Build a Career in M&A: Lessons from Intel's Todd Manley

23:31If you're looking at that profile, going back to what really makes someone successful. Yeah. Because I feel like I get a bunch of people reaching out. They're trying to break into the industry. Hopefully I can tell them to listen to the podcast from here on out. One is like, can you qualify yourself? This is the thing I found really interesting working with corporates is that sheer diversity of backgrounds. You meet folks, whether they're corporate integration, they come up through any function. Yeah. It doesn't really matter. There's no consistent theme versus private equities. Nearly everybody's coming through an investment bank.

24:00I get a little bit of that in some of the corporate roles as well. But there's a certain profile that you see with somebody like, hey, being really type A makes you really suitable for an integration role. Or is it just purely diversity counts as part of assembling a team together? There's a couple of key components. One, it helps just to be naturally inquisitive because at least coming from the integration side of the house, you have a general baseline of, I know what my company does. How does the target do it? How do they process payroll? How do they work with customers? How do they strategize and think about their business?

24:33It helps to just have an inquisitive nature and just a thirst of wanting to learn. I remember when I was doing some consultant work, I had worked with a client. After my period of time with them, we had done four deals in one year. We took some of our lessons from the first two deals and said, okay, let's approach deal number three a little differently. What was interesting was we did an offsite with some of their key leadership, some of their operational folks. And I remember pulling aside my clients and we're going to structure this differently. And it was a two-day event. Instead of us doing all the talking on day one, we're going to do all the listening.

25:07And we're going to have the target tell us how they run their business. And we'll have structure. We'll have an agenda. We'll make it valuable to people in the room. And we'll give them some guidance there. Day two, instead of us coming in and us telling them, this is how we do it. You're going to listen to what they say on day one. And you're going to come back and say, here's all the things that were super similar and make integration super easy. But here's like two or three big rocks that we got to go solve for. And that was really interesting to see that play out when we flipped the script because you saw some really attentive listening by the acquirer.

25:45You actually had the target company taking a lot of initiative and really opening up about what they did, how they did it, the problems they had. They actually were already starting to think about, we've dealt with this problem, but if you guys have solved for it, we're happy to change. We'll do whatever. In hearing that openness on that day one and then having the acquirer come back and is almost like active listening. I heard what you said and I'm playing back to you what you said, but I'm playing it back now through my filter of additional information that I know and I can apply to the problem at hand.

26:18It was pretty cool to see how we were able to accelerate and move things a bit more forward to how they worked. And that actually hits like the second point I made here was some new ways of working and thinking. And that's one reason I'm like our M &A community, regardless of whether you're upfront sourcing deals, working in diligence, doing integration, you name it. I put a big net around the whole community. I just love learning from other experts. And I thoroughly enjoy going to conferences. I love hearing about M &A that happens in other industries. I got fascinated a couple of years ago. Someone from oil and gas was talking about M &A.

26:52They mentioned something integration related that was like, it was going to take years. And I was like, that's interesting because in the time it might take for years, I didn't know enough to understand the context of why it would take that long. So I was curious to learn more juxtaposed against maybe some of the speed that you can do a quick little 50 person engineering team tuck in. Boom, boom, boom. They're integrated within, you know, four months. Interesting to just pick up that expertise from other practitioners. It's cliche. Everyone says it. I'll say it. Every deal is different. Every person who does M &A work should have that tattooed on their wrist.

27:21That and maybe I don't comment on rumor and speculation. Those might be two good tattoos to have. And then some other common traits. It's you've got to be comfortable with ambiguity at your core. You've got to be able to walk into a room and leave at the door, sometimes your expertise, some sense of, I know how this is going to go. You need to be really open. And you also need to know that ambiguity in many people that creates a sense of maybe anxiety or discomfort. If you can recognize that's going to be there and be understanding and thoughtful that that's just part of it. How do I deal with it?

27:57Do I deal with it through having the right kind of conversations to flush out more information and narrow down that ambiguity or put some frameworks around the way I think about it or how I need to put a body of work together to deliver X or Y? You can't be afraid of that. I put it that way because you'll get people who are very maybe oriented to like, my job is I put this box on the shelf and then I go do this and I do that. Like they're comfortable with the process. I come in, I do my job and I go home. Back to like every deal is different. You're not going to be the expert on everything. You're going to come into these situations where ambiguity is the biggest elephant in the room, but you got to be comfortable with working through that.

