People
Who carries knowledge, decisions, authority, client trust, and daily execution? Where are incentives and responsibilities creating dependence instead of strength?
The acquisition problem
The seller may leave. The seller's job often does not.
A company can look successful and still be structurally dependent on the person who built it. The relationships, decisions, routines, instincts, and informal systems may all still run through one owner.
When that owner steps away, the acquisition team can inherit those responsibilities instead of inheriting a business that functions independently.
What we examine
Every resource and relationship has to serve the reason the asset was acquired.
We do not start with a generic playbook. We start with what the buyer wants the company to become and how the company actually operates today.
Customers
Which relationships belong to the company and which still belong to a person? How does the company create, earn, and retain client trust?
Systems
Which processes are real systems and which only work because someone remembers what to do, steps in, or personally forces the outcome?
Our operating framework
Two relationships explain most of what matters.
1.
What is the business's relationship with its employees?
and
2.
What is the business's relationship with its clients and prospects?
How the engagement changes
We begin embedded. We are not supposed to stay that way.
Early work is intensive because we have to understand the company well enough to change it responsibly. Over time, the amount of intervention should decline as the structure becomes stronger.
Learn the acquired company in detail.
Ownership objectives, the team, the customers, current systems, spending, incentives, dependencies, and the informal ways work actually gets done.
Rebuild the weak points.
The work can touch revenue systems, employee structure, incentives, client relationships, accountability, management systems, and the operating model itself.
Transfer the company away from intervention.
The buyer should not have to become the replacement owner-operator. Our involvement should also become unnecessary as the systems take hold.
Before or after the close
If the company still depends on a person, the acquisition still carries that risk.
We can start the conversation before the transaction or after ownership has already discovered how much day-to-day dependence came with the deal.
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