October 15, 2009

Due-Diligence Review

If you’ve ever taken a used car to your mechanic for a complete check-up prior to purchasing it, you understand the value of soliciting expert evaluation before you invest hard cash. The same is true for mergers and acquisitions. Identifying specific risks and assessing the operational components of the combining organizations ahead of time will save you weeks of frustration later. Merger Coach analyzes 18 key touch points between buyer & seller that must be carefully assessed during due-diligence to ensure you price your deal right and reduce transition risk exposure to:

  1. Organizational size and management power differential
  2. Transaction value & size
  3. Transaction currency (stock/cash) used
  4. Integration planning during due-diligence
  5. Level of integration for complete transaction
  6. Disparate cultures, geography & languages
  7. Relative market position and/or ranking
  8. Level of M&A experience
  9. Overall corporate strategy
  10. Opportunities for internal benchmarking & best practices
  11. Relative market confusion/expectations
  12. Expected impacts on your customer base during the transition
  13. Effects on one-time and recurring costs
  14. Speed of decision-making processes
  15. Impacts on current or planned projects
  16. Attrition exposure
  17. Organizational change tolerance
  18. Capacity of management team to achieve results during and after transition

The Merger Coach Risky Business™ instrument measures your exposure in each of these areas and offers preventive action items for each of the 18 touch points.

After surveying key customers, suppliers, executives and employees, your executive team will receive documentation and a high-level briefing summarizing findings on each of the critical touch points into four critical transition & operational risk areas: clarity of transition performance metrics, communications effectiveness, customer & markets impacts, business structure and organizational effectiveness. The value to you will equal or surpass at least three times the cost of the review. If we don’t meet this expectation, you pay only associated expenses. It’s the Merger Coach way.