[Judith Ghitea]

One of the things that I have personally been challenged by is addressing the lack of a sense of urgency with some leaders of businesses that my company is engaged with to acquire. Specifically, organizations where there is a Letter of Intent or similar in place and we’re actively moving toward deal finalization. It’s important to clarify that the challenge most often occurs when the leaders are not intending to join our business. It’s almost as though once they confirm their decision to sell, they lose their motivation to do the work (usually hard work) of pulling together data, meeting to discuss pre-integration, etc., etc.

Does anyone have any tips on how to successfully encourage seller leadership engagement to keep M&A activities on schedule?

[Jukka Teikari]

Lack of urgency could be related to the lack of strategic agenda at the seller. You should find out, why the seller has an intent to sell and how strong the motive is. A divestment should of course make strategic sense to the seller as well, but if the future strategy is unclear, there might be less pressure to proceed. Direct communication is often a key, could also be that the seller does not have a practical way to produce required information and is therefore puzzled. Would it be possible to somehow focus the info request to facilitate the process or could the issue be resolved some way in the definitive agreement?

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