The Pacesetter Pod

The best company you can acquire is often not the most successful. Instead, it's more important to assess how well the seller prepares the exit. This may sound obvious, but most M&A integrations fail because the buyer or the seller underestimate what it takes to mold a business, so it fits into the new ecosystem. No transition will be seamless, but there are many factors that influence the success...

An M&A integration may fail if you ignore the culture of the company you acquire. A business may have a similar offer in the same market as you, which makes them an excellent candidate to integrate into your organization. But they might've got successful in a different way than you. And not figuring out these differences may draw out the integration process, increasing the risk of failure. On the...

One of the fatal mistakes agribusinesses make is focusing their strategy around their margins. Yes, it's true that your business depends on the value it creates in the economy. But some of the best strategic decisions you can make may stunt your short-term earnings. That's okay, because they lay the foundation for much higher returns right after that. How? By giving the people in your business mor...

M&A integration is a process where nothing may happen for a long time. And then everything happens at once. But this can go 2 ways. Either you enter a lucrative market, or you can scare your customers away into the arms of your competitors. The reason? During major change, your teammates have to take more responsibility  because you need to focus less on the day-to-day, and more on the integration...

No matter how well you run a farm, working with the wrong middleman can diminish your margins. And the process of buying, storing and selling agricultural commodities is one if the least understood. This is a threat to every agribusiness, since there are many middlemen who can't meet the needs of either side of their customers. Fortunately, what makes a good middleman is obvious once you know it....

Imagine you close an M&A deal that will skyrocket your business. But your top personnel leaves for the competition, before the integration process even starts. If you haven't acquired a company yet, it will surprise you that this is a bitter reality for many CEOs. Losing the team members you count on to your rivals may seem unfair. But you can do a lot to make sure they realize that staying is bet...

One of the most common misconceptions about M&A integration is that it's a strategy. This is a fatal mistake. Because you can acquire a company without having any sort of strategy. And, if you try to wrap your strategy around a merge, it will most likely fail. Why? Because it's important to walk away from an M&A plan when it won't help your business grow.  When you think you need an M&A integratio...

M&A integration is not fair. It demands excellence from you as a leader and your team. But it also weakens your company during the integration process.  You need enough reserves to cover potential drawbacks, and flawless communication with your team, while you get across your company culture to a mass of new people. The sheer amount of questions you'll have to answer means that an M&A integration...

Most CEOs don't realize the magnitude of effects their change plan has on the organization, and create more problems than they try to solve. When your business goes through major change, it's in your best interest to ensure that the day-to-day processes don't suffer from it. And your people perform worse when you implement a new idea, if you don't have the right system in place to manage the chang...

There is a certain bias that makes almost all M&A integrations fail. Most CEOs think they need to make the integration as short as possible, so they avoid eroding their company's assets. And While it's important to burn as little cash as you possibly can, this is also where things go wrong. Why?  You minimize the risk of losing economic substance before you land the deal - not after. Because integ...

What is the goal of your business? The obvious answer for a business leader is profit. And you achieve profit by growing your business. But this is where things get tricky if your business outgrows you.  Why? Because every business confronts you with the Federal Reserve's dual-mandate. The Fed wants the economy to grow, but growth mustn't outpace the productivity behind it. And while competition p...

A CEO is like a general. If you acquire a company, you also take responsibility for a legion of new employees. And if you don't gain the loyalty of your followers, like a bad general, your M&A will fail.  In fact, this is one of the most underrated risks for an M&A integration. In the eyes of the people, you're someone who changed a comfortable status quo. And the longer your employees are wary of...

With expected farm income taking a nosedive, and the highest borrowing costs in over a decade, agriculture seems to be on the ropes. By this logic, we could expect less mergers and acquisitions in the industry, but reality seems far different. Seasoned investors are seizing the opportunity to get ahead of their hesitant competitors. Why? They understand the current risks and - more importantly - t...

The success of your M&A integration hinges on your communication with all parties involved. Yet despite having best practices, communication templates, and literature on successful communications, we tend to fall short, especially when it comes to the folks whose stability gets upended by an M&A.  I've recently experienced something like this when a blizzard delayed my flight home by 48 hours. At...

The average M&A transaction has TEN THOUSAND individual, unique, and crucial decisions to make. Some of these include: How long is this going to take? How do we avoid making stupid decisions? How do we avoid wasting our time and/or money? And these are only 3 of 10,000 decisions you have to make. That's only 0.03% of the decisions you need to make!  Undertaking an M&A without knowing the answers t...

Being a "fire-fighter" works — until it doesn't.  If you're just tackling reds right in front of you, you're thinking in the short-term, and you're not improving as you go. But there's a better way. And it's called working on capability. It makes your business easier, quicker, faster, and generates bigger, proven, and repeatable results for your business. And in today's episode, I reveal how capab...

M&A is not a box-ticking exercise. Merely "completing" the tasks in your integration is not the same as closing your integration. And if you don't close your integration 100%? The feelings of dread, anxiety, and eternal despair never leave. Your half-complete integration will always be there, just lingering in the background. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody is fed up with it.  Morale...

Integrations that take longer than a year bankrupt your company.  Why? Well, there's a few reasons, but nothing is as detrimental as this:  Instead of focusing on strategy, senior leaders have now spent an entire year on integration. They've lost focus of what's important.  That's why completing your integration in a timely manner is essential to your success. And in today's episode, I reveal how...

Storing processes in the minds of your senior leaders is a huge risk for your business. What would happen to your firm if those leaders leave the company? You don't have to imagine, I'll tell you: Essential knowledge is lost, leaving the rest of the organization without clear direction or guidance. This results in confusion, mistakes, and decreased efficiency. Not only that, it leaves your company...

When it comes to integrations, your mindset produces results. This is a simple, observable fact. Yet leaders of the 70-90% of acquisitions that fail kneel at the altar of "budget management", have a scarcity mindset, and fall prey to worthless data. Worst part? Senior leaders start to spin their wheels. They agonize over tiny, incremental decisions that have no impact on the broader picture. The e...

AOL & Time Warner (2001) — $65 billion loss. Daimler-Benz & Chrysler (1998) — $36 billion loss. Google & Motorola (2012) — $12.5 billion loss. These behemoths all failed when trying to integrate. Why? There are many reasons, but the biggest one is because they tried to run their integration like they ran their business. With 70-90% of integrations flat out failing, you can't follow what you've alw...

An M&A with multiple objectives is a great way to fail. Diluted focus poisons the effectiveness when acquiring a business. To cover the costs of trying to integrate everything, profits are depleted instead of being used to grow the business. IT, finance, accounting, operations, logistics, and sales and marketing are all strained when a business bites more than it can chew. So, how do we avoid taki...

Most M&A integrations destroy more value than they create. They do this by asking these irrelevant questions: How do we sustain our culture? How do we put our new portfolio, products, and services into the market? How do we understand our margins and profitability? These questions are a complete waste of time, energy, and money compared to the life-or-death element of an M&A: your customers. Becau...

When you try to do everything, you achieve nothing. The biggest mistake I see food and agribusiness companies making is having multiple reasons why they're executing an M&A. Sounds weird, right? Why would you want to limit yourself to only one reason why? By not having a concrete why, you face very low odds of getting the integration right. If the integration fails, the deal fails. And if the deal...

Mergers & acquisitions (M&As) often destroy more value than they create. Statistically speaking, it's a safer bet to invest all your time in creating a new business, as opposed to executing an M&A. According to Harvard Business Review, Between 70 and 90% of M&As fail. Why? Because they don't have a proven process, especially one that takes into account the integration AFTER the initial M&A has occ...