How to Close M&A Deals in 30 Days

22:36Revenue synergies are a lot harder and unpredictable, like you said. And if you're depending on them for evaluation and then you don't achieve them, then it makes the acquisition a lot tougher. Revenue synergies equals icing on cake. It's upside. It's a bonus. And we love it. And we've certainly gotten cross-sell opportunities. And it's great. We're just not going to model it. You got to make the business case a little sweeter, add the icing in the model. Sometimes we end up losing deals because if another acquirer is willing to value based on potential revenue synergies and thus can be more aggressive from a value standpoint, all the power to them.

23:11And that happens as a disciplined acquirer that we are. We're okay with that. We're okay if someone else beats us on price because they are doing things to be more aggressive than we think are realistic or defensible. And that's okay. Being a disciplined buyer means that we're comfortable walking away from an acquisition. When you're going through the sales and go-to-market, how much consideration do you put into the post-close what it's going to look like in terms of how you're going to market the product portfolio? What's the customer journey going to look like? We start really thinking about that after LOI and while we're negotiating a definitive agreement and we're doing some of the preliminary integration planning.

23:50We'll start to think about that. we're not getting a lot of interaction with the target company or certainly with folks that are really responsible for the sales and go-to-market until you've signed a definitive agreement and you actually have access to a broader set of people. So it takes a little bit more time before you can really map that out. But we've done so many deals and my head of integration is a rock star. She knows the things to be thinking about. And so we can do a lot from a preliminary integration planning standpoint with our team. At this stage? post LOI, pre-signing. if there's a big gotcha thing that you may miss when you're going through the early thing.

24:25That's what I was curious about. There's always going to be a gotcha. And this is something that we discuss a lot internally at Progress. No matter how much diligence you do and no matter how thorough you are, there's always going to be surprises. There are always going to be things that you learn on the other side. It's one of the reasons why we've put such a concerted effort on as we think about what we need from a diligence standpoint, focusing on what we refer to as the must-have. not the nice to haves. Because it's great to get all kinds of information all the nice to haves and to understand every little thing about a business.

24:54But at the end of the day, you can do all that and you're still going to learn something after you've owned the company that you didn't find out in diligence. What's important in diligence is to really focus in on the key things that could potentially influence your decision to do or not do a deal. Is there a standing litigation that could cost you a lot of money? Has the company been experiencing significant attrition? Why is that? Is the company experience and lots of customer turn. So things like that, that are going to make you smarter and make you bigger picture think, do I want to proceed or do I not want to proceed?

25:26Let's get a little theoretical here. Let's say you cannot get 100 % of the information at this early stage where you're just getting a proper bid in. What percentage of information, I guess you're really just targeting the big risk items. So that's probably not really much. But I'm just curious, like what percentage of it, because obviously you get a lot more after LOI and you still don't get 100, against the accuracy. Now, are we sort of getting to like this 5 % to 10 % range of precision that we're bidding on? It's something that we debate a lot internally because we like to refer to it as it's important to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

25:59Yes, it'd be great to be able to have 100 % precision. But are you ever going to have 100 % precision? No. For instance, when you're thinking about who are the employees that you want to keep in a transaction, who are the employees that you don't want to keep, You can make educated thoughts and educated thinking around that. But at the end of the day, you're probably going to make some mistakes. Maybe you're going to say, we don't need this person. Then learn after the fact that person could have been valuable for X, Y, and Z. That's going to happen. It's never going to be perfect. But I think the whole point of M &A is getting to a point where there's enough conviction in wanting to proceed.

26:33There's enough conviction that the value of the deal is worth it. And you understand that you're going to learn some things afterwards that I would have loved to have known that during the diligence process. but it just is not realistic. What's the confidence? Do you come up with that? Where you're like, hey, we're confident that we're in this 10 % band of where we should be in pricing this asset? Yeah, we have good conviction. We have good confidence. And we also have what we refer to as a contingency line. And that contingency line allows for things that you may potentially miss. And you can dip into that contingency.

27:02As long as you stay within that contingency that you've modeled, then the model is still going to be a success even by missing a few things. If you don't have that contingency, and the model requires you to be 100 % precise and then you learn things after the fact, then it can be a little bit more challenging. That's why we always have a contingency line because we always know that there are going to be surprises. And as long as those surprises are within the bucket of that contingency, it's okay. The model will still work. You have to have your own deal philosophy and your risk tolerance. For sure.

