How to Achieve Strategic Alignment From Top to Bottom

23:44These things like the integration charter, steering co, are those stuff that you utilize? Again, as part of our initial business case, and this bears itself out the more we delve into the process. But that business case usually does have at least an integration component from the beginning. that then expands out as we go through due diligence and see more things, which again, I'm very thankful to be involved up front. I think it's vital for the integration lead to at least be part of that process to be able to help identify these are the challenges that we're going to have down the road. Part of that process, I already start building out that integration deck, so to speak, as we're going through that process.

24:25And I'm identifying risks. Here's the things that are going to be challenging. Oh, here's the things that are really good about this sync. and the synergies that we can potentially realize from an integration perspective during that time too. I think getting involved in that space, but it just kind of expands out. Similarly, you'll see in most deals, as you progress through that process, as the people start to expand, so does your integration planning and your integration story really starts to expand as well. Do you have your own document then that you just lay out? Here's your integration plan and how you communicate it to the leadership.

24:59Do you use that term integration chart? Usually it's our integration thesis. And so we'll come in and say, here's the pieces where we think we should integrate. Here's the pieces that we think need to be siloed and separate or have that whole body of work. We build that out pretty close to after post-DD and we present that to our SteerCo, our investment committee. So you'll create this, and this is why it's important to be evolved earlier the better. You can get some insights and there's a specific driver in why you're doing the deal. And that probably has a lot of impact in how your integration plan is going to pan out.

25:33This may be one of the challenges too, just from a personnel perspective. You might be making an acquisition that deals with a very specific, let's just take product, for example. It's going to fill this technological void that you have and you're like, oh, we need this piece. Not everybody's going to be impacted by that. Not everybody really is going to understand that potentially. So how do you get them and bring them along to be part of this process? The other thing is you may need very specific people involved in the process that maybe weren't involved in or haven't been involved in any process before.

26:04So again, that cross-functional piece comes back into play, whereas, oh man, I'm gonna have to train new people. I'm gonna have to inform them of our process, figure out how to work with them, train them along to now execute this integration piece. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, the thesis is informed by that overall business thesis too. is we're going to integrate this in a way that is compatible with the overall goals that we have as a company. It sounds pretty clear to everybody what's going to happen. The steering committee, what do they do? The vast majority of the time we're presenting updates on where we are.

26:42And then if there's any really critical decisions that are needed to be made that may be above my pay grade, this is something that's impactful to the entire project or to the company in a way that's really meaningful, that steer co would definitely make decisions on that level. Who's on the steering co? We'll have our C-level executives. So our CEO, our CTO, our CIO, and our CFO will all be on that steer co. We'll probably meet once a month kind of thing or once every two months, depending on the length of that project to update them on how that goes. What's that flow of that meeting like? Normally, there are slides and our updates.

27:17And one thing I do encourage is templates are great, but you do want to, especially with those level executives, you want to make it as easily digestible as possible. Fewer words, fewer of everything. Here's the big picture. Here's a status. Again, we get really colorful with some of that stuff so that they know, okay, yeah, this is good. This is bad. We should probably talk about this. So organizing in a way that's really easily digestible for them is important, but normally it's going through that. And then let's hear what you have and how we should handle these things. And if there are any decisions that should be made, usually keep those two right at the end and say, all right, we've had this discussion.

27:52What's the decision that we're coming to? We need to document that and then move forward. Is there any special approach when you do make an important decision to communicate with the broader organization and track those decisions? That's been challenging for us in a lot of ways. In the past, we've used a lot of different tools to communicate with projects leads. And then there's something else to communicate with project execution-oriented individuals. Having a decision log is something that is vital and important and have that stored somewhere. But even in that is challenging in some ways, especially when you have that cross-functional piece where finance uses this tool to manage their project pieces, even pre-close.

28:32And other people use other things. So you have all these different and disparate ways of handling those types of things. So having one centralized repository for decision making, for really for everything, for all the documentation that you've built out throughout the entire process. As you're bringing more and more people into the process post-close for integration execution, how are we going to update them? How are they going to get up to speed? So having one place with all of that kind of laid out is vital and important and one of the reasons why we love Dealroom. I want to finish on this part because you're giving a lot of good examples of where having this integration team fits in well, it creates a lot of value.