28:32And at the end of the day, sometimes it could be just as basic as saying, look, here's our guiding principles for what we're trying to accomplish. Let's anchor back to those and not get overwhelmed by fraught and anxiousness. And I also think the ability to lead is really important. I like to see leadership across every level of the deal and integration. Leading shows up many different ways. It doesn't mean you're a person at the top of the governance chart leading the deal and accountable for it. It spans the whole breadth of you may be organized around functions and that's how you integrate.

29:02You're showing leadership within your function or you may be a subject matter expertise deep in the organization, but your knowledge shows up as leadership when you're able to step into a room and really convey some aspects of how the business needs to run or operate or get integrated. I don't think leadership is just something that people at certain levels in the organization need to show. It needs to show up everywhere. And one of the hard dynamics, and this actually goes back to something I learned back in my sociology days, was the difference between formal and informal authority. Formal authority.

29:32I'm your manager. I'm your boss. I'm whatever. Okay. Formal org chart kind of stuff versus the informal of I'm the expert in the room, but I have no association with you. And how do I somehow show up and lead or attempt to lead based on my ability to contribute to problem at hand and helping to develop a solution to get us where we need to go. Leadership shows up a lot of different ways. That's always something that with younger people who I either talk with or mentor or who've been part of my teams, it's something that I try to instill and really say, look, you're always going to learn to be better leaders.

30:04I'm always on a journey to be a better leader, but it's something that you shouldn't shy away from. And in fact, it's something that in many cases, people are going to be like, hey, thank you for stepping up or thank you for saying that or thank you for leading. Sometimes it's just the little things. I remember telling a junior person a long time ago, I was like, look, if you just raise your hand and say, hey, I've got that action item, I'll take that. That's a step in the right direction. Absolutely. You know, dude, and you can build upon that. You have to be a strong communicator. Communications, also, when I say communications, it's highly leveraged on listening.

30:34I like to joke that we were born with two ears and one mouth and let's use them in that proportion. There's a lot of power in being able to listen, to understand and think through what are the difficulties of deal work and integration work. And then playing that back and being able to synthesize what you heard versus what you know and how does that come together. Some of those interpersonal skills that come along with that. I learned a lot about myself over the years taking Myers-Briggs tests at different companies. And it's been an interesting journey because at one point, I actually tested out as a pretty strong introvert.

31:05And now if I test out, I wouldn't say a full extrovert, but I've crossed the line. And it was interesting because I remember it was probably about 15 years ago. I remember feeling like, okay, the pendulum's switching a little bit from being an introvert to getting extrovert. And it was interesting because I read some materials. There was a book that Susan Cain wrote. It might have been like the power of quiet. And she was an introvert. And I remember watching a TED Talk. And she starts her TED Talk off articulating that as a youth, her family would go on vacation. And they'd all get to their location, bust out a book.

31:36And that's what they did. They just went full introvert reading. And they all enjoyed that. And her research and writings actually were very interesting to me because it highlighted some dynamics of how do you take what is perceived as maybe weaknesses of an introvert, but really are strengths. You flip that on its head and benefit from that. So that was really interesting for me in understanding a little bit of the introvert side of me. And then more lately, it's been, okay, how does the extrovert side of me grow and continue on that journey? I like to think I can take an introvert and make them feel comfortable, pull them aside, have a one-on-one conversation because introverts are really good at making personal connections and diving deep in the topics versus the extrovert who wants to be in the room full of energy and is just soaking all that up.

32:17Some of those interpersonal skills and dynamics are really important because you're going to come across people doing deal work that are across the whole gamut. Especially coming into this work, you have to understand that there is an intersection of strategic and tactical views that come together at different points in time over different aspects of where the deal is. and being able to think about strategy, how does that maybe play out three or four steps down the line that might land in integration? Or is there something in integration that you know of that is going to go upstream and impact the strategy?

32:56Being aware that you can't just come into this kind of work and be like, it's highly strategic and it's this and it's this. There's a bit of rolling your sleeves up and you've got to really understand how the business works. if you don't have that appreciation for both different lenses that get applied you'll find yourself tripping up on things that in hindsight you're like ah we see that we should have done that or oh we didn't see that i sometimes use the analogy of you gotta be a helicopter pilot you gotta be able to fly up to i don't know if a helicopter can get up to 10 000 feet maybe i'm exaggerating but it's gotta be able to get you know high right but then you gotta like hey i'm gonna go be a crop duster i'm getting in the weeds yeah yeah zoom in zoom out yeah we got But being inquisitive, a big part of that is listening.

33:38I highly agree with. And then identifying new ways to do things, being comfortable with ambiguity. Let me poke on something, new ways to do things. The reason I poke on this is I routinely see new people coming into this and almost coming in, it was so fresh of an eye, which I don't mind, but saying, what's the new metric or what's the new this and what's new that? And maybe Jim Buckley and I had a deep conversation on this once or twice, but it's kind of like, look, Like there's some basic metrics that are just routine to running a business. There's no new analytic. Like I'm thinking about, I don't know baseball real well.

