Thousands of deals are done every year that involve integrating an acquired company. For many companies, M&A is the highest potential value activity they undertake, yet based on actual results achieved, it is also the riskiest. Anywhere from 50 to 70% fail to achieve full value, and more than 50% of the failure rate is attributed to breakdowns in post merger integration.
This Webinar will help you avoid the pitfalls and maximize the value of your acquisitions through Effective Integration Execution. But first, we would like to point out that even serial acquirers struggle with the unique challenges inherent in integration. Why?
Breakdowns in execution:
- planning often occurs late in the process
- plans are incomplete
- processes lack structure
- accountability is loosely defined and hard to enforce
- most integration team members have full-time day jobs
- employees are anxious and feel insecure
- communication is difficult and incomplete
- data is hard to collect, access, out of date
- reporting is arduous and time consuming
- executing with general purpose tools
The clock is ticking against synergy attainment. Outside the PMO, most team members have functional area expertise but are NOT trained or equipped for project management or M&A. It's no surprise that many deals fall far short of strategic goals.
But, there is a better way. We will show you how to maximize your success through the use of proven methods and specialized tools.
In this Webinar, three expert practitioners, Gerald Adolph of Booz & Co., Stacey Fix Conti of Merger Managers, LLC and Manuel Sanches of eknow, inc. will provide their insights and practical advice about achieving M&A integration success.
Gerald, Stacey and Manuel have spent years in the trenches helping companies deal with these challenges. They will demonstrate how proven methodologies and tools specifically designed to address the deal-derailing challenges of M&A can make huge improvements in the value attained on your transactions.
Whether your organization is contemplating a deal or already in the middle of an integration, we hope you will join us.
Panelists
Gerald Adolph
In support of his clients' growth agendas, Gerald has led M&A pre-deal assessments as well as multiple complex, challenging post merger integration assignments.
Gerald and his consulting staff have provided clients pre-deal candidate assessments, board reviews, and communications support for the announcement. In the pre-closing period, he has led efforts to create detailed integration and synergy plans, which balanced external/strategic and tactical imperatives along with employee concerns and culture/organization integration. Integration support post close focused on those areas of most need for specific clients.
Gerald has received Booz & Company's Professional Excellence Award, which was given in recognition of outstanding and innovative client service on an assignment for Quest Diagnostics.
He is also co-author of Merge Ahead: Mastering the Five Enduring Trends of Masterful M&A, published by McGraw-Hill in Spring 2009.
Gerald is a former member of the firm's Board of Directors, a past leader of the firm's global chemicals business, and a former leader of the firm's global consumer and health work. He currently leads Booz & Company's work for mergers and restructuring clients.
Gerald holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He also holds a BS degree in chemical engineering, a BS in management science/organizational psychology, and a Master's degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Stacey Fix Conti
Stacey Fix Conti brings over 20 years of operations, merger and integration experience with her to her company, Merger Managers, LLC, which specializes in assisting companies in the creation of an effective, standard and scalable merger integration process.
Her background includes commercial operations, mergers and acquisitions. She has been involved in every aspect of deal making from negotiating and structuring deals to globally integrating and transitioning acquired companies. She also has managed divestitures, carve outs, and joint ventures. She spent 10 years Oracle Corporation where she managed over 40 acquisition integrations.
Her operational responsibilities included setting strategy for transitions or carve outs, working with executives on transition or carve out strategy, creating executive compensation packages, stock option plans and allocations, retention strategy, addressing change management issues, reengineering business processes, managing cross functional transition projects, creating infrastructure to support integration or new company, brokering issues among cross-functional areas, training personnel, executive summaries and operations reviews.
Stacey's company, Merger Managers, helps guide executives to achieve the successful integration of acquired companies through training and consulting services. She has trained over 600 managers and executives globally and has helped companies develop processes and tools to manage and capture value for acquisitions ranging in size from $10M to $7B.
She is also co-author and editor of M&A Integration: A CEO's field guide to the art and process of effective integration.
Manuel Sanches
Mr. Sanches' career spans nearly 25 years in technical, management and executive roles based in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. But the common thread of Mr. Sanches' career has been applying software design and cognitive science to enterprise management challenges of increasing scope. Mr. Sanches founded eknow with Lawrence Dell (in late 1998) and began operations in 1999. Mr. Sanches developed the company's then-radical "software-as-a-service" or "cloud-based" business model, and is responsible for the design, engineering, and management best practices behind eknow Integrator.
To Mr. Sanches and eknow, restructuring and M&A – particularly complex post-merger integration – represent the greatest management challenges most organizations attempt, yet they are the most poorly served by technology. Existing software and methods are grossly inefficient, difficult to use, require inordinate IT and/or M&A consulting expense, are not tailored to critical elements of M&A and large-scale initiatives, fail to integrate every contributor into the process, and reflect false assumptions about users, processes, and value drivers in the real world. Mr. Sanches' vision has been to address these shortcomings in an easy to use, highly automated and flexible web-based tool. Mr. Sanches' vision is realized in eknow Integrator, the first and only such application a decade ago, and now the most mature and easy to use in 2011.