27:34Customer success. Is there some key things? I think this goes back to retention and customer satisfaction. We're thinking about a couple of things. We're thinking about how much touch points are required to keep a customer happy. You throw a lot of bodies at it. How hard is it to get a customer up and running on your product? Is it very intensive from a professional services standpoint? So those kinds of things are really important. And remember, Marcus isn't necessarily saying, all right, we're going to model this deal and we're going to go out and chase a whole lot of net new. Our focus is really around what we refer to as maintain and retain.

28:07So the customer success piece is really important. How good is the company at retaining the customers? How happy are those customers? Our focus is really if we can build on a model where we can have a lot of conviction that we will maintain the core set of the customers that are driving the majority of the revenue, that's great. We want to understand who it is that's critical to helping us to do that. And that's why asking the questions around customer success and professional services is important. You get through those key areas and then it's G &A questions. Yeah. Starting with finance, which I think is pretty straightforward.

28:39It's probably the thing that we're all most familiar with, is you're asking for some of the financials for the past... I don't know. How many years do you go back? We'd like to look back two, three years. We're trying to understand trends. We're trying to understand what's going on with annual or recurring revenue. Is it growing? Is it shrinking? We're trying to understand, are you seeing a lot of expansion with your install base? We're trying to understand, is growth highly dependent on lots of net new? or is it highly dependent on the install base that you have? Those are some of the key things that we want to really understand and they're going to inform our model.

29:12Because remember, we're focused very much on operational efficiencies. If we have to go chase a lot of net new to keep revenue flat or to keep it growing a little bit, that's going to be a lot more expensive than being able to maintain and retain and grow an install base. What is like a right retention rate? What's your key metrics you're looking for? Because customer loyalty is so important. We're looking for net retention rates that are north of 90%. We're looking for gross retention rates north of 80%. That's roughly where we are. If you look at progress as a whole today, we are historically around 100 % net retention.

29:46We're trying to look for companies that are in that range or where we have conviction that we can improve those net retention rates a little bit, given our more robust platform of customers, of distribution, and things like that. That makes sense. People. People. Very important. And the people piece is super, super important at Progress. We talk a lot about how we care about our customers and we care about our people. And one of the things that I think is fantastic about our M &A strategy is the opportunity that people have to be able to come within Progress and to be able to grow their careers.

30:22And if you go to our website, you'll see different profiles of people who have come to us through acquisitions that have been able to take on more responsibility, bigger roles on a bigger platform. And that's what we're looking for. We put a lot of emphasis into taking care of the people. We know that we're not going to be able to keep all the people. The important thing for us is that we're transparent around that. And for the people that we aren't able to keep, that we still take good care of them. And we're incredibly respectful. And I think that's something that we've gotten a lot of credit for because we care about that.

30:56And it's hard. It's hard to find out that you don't have a role within the bigger company. But sometimes that's just reality. You don't need two CFOs. You don't need two chief people officers. There are obviously going to be roles that are redundant. And that's what you're figuring out. You're figuring out, hey, where's more of these OPEX reductions? OPEX reductions. Yeah. So think about where there are OPEX reductions. But we're also trying to understand what are the trends? What are the trends that the company is experiencing? If the company has done a bunch of rifts already, how has that affected morale?

31:26If the company is seeing a lot of attrition, why is that? Why do people not have conviction or excitement around staying at the company? Really trying to dig in on those pieces. It's important. And then even from a culture standpoint, we do care about understanding the target company's culture. We're not one of those acquirers that just says, we're going to do it our way, take it or leave it. we're very respectful of understanding what does another company do? What are the important things from a cultural standpoint? How can we incorporate that into the way we are at Progress? And we're not necessarily going to be able to incorporate everything, but we try to understand what's important from a cultural standpoint.

32:01And when we're doing our integration planning, we're going to bake that into the thinking. Do you ever come across some real red flags in people that you can't do this deal? Absolutely. From a cultural standpoint, their culture is just completely different than ours. is it's incredibly entrepreneurial. And, you know, our progress has been around for 40 years. So that's something that you have to take into account. If you learn things that give you discomfort from a standpoint of ethics and ethical things, absolutely, we'll walk away. You've had that happen? I haven't had that happen specifically, but those are the kinds of things that would certainly rise to the level of, all right, we don't want to proceed with this deal because there's just too much risk here.