34:11And I don't know like the, maybe you're a bigger baseball fan than me. There's some acronym, maybe it's war or OPL. There's something out there that is synonymous with success. It might be like a combination of how many times did you strike versus hit the ball versus take a walk. More or less an algorithm to give you a metric. Like batting average. Even more complex than that. Oh, okay. Batting average on steroids. Batting average is good enough. We don't need to boil the ocean on something else. But I do pay attention. Okay, but is there someone else who's maybe looking at it a little differently?

34:41And usually when they're looking at it a little differently, it's maybe something specific to their industry, something specific to their peers. But nothing that I walk away going, oh my dear, I have to write an Excel macro or do some database scripting to actually gain insights. It's pretty basic business fundamentals. I agree. That's like a good way to look at a caveat. Just don't just throw new ways on everything. The wheel is a wheel for a good reason. It's round and it works. We talked about leadership. We talked about having good communication skills, which I think is a part of leadership.

35:10I liked how you mentioned essentially taking strategy through execution. Sort of that gap in between being able to zoom in, zoom out. You know, and there's no wrong way in approaching it. And I say that because if one has this thirst for learning and really loving getting into the weeds of M &A, they're going to come at it probably with some sort of disposition that either puts them more so on the side of strategy and strategic on-ramps into the work, or they're going to come up very tactical. I came through a very tactical mechanism of business applications and understanding data and how it all came together.

35:43My area of growth was more pointed towards I need to understand more aspects of go-to-market, product strategy, product customer fit, things like that. It was fun to go explore those. It wasn't fun when maybe I thought I knew too much and I espoused to be an expert in something. and quickly got my hand slapped and realized, okay, there's still more learning you need to go do. There's a good mix to have being able to kind of look at the body of work through multiple lenses. We talked about breaking into the industry. You mentioned just start off by getting into organizations that are generally acquisitive and then make your way into where the M &A happens.

36:17Or anything else around breaking into the industry? Because this one comes up a lot from folks, especially if you're not coming up through investment banking. There was a point where I remember I'd have been like a sophomore or junior you're in college and I thought I wanted to be an investment banker. I did a summer internship with Smith Barney. It was the farthest thing from investment banking. They actually threw me the white pages and said, start cold calling because you're selling PG &E preferred bonds. I wasn't even registered to go sell. I was just like finding warm leads. I know that's not investment banking.

36:47Investment banking has a lot of great skill sets that come to bear. What's interesting about getting into this body of work is from the outside, it looks interesting. It's dynamic. It's different. There's a bit of sexiness to it. There's a bit of intrigue. I can't tell you what I'm working on, but I'm working on something big. That kind of mystique. People break in and they're going to know within one or two deals whether it's for them or not. I agree. Hey, you're going to be pulling 80-hour work weeks on the work days. And oh, by the way, you're going to be doing another 20 hours on the weekend.

37:21You want to sign up for that? Some of us know that there's the peaks and valleys. And my first manager doing IT integration work said, look, Todd, there's peaks and valleys. When we're climbing the mountain, going to the peak, you got to be all in. But when we're coming down to the valley, I know you need to recharge your batteries. I may not want to see you in the office for a week. You got to do that. He was also the same person who said, rip the bandaid off, let the healing begin. He had a few sayings that stuck with me. But sometimes the hardest thing is just getting your foot in the door.

37:49There's a lot of competition to doing that. That's why getting exposure, consulting is a great way to check it out. If you can get into a consulting firm that has a practice that you can learn. A lot of firms have done a lot of different work. You get a lot of corporations that maybe don't want to make the investment in having a full-time corporate dev organization. And they're looking to consultancies to come in and help. When a deal needs to be done, bring them in. Okay, thank you for your service. Deal's done. Let's move on. But there's other companies who've made the investment into having full-time corporate development teams.

38:18And interestingly enough, you'll see a couple of different structures in how those teams are set up. So some will have a dedicated corp dev organization and then have dedicated corp dev and M &A integration folks in functions around the table. And that's pretty formal. You'll have other organizations that are a bit more dynamic who might just say, hey, look, we're going to do the National Guard model. When a deal is about to happen, we're going to blow the horn and pull everyone together because you're kind of informally part of the deal team. Those are some dynamics to think about as you're looking at what kind of organization might give you the best entry point into being affiliated or adjacent to the work that's being done.

