. Findings from the 2016 Global Workforce Study highlight the people risks inherent in these transactions and reveal what employees value during a period of change.
May 30, 2017
The Tax Advisory Role in Buy-side Transactions
By Michael Williams,Transaction Advisory Services Tax Leader for BDO, a Partner of the M&A Leadership Council
As a strategic buyer, you can run across a multitude of complexities when evaluating a target company for acquisition, which is why the due diligence process is so important. And while tax considerations play a significant role in most transactions, tax due diligence is often overlooked in the due diligence process.
May 30, 2017
Sustainable Growth Will Win over Private Investors
By Troy Hooper of Mergermarket, a Partner of the M&A Leadership Council
Only nine technology companies have gone public this year. But this isn’t due to a lack of candidates. There are at least 100 high-caliber tech companies capable of going public that have thus far stayed private thanks to the deep and increasingly diverse pools of late-stage private capital available to them.
May 25, 2017
Let’s face it. Most acquirers aren’t very good at innovation. Cost synergies, yes. True innovation through the deals we sponsor or integrate? Not so much. Oh, sure, we talk a great game in the boardroom, but when it comes down to actually delivering on the innovation bullet point in your deal-book or making something real out of the half-baked assumptions you stuffed in the financial projection model as a placeholder, there’s typically a lot more talk than action.
May 24, 2017
Let’s pick up where we left off last week in our discussion about the Business Impact of Integration Project Staffing.
As reported in that post, based on our recent survey, The State of M&A Integration Effectiveness 2014, integration project staffing was cited as both the #1 “most important breakthrough or best practice with integration,” and simultaneously listed as the #1 “greatest remaining obstacle to overcome for more consistent integration success.”
May 17, 2017
(Fifth in a Series on Change Management)
It’s time to get down to tactics. For our fifth and final (for now) article on the importance of change management to M&A integration success, we want to focus on specific actions, components, processes or reinforcements that you should consider as a part of your change campaign.
April 26, 2017
(Seventh in a Series on Culture)
I saw a report from well-known industry analyst recently that said essentially this. “The primary cause of the (“ABC/XYZ”) merger failure was cultural incompatibility. XYZ, the TargetCo, historically focused on quality first and price second. For ABC, the BuyerCo, everything they have always done was just the opposite and their insistence on extreme cost leadership destroyed XYZ’s business.”
April 25, 2017
Chairman’s Message
By Jim Jeffries, Chairman M&A Leadership Council
Many companies declare victory on the day of signing the letter of intent (LOI) but beyond that, “it’s just a matter of getting through the diligence!” Whoa! That’s the wrong headset. The right headset heard from best acquirers is “our best acquisitions are the ones we never do ...