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Another Way: Holistic Acquisitive Growth – Focusing Integration on the Most Important Contributors to Value.

by Evan Smith and Greg Collins

PART I

OVER THE LAST 20 years, most acquisitions have failed to deliver the business value executives and investors have used to justify the deal – AND most executives, leaders, and consultants with history in the field know this. Recent indications are that the rate of reported “success” remains shockingly low – with failure rates running somewhere between 50 and 80%. Even in many of the “best” examples, organizational friction, waste, demoralization and other factors cause declines in productivity that blunt or wholly offset desired synergies, cost savings, and creation of business value. And everyone knows that failure in integration after the deal means real pain:  loss of market value, loss of critical talent, declines in profit, loss of market share, and – perhaps most importantly – loss of customer goodwill, and loss of confidence from the markets.

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.”  – Damon Runyon

Most business strategies are built on an inexorable need to grow – so companies boldly pursue inorganic growth in spite of the odds. If your company is one that “must” grow, and growing via acquisition is one of the approaches you’ll use, the questions become: how will you prepare yourself and your organization, how will you structure not just the transaction but the activities that follow it, and how will you engage others, in order to position acquisition initiatives for success?

Read the full article @BizCatalyst360.

PART II

IN THE FIRST post of this series on Acquisitive Growth (Acquisitive Growth:  Structuring Acquisition Integration To Capture Business Value, Part 1), we overviewed an alternative approach to acquisition integration that sets up companies to capture more business value from their deals than the traditional approach.  The alternative approach directly addresses many of the shortcomings of the traditional approach to Post Merger Integration (PMI) – and is designed to align integration efforts for success.  It works because it explicitly surfaces many of the assumptions leaders make about their deal early in the integration process, and overtly closes gaps and addresses uncertainties that can creep into the process after the closing takes place.

Read the full article @BizCatalyst360.

PART III

THIS IS THE THIRD in a series of posts on Acquisitive Growth.  In earlier posts of this series (Acquisitive Growth:  Structuring Acquisition Integration To Capture Business Value, Part 1 and Another Way:  Integration That Begins With the End in Mind), we overviewed a holistic approach to acquisition integration that enables companies to capture more business value from their deals than the traditional approach.  These earlier posts detailed the work streams, and phases of due-diligence/ opportunity development that make significant contributions to creating this value.  In this post, we explore the contributions that a robust value-driver analysis makes to understanding the levers by which any given deal can create business value.

Value driver analysis comes at a critical “spanning” stage in due-diligence – between the formulation of strategic objectives, and the confirmation of a specific company to acquire.  As strategic objectives become clear, and specific targets emerge, well-structured value-driver analysis plays a pivotal role to help align stakeholder views on what aspects of the acquired company will make the best contributions to value, focus business development and integration planning, target data gathering on the “critical few” real needs, and focus integration and planning on high-priority opportunities to capture the value in the deal.

Read the full article @BizCatalyst360.