Tom Gooley is Chief Operating Officer at Cetera where he brings together teams who deliver exceptional experiences that drive growth.
Mergers and acquisitions are inherently complex, but a compelling way for enterprises to grow and scale.
The Twitter takeover, Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and the formation of AOL Time Warner—the largest M&A value loss in history—are textbook examples of culture clashes, missed calculations or simply unrealistic expectations. Advanced planning and some best practices can help your company run smoothly even during the most complex transitions.
Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch
In my years working at leading investment banking companies, and now as COO of a financial solution provider, I’ve learned many ways to be proactive with transition planning, so service quality stays front and center.
Do you know advisors’ No. 1 influencing factor when deciding to affiliate with a new firm? According to Cerulli’s U.S. Broker/Dealer Marketplace 2022 report, technology (56%) was the most frequently identified factor. When changing firms, advisors cited learning new technology (70%) and operations (75%) as moderate to major challenges.
It’s critically important to keep your service strong in times of transitions and acquisitions, so you keep your current clients satisfied with service even as you’re growing. A streamlined and smooth experience—the ease of doing business—is what leaders should aim for. During mergers and acquisitions, it is critical to ensure the integration is smooth for all.
Here are five ways to ensure experiential excellence during transitions.
Start with estimating budget.
• Ensure each year’s budget has capacity for capital projects.
• Evaluate previous M&A projects to ensure that all departments are accounted for.
• Understand that every deal provides different opportunities and challenges—they’re not cookie cutter.
Assemble a dedicated M&A team and hire additional staff.
• Look at best interests for all. Designate a clear leader who is focused on the M&A transition to manage teams and handle precisely defined workstreams.
• Ascertain how much human capital will be needed. At least two quarters ahead of the transaction, hire additional permanent and contractor staff who will be focused solely on the M&A volume.
• Contemplate thoughtfully how best to integrate culture. What hallmarks from each new company make sense to integrate into the merged one? As a starting point, look at language and understand new nomenclature. For example, how does each company describe or name similar roles or talk about similar subjects?
Create and execute on training plans for existing internal teams, new advisors and team members.
• Make the onboarding process smooth. Thoughtfully sequence how you present information both internally and externally, starting with the familiar and moving to the more complex.
• Decide what to tell who and determine the optimum times. You may have overlapping timelines to parallel groups.
• Provide a proverbial roadmap so people know what to expect. For example, my company uses specific roadmap imagery to visually bring the transition alive.
• Sequence onboarding training in phases, so new advisors take action in a timely way and absorb each layer of what they’ll need to know.
• Publish dedicated training communications, for example: articles, newsletters, a sitelet, webinars, FAQs.
• Designate special operational processing queues for transactions and questions specific to the deal so that they don’t disrupt business as usual for existing employees and affiliates.
• Host ongoing all-leader and all-team meetings as touchpoints to address progress, new issues that may arise and to simplify overlap.
Improve your tech stack.
• Assess technology systems from both firms and select the best systems from each to implement.
• Create a dedicated plan to onboard any new systems, and address issues in how they are replacing previous ones.
• Train on the new tech from the firm being acquired.
• Shift as many platforms and major applications to the cloud as possible. This allows for scaling more easily to support the increased volume.
Remember, data is your friend.
• After a transaction, do an honest postmortem. Looking at what went right and what went wrong can give you equally powerful insights by listening to the stories from the key teams responsible for the transition. Among the factors, measure efficacy, processes and turnover.
• Take a look at the things you did right and that translate to the rest of the business to help it grow.
• Learn from your mistakes and what went wrong. Some of your learnings from previous transactions can inform new ones and lead to broader improvements.
By estimating budget, assembling a dedicated M&A team, hiring additional staff, creating and executing training plans, improving your tech stack and using data to guide and assess, you can ensure experiential excellence during transitions.
At the end of the day, culture eats strategy for lunch. Data, tech, training and budget are of paramount importance. Yet, it’s all for naught if the people who are coming over, whether team members or advisors, aren’t on board. Taking the time and care to learn how your partners’ company culture works is critical. Getting to know the people, personally and professionally, is key. The human connection needs to be at the heart of any successful deal, and in my experience, is the most rewarding aspect of transition integration.
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