29:09It's sort of a nice pivotal role between all the different departments going on, the leadership team, making sure things are going the right direction, connecting with the incoming employees and making sure they're having a good experience. I get it. Very important. What do you do when you don't have that? If you're an organization that doesn't have a dedicated integration team, how do you keep up with all this stuff? How do you make it happen? I'm not sure anybody has this figured out perfectly in any way. And I know I don't. So this is a constant learning curve for me. Listening to people that have more experience than you and have done this multiple times and in other spaces is vital.

29:45That's how I've been able to build what we have so far. We have a long way to go, but I think having that type of learner's mentality and I'm willing to learn and we're on the ship together. Let's figure out how we can make this a good trip. So that's one thing, just continuously learning from others. But then two, really figuring out what works for your corporate environment and the way people work there. So Jamf is very much a people-first approach to almost everything we do. They also love to give people choices. So people have a say and so they'll have a choice in what they're doing and how they're doing it.

30:19So you have to be very flexible in that regard. Be open to different ways of getting to point B. it might not be the way I would normally get to point B, but that's how they get to point B. And at the end of the day, all we need is for them to get to point B. So being open to that kind of perspective has been key and something that I've been learning through at Jamf as well. Coming from more stringent environments and coming into a space where, oh no, people have choice. Okay, that's different for me. So how do I engage with that has been one challenging, but also in a lot of ways, refreshing.

30:50I've been able to ingest a lot of different ways and perspectives to get to where we want to go. That makes life interesting. So there's also leaning into that fun side of things too. Got an interesting point around culture's impact of integration overall. Some organizations' culture just lend to them being naturally better at integrating companies, especially when they're just welcoming towards new people joining their organization. Yeah. Welcoming the changes and very adopting versus not. Then all of a sudden you got a lot of points of friction when you're trying to do a deal and they're not as welcoming.

31:24So that's kind of an interesting take I got out of that. Yeah, I don't think corporate culture can necessarily be understated in all of those things. It affects everything. And integration is about people most of the time, whether it's on the receiving side or the other side of the deal. Corporate culture is pretty important. I want to get into this prep for an acquisition. I'm always curious about how do you make sure you got the right resources and know where you're going to have some issues before all this stuff happens. I feel like it's a lot. M &A comes in, all of a sudden you got all these new people joining, all these initiatives that you're trying to tie together.

31:59There's just so many different changes happening. How do you just prepare for that and saying, hey, is our organization ready for this? We're ready to go bring on this other organization. Our investment committee meetings are tailored towards that. We're presenting a lot of different things from a market perspective where we're saying, okay, yeah, we think this is a market we need to go play in and here are the different players and here's who might be we're having conversations with already or greasing wheels. Those types of conversations with those level of executives are important, but they also know all of the other projects going on.

32:31Oh, we have this over here that's happening and we have this over here that's happening. Might be something that the corporate development team doesn't even have insight into necessarily. Having those type of regular cadence meetings with executives that have a full view of everything going on at the company is vital. we've definitely walked away from opportunities that may have been a good opportunity but our company wasn't ready for it or our people aren't ready for it we wouldn't have the right resources to allocate to that particular project and so we said you know what this is not the right time for that and i will say there's deals out there that look very enticing but there's nothing better than walking away from a deal that you're not ready to take on that makes a lot of sense so there's a level of scoping just to really have some assurance that you have the resources to do the deal yeah Yeah, that comes down to communication.

33:18As a corporate development team, you're not just communicating to all of the other resources that you're using within your process, but you're also having to have regular meetings and communication with your executive leadership team, making sure that you're all aligned and that they're apprised of everything you're doing. And then you hear, okay, yeah, this is why we're going to say no to that or no, those cross-functional leads, they know all of these things that might be challenges. They can bubble those up and we can determine, okay, yeah, that risk is acceptable or no. we should pass. If you were to click down into it and saying, where would things be like the bottleneck or go wrong?

