"Merger is like a marriage. Honesty is all," says Sue Charles, veteran of five business start-ups and now Managing Partner at College Hill Life Sciences.
Business communications consultancy College Hill acquired life sciences and healthcare specialists Northbank Communications, in a deal brokered by Pembridge. The acquisition was the result of a five-year plan that Northbank developed alongside Pembridge to build up the operation, which included actively hunting for merger and acquisition opportunities.
Trust your intuition
Before you get into bed with advisors like lawyers and accountants, you need to look really, really deep into your heart and ask, "Does this feel right?" If it doesn't, it's wrong - whatever the spreadsheets tell you.
Of my three communications businesses, one I sold out to my co-founders, and that's still flourishing as a design business. Another, I built up over just under 10 years by founding one company, co-founding a joint venture and then merging the businesses together. That was where I learned an awful lot about people.
We ended up with seven people owning the merged business. We spent a long time agreeing common goals, a mission, all those things that MBA school says that you are supposed to do.
What we forgot was to ask about the things we didn't have in common: the different time scales in which we might want to retire and go start a vineyard, or who's got school-fees to cover and which of us hadn't. There were also our different leadership styles.
As we moved forward, it was those differences that caused the company to fall apart. One by one, five out of the seven left in less than happy circumstances that significantly dented the value.
Spend some time thinking about your different objectives and styles, not just what you have in common.
Prioritise
You have to decide in life what you enjoy, what are you good at and what do you want to do.
I could spend my time looking at operational issues, or I could spend my time with clients. I prefer time with clients, so I looked around for someone complementary to me. I found someone very operationally oriented, and we came together as two fairly different individuals and remained that way.
We didn't set out to become best friends but sat down at the start and asked, "What do we want to do together?" and "Can we put two and two together - will it make five? What do we want to do differently? How can we grow the teams behind us?"
We shared our life goals: who wanted to retire, who wanted to be rich, who didn't value riches so much. It was all quite personal stuff that didn't involve any spreadsheets and no legal advice. It was much more about "What do we want to do it for?" and "What do we personally want to get out of it?" Only afterwards, once we had decided that that there was a firm foundation, did we bring in advisors.
We wrote our life goals into the business plan. We set a time scale so that Peter, my co-director, could retire out of the business at five years with cash. My goal was longer term and I wanted to achieve global growth for the firm. Both of us want to bring our senior teams through to be “the future”.
We got together with Pembridge right at the start, not so much because we wanted their money, but as a referee because we recognized that we had very different goals. Most of all, we wanted someone who could say to us: "Hey guys: remember this is a business, this is why you set up, this is what you set out to do."
Stay on the same page
Keep focused on what you've agreed to do, have a plan and keep looking at that plan and ask "Are we still on plan? Do we still want to do that?" It can still be appropriate to change it but you have got to be honest with each other.
Keeping everyone on the same page is really hard. My business partner and I had both been through less-than-successful M&A in the past, due to people factors.
In practice, even with Pembridge holding the peace, a written plan and the best will in the world, there were still times when the wheels fell off the wagon and we had a few spats with each other.
A merger is truly like a marriage: if you really don't want to be in it, and aren't really sure why you got into it in the first place, you just go off and get a divorce. But if you are firm that the goals you set out to achieve are still achievable, then you should try and make it up and go for it.
In our case, we merged our firms. We split our roles to make it quite clear what both of us were doing based on what each of us wanted to do, working with our respective skill-sets.
A major question was whether to bring together the different offices we each had, in different parts of the UK as well as in Germany. It was soon obvious that those offices had quite different cultures, in terms of the pace at which people work, their values and even how they got to work. So we tried to recognize all those differences and make them a positive asset – the whole being more than the sum of the parts, not less.
Make the most of the differences
Spend a lot of time on the people issues, because it will be the people issues that will either make or break what you're doing.
To make our merger work, we had to spend the time to understand each individual working for us: to take the people personalities and the company personalities and to try make that into one.
This took awhile, but in reality, we had different offerings which had been led by two different leaders. So inevitably there were employees who were used to different personalities.
Four years on, we sat down and said "Right - we have got 12 months to go to achieve our goal of a sale to allow Peter to exit”. We asked, “What have we created? Who is out there? How do we realise our value?" and then spent a year selling the business.
Meanwhile, my business partner bought a house in France. Since we had explicitly stated at the very start of the process years ago, that this was his intention, we could go into discussions with the acquirer with clarity about what we both wanted.
We wouldn't necessarily appeal to all acquirers because Peter and I were in very different stages in life. But that honesty and understanding of personal motives was really important.
We achieved our exit at four years 11 months and 3 days, which was within the five years that we set. Peter retired and moved to France which is what he wanted to do. I became managing partner of a division of a large company which is what I wanted to do.
Sue Charles shared her experience with The PemBRIDGE CLUB, which meets quarterly. Membership is open to any business owner serious about exploring new models of partnership and collaboration
Thinking of selling your business?
