How to pursuade top management that does not care about PMI
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I worked in an organisation which did lots of financial acqusitions, meaning after acquisitions, little efforts were put into PMI and the acquired company still run more or less independently. The outcome was that the group is not a synergistic organsiation but a group of standalone small companies. The management seemed to have no issue with such structure as long as these acquired business turned in profits. How can I pursudate that a top management that proper PMI is necessary when the organisation is running with very lean resources?
I think that is will be key to assess and draft the “financial business case”.
– what could it bring us in terms of money?
– how fast can it be delivered?
– what risks do we see?
– what are the investments required (both in money and in time from management)Only in case the value outweighs the risks & investment needed, I think you will be able to convince management
Maybe the best way to get their attention is to show them that if the PMI process was managed differently the return in term of revenues, retention, etc would change considerably.
Maybe a first step could be to propose a generic HR survey to measure the temperature of all employees. In HR tasks, this should be a normal routine, so not so difficult to arrange…?From what I understand, the objective of the company was to acquire companies and let them run independently as a subsidiary and not integrate into a larger firm. There is nothing wrong with this and PMI as such is not a necessary condition for success. PMI is most important in larger companies that absorb an acquisition. Here, it more like a PE firm model where you manage it as a holding company. If there are more synergies to be had from the two operating companies then there is value in having a central value creation team that looks at all the holding companies and shares best practices, customer lists, integrated offering etc. otherwise, just having a common IT, HR infrastructure is to the extent one needs to integrate…
I would quantify the importance of PMI, highlight potential issues and areas for synergies. If possible, I will compute potential cost savings and revenue gains which may lead to buy-in from management.
I had a similar situation and started to work on minimum requirements in problematic functions of the new subsidiaries, for example fixed their delays in Financial Reporting. After this small but visible success, Management asked me to work on the other topics of my integration plan (including synergies).
So, starting in areas with a lower integration level was my way to solve this.
You mentioned profits being a point of interest. It might be worth challenging leadership why they chose the revenue/ profit figures they did and what higher or lower profits would mean to them. A lot of the content we reviewed in this course focused on identifying opportunities for synergy and developing processes to ensure that those synergies were achieved. If PMI is not being conducted, it implies that these synergies are not being pursued or tracked and by extension, profits are being left on the table. Wonder if leadership is also ok with this?
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