33:53Was it, hey, HR can't onboard all these people? Is it the IT? There's way too many different tech stack, then that's not going to integrate well. Where do you see that resource constraint being? And I'm just trying to get a sense of when do you actually, as an even earlier stage company like ours, know when you're really M &A ready? It's going to be different for every company and whatever stage they're in. I know for us particularly. We're in this stage where, again, we've had that hockey stick growth. We're working heavily on a lot of really cool things. But as we work on those cool things, bringing in other tech stacks is challenging and it creates a lot of stress on our R &D and product teams.

34:31So working through that and making sure that roadmaps are aligned and that we're all heading in the same direction, but that we can also properly resource all of those things appropriately is a challenge. So we're actually considering a lot of really creative ways of managing that, whether that's through certain pieces of maybe some outsource components or how are we going to bring in other people to help us because we don't have those internal resources. Things like that, at least thinking through them, evaluating them, figuring out what works and what doesn't work is important. And those are the conversations we're having.

35:03Makes sense. It ties back to the driver of doing the deal. And then you're prioritizing your activities around that. Do we have the right resources? So the emphasis is on the tech, then let's make sure this aligns and we're not overly disrupting the tech team and their roadmaps. We go past that. We got the resources. We got the deal. We're executing on it. We're going through diligence. You're planning integration. Folks are doing that. And then you close and actually got to integrate the thing. It goes back to the resources thing, right? Because most of the time, most companies, there's a few mega huge companies that will have tons of dedicated folks in every department.

35:39But most cases, it's all shared resources. and you're competing with the day job, what we hired you to do. Now you got some extra homework for M &A and then people get burnt out. What does burnout look like? Usually for me, it looks like, hey, it's Camilo. How are you? With no response. People just starting. People aren't responding. What else should we get from burnout? Like, oh, we're going to avoid that guy. So that's part of it. I think too, just the level of effort put into the process is minimized. Oh yeah, I need to get that thing done. We'll just hodgepodge something together to say we got it done.

36:14But did we really put the effort forth that we needed to actually appropriately execute that particular integration task? No, it wasn't done appropriately. Things like that. And then you will get the very forthright individuals who are like, why are we doing this again? Why do I need to do this again? And you know what? That's not a priority. And that's actually come up a couple of times where we've had to pivot and change approach in some ways because it hasn't been a priority for certain individuals or certain functions. we have other things going on that take precedence. Obviously, we either have to get senior leadership involved and say, hey, we need to evaluate this prioritization or we need to pivot and say, how can we execute on this in a different way through a different avenue or through a different function?

36:55If I would generally ask you, how do you prevent burnout from happening? I'm not sure there's a way to prevent it, especially in the environment. If you're in a high acquisitive environment, really not a way to prevent that. It's going to happen in cross-functional teams. So you have to learn how to manage it. And that's the challenging part. We'll have a pizza party when this is all done. I love pizza, but pizza only goes so far. What about defining the end? Do you do that when you do these integrations? Hey, we're done, guys. Let's move forward. Yeah, obviously you have your integration plans and there's a lot of very execution-oriented tasks within that plan.

37:31A lot of people think that once those plans are done and all my tasks are ticked off, we're done with integration. And that's not necessarily the case. how are we continuing to report and measure progress? And are we actually receiving the value that we said we would from this particular deal? That may continue to happen and continue to evolve past your 180-day plan that you might have created or whatnot. Is there an end? I think there is an end eventually. Is there a clean line in the sand that says, okay, this is over? Usually not like that. It's usually a little bit more nebulous than that.

38:03We're still tracking things that were two years ago and we're still talking about it, figuring out if there's something we need to do. I think having that pulse on where we are continues for a while. Do you communicate that with everybody in terms of stakeholders involved? So stakeholders involved, you balloon post-close and all the people that are involved in the integration piece and execution of that integration piece kind of balloons for a while. And then that begins to dwindle over time as well. There's less and less people involved in that piece, especially as you move to a normal business process.