If you would like to explore what might be involved in selling your business, Pembridge would be pleased to talk through the process with you. Please contact Paula Pattriti for further information.
- Trust your intuition
- Prioritise
- Stay on the same page
- Make the most of differences
Trust your intuition
Before you get into bed with advisors like lawyers and accountants, you need to look really, really deep into your heart and ask, "Does this feel right?" If it doesn't, it's wrong - whatever the spreadsheets tell you.
Of my three communications businesses, one I sold out to my co-founders, and that's still flourishing as a design business. Another, I built up over just under 10 years by founding one company, co-founding a joint venture and then merging the businesses together. That was where I learned an awful lot about people.
We ended up with seven people owning the merged business. We spent a long time agreeing common goals, a mission, all those things that MBA school says that you are supposed to do.
What we forgot was to ask about the things we didn't have in common: the different time scales in which we might want to retire and go start a vineyard, or who's got school-fees to cover and which of us hadn't. There were also our different leadership styles.
As we moved forward, it was those differences that caused the company to fall apart. One by one, five out of the seven left in less than happy circumstances that significantly dented the value.
Spend some time thinking about your different objectives and styles, not just what you have in common.
Prioritise
You have to decide in life what you enjoy, what are you good at and what do you want to do.
I could spend my time looking at operational issues, or I could spend my time with clients. I prefer time with clients, so I looked around for someone complementary to me. I found someone very operationally oriented, and we came together as two fairly different individuals and remained that way.
We didn't set out to become best friends but sat down at the start and asked, "What do we want to do together?" and "Can we put two and two together - will it make five? What do we want to do differently? How can we grow the teams behind us?"
We shared our life goals: who wanted to retire, who wanted to be rich, who didn't value riches so much. It was all quite personal stuff that didn't involve any spreadsheets and no legal advice. It was much more about "What do we want to do it for?" and "What do we personally want to get out of it?" Only afterwards, once we had decided that that there was a firm foundation, did we bring in advisors.
We wrote our life goals into the business plan. We set a time scale so that Peter, my co-director, could retire out of the business at five years with cash. My goal was longer term and I wanted to achieve global growth for the firm. Both of us want to bring our senior teams through to be “the future”.
We got together with Pembridge right at the start, not so much because we wanted their money, but as a referee because we recognized that we had very different goals. Most of all, we wanted someone who could say to us: "Hey guys: remember this is a business, this is why you set up, this is what you set out to do."
Stay on the same page
Keep focused on what you've agreed to do, have a plan and keep looking at that plan and ask "Are we still on plan? Do we still want to do that?" It can still be appropriate to change it but you have got to be honest with each other.
Keeping everyone on the same page is really hard. My business partner and I had both been through less-than-successful M&A in the past, due to people factors.
In practice, even with Pembridge holding the peace, a written plan and the best will in the world, there were still times when the wheels fell off the wagon and we had a few spats with each other.
A merger is truly like a marriage: if you really don't want to be in it, and aren't really sure why you got into it in the first place, you just go off and get a divorce. But if you are firm that the goals you set out to achieve are still achievable, then you should try and make it up and go for it.
In our case, we merged our firms. We split our roles to make it quite clear what both of us were doing based on what each of us wanted to do, working with our respective skill-sets.
A major question was whether to bring together the different offices we each had, in different parts of the UK as well as in Germany. It was soon obvious that those offices had quite different cultures, in terms of the pace at which people work, their values and even how they got to work. So we tried to recognize all those differences and make them a positive asset – the whole being more than the sum of the parts, not less.
Make the most of the differences
Spend a lot of time on the people issues, because it will be the people issues that will either make or break what you're doing.
To make our merger work, we had to spend the time to understand each individual working for us: to take the people personalities and the company personalities and to try make that into one.
This took awhile, but in reality, we had different offerings which had been led by two different leaders. So inevitably there were employees who were used to different personalities.
Four years on, we sat down and said "Right - we have got 12 months to go to achieve our goal of a sale to allow Peter to exit”. We asked, “What have we created? Who is out there? How do we realise our value?" and then spent a year selling the business.
Meanwhile, my business partner bought a house in France. Since we had explicitly stated at the very start of the process years ago, that this was his intention, we could go into discussions with the acquirer with clarity about what we both wanted.
We wouldn't necessarily appeal to all acquirers because Peter and I were in very different stages in life. But that honesty and understanding of personal motives was really important.
We achieved our exit at four years 11 months and 3 days, which was within the five years that we set. Peter retired and moved to France which is what he wanted to do. I became managing partner of a division of a large company which is what I wanted to do.
Sue Charles shared her experience with The PemBRIDGE CLUB, which meets quarterly. Membership is open to any business owner serious about exploring new models of partnership and collaboration
Thinking of selling your business?
If you would like to explore what might be involved in selling your business, Pembridge would be pleased to talk through the process with you. Please contact Paula Pattriti for further information.
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