Earlier this month, the Association for Corporate Growth hosted a webinar on “Identifying and Achieving Transaction Synergies and Impacts on the Acquisition Price.” One of the takeaways was the gulf between financial and strategic leaders: “We often see a disconnect between the financial modelers of synergies and the strategic & operational planners, particularly in large corporate settings,” says Matthew Morris, Managing Director of RGL Advisors.
This disconnect underlines the need to include functional leaders in your acquisition process. That’s to say, leaders from each main area of the business: operations, marketing, finance, etc. With each function represented on your team, everyone is on the same page for overall M&A strategy.
Regardless of your strategic reason for an acquisition, it will affect every functional area of your organization, and each functional leader has unique insights into the potential synergies of a given target company. Open communication with each functional area prevents “silo thinking” and increases the effectiveness of your M&A process.