38:32We're no longer managing this from an integration perspective, it's already moved into whatever normal process we've already built around, let's say, financial reporting or whatever. So now it's just part of that normal cadence. I feel like once it moves into that normal cadence, yeah, that integration piece is over. But again, you're still tracking the overall piece of the integration for a while. Yeah. I think people move in and move out of this process pretty organically in a lot of ways. I wanted to talk to you about how you maintain alignment around priorities with the team this sort of technology comes in play we're just gonna put disclaimer out there camillo is a customer of deal room jamf is a customer i haven't paid him to say any of this stuff so feel free to be honest and unfiltered it's always interesting for me to learn and improve from customers feedback tell me about that tell me about the tools you use because i think this is the other key piece is keeping all these individuals aligned to the highest party tasks throughout the whole process.

39:30When I initially came to the process at Jamf, one of the first things I identify as a high risk for us and our process in general was the fact that we used so many tools to use different things. And again, it goes back to that corporate culture of everybody has a choice. Oh yeah, you want to use this tool or that tool, whatever makes you feel most comfortable. That feels good in a lot of ways, but it presents its own challenges from a process perspective. Having to now bring all of those plans into one place was a key objective of mine within the first year of working at Jamf. And we were able to do that by using Dealroom, which was great for us.

40:06Essentially, it's our source of truth for what's been done or what has not been done with any part of the process. That's one of the things I love about it so much is that it's not just an integration tool. We first used it just as an integration tool, but the more we got into it, the more we realized, yeah, we can do so much more with this. and now have used it from beginning of the process when it's just documenting the conversations we're having in early discussions with potential targets, all the way to post-closed integration reporting, building out reports to send to executive leadership on a regular basis so that they know exactly what's going on with the acquisitions we've made.

40:41Having that end-to-end piece was vital. But then too, it's just so easy to navigate and use. And so bringing people in, again, there's M &A fatigue. There's also tool fatigue. Oh, another tool that we have to use. That was definitely something that was a challenge at the beginning. But people realized that, okay, I'm actually able to do so much in this that I was doing in five other tools before. Why don't I just use this now to manage this particular process? That's been really helpful. So now we have people that are in there building out playbooks so that the next time we do something, they have a template that they've created.

41:15So we already have people working in that way and making it their own, which is fun. The other thing we're looking at too is just down the road, how can different technologies really aid in how we manage our process in general? Can we use AI? Is that something that would help us, whether it's due diligence or it's integration tracking or down the line to one of the biggest challenges for us is interdependencies. So you have different departments who have built their integration plans, but pieces of their integration plan is completely dependent on another department's activities and where they are in the process.

41:49Being able to link those appropriately is challenging. How can we leverage technology to help make those connections in a way that's meaningful and honest, but then also help keep us accountable to timelines and making sure that everybody's moving along the same path at the same pace that we want? But for you, Dealroom has helped centralize the data and become the single source of truth. So anytime you want to know what's going on in the deal, who's doing what, you know where to go, find that information. Yeah. For some folks, there's a little bit of an adoption hurdle. But once they get over it, they realize, hey, at the end of the day, I'm not using all these different tools.

42:24It ultimately simplifies the workflow. Absolutely. I want to bring this point up because I have a strong view. I even wrote a whole book about this called Agile M &A, which is obviously about moving fast and having a very iterative, collaborative process. But the main thesis was all about connecting your diligence and integration process together. The better you did that, the better continuity you have, the better integration plan you're going to end up with, the better execution. I want to talk to you about that because that's one of the core designs when we built Dealroom was to be able to do that.

42:55To one, I wanted to see your thoughts around that. to there's an industry old school thinking of the seller controls the whole process. And there's a challenge to it because now we're saying, hey, listen, the buyers are one with everything at stake. They're putting the money up. They're the ones taking the big bet on this. They have more people involved in the deal. And they're the ones that ultimately are accountable for everything that's going to be happening post-close. But for them to be able to drive a process in a way that allows them to best plan for integration and work with the incoming team on that plan is probably the best way to go.

43:28But anyways, I just want to hear your take. That's it. That's my big pitch and position on it. And having been on both sides at that table, I completely agree with you. It is a challenge because again, people are set in their ways and they're like, this is the way we've always done it. You talk to us, we agree to something and then we provide the data room and I get it. There are concerns around all of their data and where it's housed and all of that. Totally understand the risk potential. But one of the things that we've said from the beginning and upfront is we're going to see this stuff anyway.

