Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are protagonists in the corporate finance domain. M&As do not only create new organisations and commercial realities but are also an instigator of change, a melting pot of organisational cultures and in most cases turning points for both the acquiring company and its target. Beyond the contractual and legal instruments, M&A transactions require extensive planning, clinical execution and a clear implementation path once it is executed to ensure that the objectives motivating it are realized and followed through. Being a decision based on an projected state of affairs, M&A processes pose many pitfalls which need to be considered at planning stage and managed throughout. This notwithstanding, M&As remain a primary route for an organisation’s growth and hence a central domain for our engagement to deliver value to our clients.
Our vertical sector expertise coupled with our skills set positions us to take a central role in M&A processes for our clients. Through our experience, we developed a standardized approach towards M&As, which instills discipline in the process and ensures that the focus of the transaction remains value-added throughout the process, never succumbing to personalities or matters of relatively minor importance. We add value and not just support to the process with our proven capability of ensuring win-win situations through an effective iterative process of converging the parties’ objectives towards common ground enabling successful closure.
Most importantly, we lead the M&A process for our clients and not merely report about it. At inception, we join the team to develop the growth strategy and how the M&A blueprint complements the fulfillment of this strategy. We articulate the M&A strategy which maps out the logical process the company needs to go through to realise its goals, following which we identify and hone into the targets based on their proximity to the value-added framework of the M&A outcomes. We pride ourselves in building the ‘Compatibility Profile’ between the preferred target and the companies we assist, which lead us to invest the collective time and effort on reviewing the closest fit rather than many of them. In liaison with our clients’ legal and financial teams we evolve the due diligence process into a full valuation process, which forms the basis for the transaction to take place. At this juncture, we lead the negotiation and value engineering process ensuring that the full value is derived for our client and that value is duly reflected in the contractual framework.
In parallel to the process leading to the execution of the transaction, our strategy execution team develops an integration plan with a set of clear outcomes to be achieved within the first 100 days of it happening. Our effort is channeled towards hands-on leadership of the alignment of management and operations, steadily converging the structures and activities towards our exit from the process when the leadership is handed over the client.