[Laura Sims]

How has the pandemic influenced and/or changed your M & A strategy – “Best Practices”.

[Pamala Paschal-Sturhan]

Hi Laura:

The pandemic seems to have highly impacted many companies’ P&L, making it more difficult to have the resources for M&A activity. I know that the company I work for is trying to pass through cost to the customer with price increases but that impacts sales. Thus, unless you are in an industry that is profitable during the pandemic, it will be difficult to conduct M&A activity unless it is at a bargain…

~Pamala

[Corina Bunu]

Hello Laura,
The pandemic definitely impacted the whole business and social ecosystem. However, the impact was two-sided: negative and positive.
Many companies shut down, registered losses or weaker financial performance, the supply chain was and is still disrupted.
On the other hand, the surviving companies had to rethink their business model, to become more agile, innovative, flexible and lean. Digitalization, automatisation, innovation are positive booming trends that have been noticed especially as a result of the pandemic.
Thnaks,
Corina

[Corina Bunu]

Hello dear M&A fellows,
In your opinion, how the recent geopolitical events (Ukrainian war, change of world order, shifting of political power) affect the global M&A activity?
Thanks.

[Greg Jessup]

Integration is best implemented in a personal setting. Onboarding, employee announcement, and training needs to be done face-to-face. We attempted to integrate virtually and it did not work out well. As far as we have come I do not see a true replacement for face to face interaction

[Cody Eberhardt]

When looking at M&A, be sure both companies tools have the capacity to scale remotely

[Christina]

I think being able to do a hybrid integration is essential – while in-person has long been deemed the best option the pandemic showed us that being flexible and respectful to others’ needs regarding training, onboarding, etc. is the most sustainable option.

[Jeff Christiansen]

I’d be curious to see whether M&A that happened during the pandemic through a more virtual process ends up souring along the lines of company culture, as it seems difficult to assess that virtually.

[Laura Sims]

Hi Jeff,

I am sorry to hear the virtual workarounds for your M & A activity did not prove to be as successful as you would have liked. I agree, Face to Face meetings have their place and shouldn’t totally be eliminated. However, I will say we are currently involved in onboarding our second large acquisition since the pandemic and virtual discovery workshops/meetings have proven to work very well in our organization. We have also seen a dramatic decrease in travel expense for the large number of folks that would typically be traveling for Integration Planning meetings and/or discovery which further supports our efforts in aspiring to be better.

Good Luck with your future deals and strategies!

[Alison Wills]

The pandemic helped us prove our business case that integration cutovers can be done successfully in a virtual environment. For the first time (to the best of my knowledge), we completed our integration cutovers without having anyone on site for support from our company and with the vast majority (if not all) employees involved working from home.

[Wiebke von Ahsen]

In out legal merger we had bis issues in the HR Integration, caused by cultural differences and less good preparation from management. There was a very good mitigation plan, but we could not go onsite due to the outbreak and that made it more difficult.

[Author]

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