43:57We can tell you this is secure. Here's how we can provide the documentation to prove that. There's obvious benefits, not just to us, but to you as the seller to be able to use our platform. We're not going to push on that. That's not going to be a deal breaker for us. If they want to use another system to house their stuff or whatnot, and we want to use that, that's fine. We'll go along with that. At the end of the day, it's still going to make its way into deal room in some way, shape, or form, whether it's at the beginning of that process or at the end of that process. Because for us, it is our source of truth.

44:28So people are going to come back and if we have questions about anything, they're going to want to see it in the system that we use. So eventually it'll make its way in there some way or another. It should be a non-issue, but it is for a lot of people. Do you run both your diligence process and your integration in the same room? Yes. And I'll take it back to the beginning. We were in the middle of a deal when we first brought on DealRip. And so we did not use it for any due diligence or anything like that. So we just used it for the integration piece, which was great. We loved the product. We're like, oh, this is valuable.

44:58What we saw was that we left a lot sitting on the table by just using it for integration. There was a lot of pieces we couldn't connect. We couldn't appropriately pull information to inform those integration plans. It wasn't easy and seamless. And the next deal that came around, we were able to use it for the entire process. And the target it was amiable to using our platform. The other thing is it saves them a lot of money too. It should be a win. And so they took it that way. We were able to do that process from end to end within deal room. And you can tell the difference. People know where to go.

45:30People know where things are. Very easy to find within the data room that we've set up. And then to correlate that to then specific tasks within the integration plan potentially has been really cool to see. I've been also interested to see how people are making it their own. And again, we all think differently. We all have different perspectives on how to manage things. So to see different functions go in there and say, oh, I can use this way and we're going to figure this out. And being able to leverage the tool to do that for them has been really neat. Whereas another function doesn't necessarily use it that way because they don't need to.

46:01So finding those different value pockets within different departmental functions has been interesting too. That's pretty cool. You'll create a work stream for doing diligence in DealRoom and you'll create a work stream for your integration plan. But do you update it that way where stuff's coming in and progressing and diligence and you're catching stuff and just iteratively updating your integration plan? Or is it more, here's the template we typically use? I don't think we're at that point yet. And I think that would be great, obviously. The more we can get out early on, the better. We haven't reached that point yet.

46:29But that's the way I envision the future. As we're going through DD and those outputs and reports are being generated. now all of a sudden our integration plans are being updated based on those particular either risks that are identified or opportunities that are identified within those outputs. So now let's go back to talking about AI. Because this is why I'm like reinvigorated all my product interest. I feel like I was involved with Dealroom back when we inception in 2012. Yeah, it's fun. You get the business and then you get to the point where it's about market fits there. You're scaling it and then you're building a team to go all your functions.

47:05Yeah. But now with all the AI emerging, it's like a whole different view. There's this whole next generation and it creates a further divide between folks that think that they can keep doing it in Excel versus you're going to be missing out on so much capability. And the one I was really interested in is integration planning. Yeah. There's so much you can start populating. I brought that up because there's something that you're currently not doing manual, something that AI can actually start doing for you. As soon as you start getting that diligence information, it can start thinking about what does that integration plan look like?

47:35And then as it gets appended to from your team members, you can identify those dependencies and start raising them up and saying, hey, what are these potential conflicts going to be? So that's why I thought it was pretty interesting to see that as a use case. I think the other thing I've noticed is M &A is a series of templates. When you really look at it, you have your investment memo, you're signing up to the board, you have all your functions, writing some kind of findings report, you're updating around progress of integration by function broadly, but everybody's completing a template, is that an opportunity to start pre-populating those templates with graph content so they can get put together faster?

48:13If you think about it, much of what we talked about today, even from a people perspective, is M &A fatigue, under-resourcing. This is additive. This isn't their full-time job. All of those things. Those are challenges that everything you're talking about helps to solve because it takes the burden away of having to generate content And let's be honest, people don't like to create content. They like to change content, right? So if you ask somebody, here's a blank slate, do something. Oh man, that's way more of a challenge than if you give them something that's already pre-populated and they're like, oh yeah, I can, I'll figure this out.