38:52I would say in larger organizations where perhaps there's more formal alignment of a finance team and within finance, they've got their M &A integration team. Two or three people, what have you, but they've got some sort of formality. In those larger organizations, if you're interested in M &A, and if you're coming at, let's say, from the integration side and you've got some sort of expertise in some part of the business, you could probably, within a couple phone calls or connections within your own network of your company, probably identify, hey, who does that? Now, it may not be always obvious because there may not be a deal in flight.

39:24Maybe the company hasn't done a deal in a year. But when the call is made, someone's probably going to be there. So it's just a little bit of hunting and pecking and going to have coffee, getting to know people, asking around. And you'll find that displaying a desire to get into it. It's always helpful. There's obvious external signs where it's like, I'm applying to this job and it's M &A related. But if let's say you're not, you're on that journey to being in a large organization, you don't know if that capability is there or not. But just exploring it and having those conversations, someone's gonna be like, wow, you know what?

39:55we actually have someone who is showing some interest in this and it might be the right person that we pull in the next time we do a deal. I would rather have someone who is excited and passionate and wants to learn and do this kind of stuff versus someone who's just, oh, I'm going to do another deal. There's a bit of mindset around it that I think is also super helpful. Let's rip apart networking because I feel like it is such an important thing. We talked about it before. This has been pretty instrumental to your success. And I time after time just see kids coming out of undergrad, even grad programs that just lack this skill.

40:28And I, for me, can credit a lot of my success from it. So I got to know you. We networked. Exactly. And I feel like let's talk through maybe a playbook for those that maybe aren't strong in this area. Because I think first and foremost, you got to get good at this, especially like getting an M &A. I always joke around and it's probably not that much of a joke, but like in the Bay Area, none of the jobs get posted in M &A. It's all who you know. That's how It is. I get texts from people I know and it's just, hey, I got this rollover. Do you know anybody? It is interesting. I would say the M &A community is pretty tight in that regard.

40:59Once you start networking, you're like, I've networked with some people. I've got a bit of peer group. And then you realize there's like even more out there. I was at an event earlier this week where I recognized some names of folks at companies where I was like, I had known people who had been there before. There was turnover and such. And I was like, oh, there's a new name I have not met. I made the effort to go introduce myself and we were there for a common topic about some AI tools. And it just led to some natural conversations. And I'm going to go have coffee with these people and learn a little bit more about what they do.

41:31Networking in and of itself needs to be bi-directional. It can't be, hey, Kisan, I'm going to network with you because I want something from you. Okay, this is good. How not to network. Yeah, this is how not to network. Imagine the person in a conference, you always see at least one person that will go around, give you an elevator pitch, hand your business card and go to the next person. And they're literally just trying to work the whole room. Oh, my dear. I remember seeing those people and you could see them coming from a mile away. Oh, yeah. And you're just like, oh, my dear. Here they come.

42:00You're like, let's watch this train wreck. And you just see how they elbow into a conversation where like, where'd you come from? And then they're doing their pitch, leaving their business card and then just hightailing it to the next person. And you can see it because they walk into a conversation like this. And the reason they're doing that is they're trying to read your name. And in smaller letters, they're trying to read the name of your company. Or qualifying you. Yeah, which is funny because sometimes I'll go to an event and we'll give you a name card with a little magnet and such. I'll just slip it in my pocket.

42:31Try to be as inconspicuous as I can. So that's how not to network. That's how not to network. Good networking. You need to know a little bit about who you want to network and why you want to network with them. You don't want to come across as being too salesy and not genuine. A lot of one's own success can be attributed to how genuine are they to who they are. You know of people who you're just like, they're one version of themselves in one setting and a different version in a different setting. And I've always tried to live by, look, I just want to be as genuine to who I am. That gives me peace, removes anxiety from my life.

43:07It feels authentic. And sure, maybe it doesn't click with certain people. And that's okay. It allows me to network and talk with different people and feel good about what I'm saying and how I'm talking, how I'm representing things, my interests in these people. You can't show up and network and think, okay, I need to memorize where they went to school, what they did, the deals they did, all these things. Like ask some good inquisitive questions and do a lot of listening. I always enjoy asking questions where I barely have to say anything. And I just learn a lot about people. And you do a good job of this in your interviews.

43:40You're writing down notes. I'm saying things and you're like, Hey, you mentioned this. Let's come back to that. The ratio of me talking versus you is about 98 % me, 2 % you. But the 2 % that you're contributing is really diving into hearing more about my background and experiences. So I'm going to start asking you more questions. Well, I think that's the thing is like coming with that intention of just really listening and learning. being inquisitive. Sometimes when you, when maybe you put it in the frame of mentoring, sometimes mentoring gets a bad knack because people think of it as like just a one-way exchange.

44:13And I think the two-way exchange of understanding how you can network is really valuable. I have a large network on LinkedIn. I like staying in touch with people who are out there. I like seeing their successes. I like helping them if they're putting their hand out and I need some help with this or that. But what I don't appreciate is just those blind requests that show up in your inbox and you're like, who is this person and why are they reaching out to me? I have a couple sentences that I've saved on my phone and I just cut and paste it into some of these because there's some outreaches that like make sense.

44:46You're like, oh, I can see a fit. They might know 10 other people that I know. Okay. There might be some sort of fit there. Usually in those cases, I'll say, hey, thanks for the outreach. Good to get introduced to you. It looks like we might I have some common people that we know, love to learn a little bit more about how we could learn a bit more about each other and see if it's worth connecting. I've fallen into wanting to have a conversation with somebody before blindly accepting an invite. Sometimes I send those emails out and I'll get a response and someone will say, oh, sorry, didn't mean to send it to you.

45:15Or, oh, I accidentally clicked on your name and sent an invite. Sometimes those actually do turn out to be very interesting. But yeah, more often than not, it's interesting to just see the human nature reaction to some of these invite requests that come over from time to time. Yeah, that's so true. Well, the best practices, we got a good point about just being genuine, about connecting people, learning from them. That's always a good point of view. Just, hey, I'm interested in your background. Yeah. I want to learn from your experience. Yeah. You know, I actually have one, a funny story. I'll hijack.

45:46Hijack it. And I'll start asking the questions. I had this intern. And how did that make you feel? I didn't plan to have the intern. It was reporting up to another leader in the organization, but they were like, hey, this person's just super excited. And I thought it'd be good just for him to work with you a little bit or just for you to spend some time with them. And I'm like, sure. I didn't have a plan in place. It wasn't a time when I'm working on something and I'm having an intern for some reason. So I wasn't really sure what to do with them. But I said, hey, super green, super motivated. So this is what I want you to do.

46:16I want you to go on LinkedIn. I want you to have five conversations with people in our space. Just go network. And I gave him the playbook. I said, go connect with people. Tell them how you're interested in whatever career path they are. And because he was interested in finance. So think about where you want to be five, 10 years out. Find people in there. Not like the old E-Trade ad where I want to be in middle management. I know, maybe. Find those people. Reach out, connect with them. Say, hey, really interested in getting a career path that you're in. That'd be great to learn from your experience.

46:45I told him, you'd be surprised like a third of the people will connect with you and say nothing. That's when you follow up and with something tailored that, thanks for connecting. Thought it'd be great to grab an intro call and learn from your experience. Open a 15 minute, something like that. Yeah. And you'd be surprised. Then you get a really high response, right? They're already connected with you and then you're following up and you're just generally trying to learn. And it was so interesting. He came back to me the next week because I had those fine conversations. He was so excited. He was like, oh my God, I talked to this person.

47:17This person told me to stay in touch. He'll give me a job when I graduate. this. And he's just had all these great insights and it was just so much of an eye opener for him. I'm like, that's the one thing I want you to learn. I don't think your school is teaching you. And it's just, that was it. I was like done. I felt like accomplished. I got, I served the value for the internship here. It's interesting. You mentioned how perhaps that wasn't being taught in school. I taught a course at Santa Clara university for a long number of years. And it was interesting because it was a leadership curriculum that gave you like a little asterisk on your degree when you graduated, but it was noted there.

47:52But the curriculum was interesting because the first class or the first two classes were deep into some leadership practices. At that point, Barry Posner was the dean. He had written the book with his research partners, the leadership practice, things like inspire a shared vision, model away, challenge the process, those kinds of things. The students had a little bit of a framework around leadership. And then as I came in, what I taught were more of like, how do you actually take some of those principles, put them into practice. We talked about things like networking, how to work in teams, how to have difficult conversations and such.

48:24And so there's aspects of how do you take some of these nuggets that excite kids and interns and younger people in the workplace? And if they're still on their undergraduate journey, how do you plug that in and highlight that this is really important to you? You can learn from it. And it sounds like the story you just said, this guy was just completely jazzed up, excited about every conversation he had and just where things went. That's where we'll pause the conversation for now. We covered a lot of ground. In the next episode, we'll pick it up right where we left off and keep digging in. Thanks for listening.

48:57We'll see you in too.

49:10Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M &A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an M &A function or optimizing one that you already have, we're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email, Kisan, K-I-S-O-N, at mascience.com, or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter.

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