48:47To me, that's powerful. That's time-saving. Not only from a time perspective, but then just from that fatigue perspective, they're not going to get nearly as fatigued if I give them something already to start with than telling them, oh, blank slate. Here's an Excel spreadsheet that you need to figure out what your tasks are and what your plan should be based on these reports that you now have to go read. If I can take that burden away from them, that's huge. That's huge for our process. It's grunt work at the end of the day. Yeah. The tactical crap we can say. Yeah. And focus more on the real strategic thinking involved and understand the information, making the appropriate edits and move forward.

49:22Yeah. And then execute. I'm excited about it. I've talked to a lot of customers and we've had conversations about it. And there's so many of these use cases. And I think I'm even more fired up. I just looked at our first prototype of what we're taking to the market. Just literally looking forward to rolling that stuff out and just seeing the changes it can make in the industry. That's exciting. I don't know what we're going to do with legal fees, consulting fees, and banking fees. Yeah. And then eventually you won't need a person like me. You'll just have this machine that does it for you. Somebody's got to go and listen to people and empathize with them.

49:53That's true. Until we figure that out. You can make learning models empathetic, I guess. You can figure that out. You're going to have like the empathy robot going around. How are you feeling today? Here's a slice of pizza. Want to talk about it? Okay, I think we're done with the deal room commercial. We try not to. I feel like I'm pretty good about just not being so everything's a driven commercial plug. But it is the one thing I'm like super proud about is like contributing to build the greatest platform and Gemini. It's such an important part of our process now. So I almost can't talk about our process without speaking about it in some way.

50:27It's pretty integrated at this point. The first-time practitioners, do you have any advice for folks that are going to be coming in your role, integration lead? One, you'll get through it. It will feel daunting and complex because it is, but it's incredibly rewarding too. So I would say just push through, move forward. And like I said earlier, listen, there's a lot of good content out there, a lot of good practitioners who've been doing this forever. Listen and learn from them. But then two, don't be scared to bring new ideas to the table. We need that. I think we've talked a little bit about that already.

51:06Having people with different experiences, different perspectives on how to get things done is not a bad thing. That can be a very good thing and can actually lead to a process that's just better than it used to be. Don't be afraid to bring things to the table that, oh, well, we didn't used to do it that way. That's okay. okay, maybe we try it this way and it might not work. Probably my third thing would be, don't be afraid to fail. You may fail. There may be things where it's like aspects of this deal were complicated and it didn't really work out. That's really the only way you learn in some ways.

51:36So don't be afraid to fail, move through that and then learn and iterate for the next time. One of the things that people think about M &A process as a whole is that it's just a very linear process and it's not. Every single deal is different and complex in its own ways, but you kind of shift through all of those things. So experience and time, you're going to learn a lot. Just keep bringing that to the table every deal and you'll be okay. Challenge the status quo. Yeah, I love it. Camilla, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? I wish I could come to the table with this story. Oh man, this one thing happened and it was absolutely insane.

52:11I don't think I have anything like that. I would say being part of a process during COVID, again, it just upended everything. We had to do everything differently from management meetings that we couldn't do in person. So now we're evaluating things from afar. You're not getting that people piece where I'm sitting across the table from you and really seeing how things are and listening to your pitch. But then I'm going to grab a drink with you afterwards. And we're spending three or four hours continuing to talk about it over drinks. Those things weren't happening. So you're now operating in a space that's a lot more limited.

52:43On top of that, you're having to update executives on here's what the COVID strategy is. And here's how we're managing that from a business perspective. Here's how it's affecting our process. Here's what we're having to inform all of the potential buyers about and giving them updates on how we're handling COVID too. Just a whole subset of muscles that we had to exercise that weren't normal to the process. That was a crazy time. It was a wild ride and was interesting to be a part of. Yeah, I feel like any of the transactions, but especially doing something like that during COVID, it's been pretty crazy.

53:17And then different time zones too. Europe and Latin America and we're doing them simultaneously too so super fun Camille thank you so much for taking the time with me I enjoyed this conversation you helped me become a better M &A scientist I'm glad to hear it it was a pleasure to be here and love this community so I'm looking forward to hearing more and learning more from all of you too those of you still with us thank you for sticking through until next time here's to the deal

53:53Thank 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.

54:38Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal. Thank you.