32:39Then you got IT. So it says things about incidents, breaches, things, attacks and stuff. So you're looking to see if they had some issues. We want to understand what kind of security initiatives have they put in place. Is there the potential for risk and exposure from a vulnerability standpoint? In today's world of cybersecurity and cyber threats, I think that this is an area that you just have to pay a lot more attention to than maybe you did five, 10 years ago when it wasn't as much of a concern. Now it's something that you absolutely need to understand. Because the last thing you want to do is go acquire a company.

33:14And then a couple months after you've acquired the company, they have a vulnerability or some sort of ransomware. In this preliminary stage, you're looking at their historical to see what that track record looks like. Yes, but we're also asking like what kind of security initiatives do you have in place? Do you have a strong security protocol or not? And if you don't, it's okay. We just need to make sure that we're proactive and thinking about what do we need to implement to get them to a security level that's at par with a public company like Progress. And I guess I was trying to delineate between free and conformatory diligence.

33:48You got to put a line in terms of what you can really get into. It's pretty easy to ask a simple question of have you had any vulnerabilities? Have you had any security breaches? What are those entailed? What did you do to respond to that? It's pretty easy to just ask what kind of security measures do you have in place? What kind of tools and technology do you use from a security standpoint? If the answer is we don't do anything around security, that's probably a red flag. I got you. Or at least it's an opportunity for our IT and CISO team to be able to say, here's what we need to make sure we model into this deal model to make sure that we put the right protections in place once we own this asset.

34:26Lawsuits. Yeah. What are their legal issues? You're digging in on customer contracts. Are there clauses that would be concerning like most favored nation type clauses? are there restrictions on being able to transfer a customer contract, on a change of control? Change of control. So things like that. So we're digging in on. But the litigation is big to understand too, because we need to make sure, are there going to be certain special escrowers that we need to put in place to protect us for potentially litigation that's going to continue for some time? Progress is a different profile as a public company.

34:57A person that's litigating with a small private company might be looking for X. Now that company is part of Progress, that person might think that they can get more because they're now part of a big public company. So you need to be thinking about what is the risk? What is the exposure? Let's use that change of control as an example. In customer agreements, by default, you don't have it. But so often, these customer contracts get negotiated. How do you approach that? Is it how many customer agreements have this clause or this early? I assume you can't ask for the copies of this stuff. Yeah. So this is where AI, and we talked about this at the Strategic Fire Reform yesterday, today, AI technology can come into play here because you can use AI technology to go and review contracts and say, here are the key things I want you looking for.

35:40Are there restrictions around change of control? Are there MFNs? And then you can identify of the target company's 500 customers, rehab MFNs. Then you can go and dig in and get a better understanding of those. Are you getting that information right now? Preliminary? That would not be in preliminary. That would be when you're doing confirmatory diligence post-LOI when you're in exclusivity. I guess it raises a thing where I looked at a deal and all of a sudden you find out every contract has a change of control provision. If there's risk that the customers are not going to come on board, that's a potential red flag.

36:08Yeah, for sure. Then all of a sudden you got to put some contingencies like you have to figure out a counter move for that. You need to either walk away or come back to the target and say the valuation was X because we didn't know that there'd be this potential exposure. But now that there's this potential exposure and it accounts for X percent of your revenue, the valuation might be something different. And we give them an opportunity. They can either say, all right, we still want to proceed with a deal or that's not going to work for us and we're going to walk away. And we're all grownups. And we as disciplined buyers are comfortable walking away if there is an issue that rises to a level that doesn't support us continuing with an acquisition.

36:48Marketing. Marketing is pretty easy. marketing, we're trying to understand where are they investing? How are they generating awareness? How are they creating a differentiation? What does the competitive landscape look like? And things like that. Is the money being spent efficiently? Is the money being spent poorly? Where can we get greater efficiencies? We have a great marketing team with a great platform where we can do a lot from an efficiency standpoint. And so it's really helpful for us to understand where is the spend going? Are they spending on conferences, but they're getting no value out of those conferences, things like that that we'll dig in on.

37:23And again, it's all informing our model. Can we get efficiencies or do we need to spend in marketing just to be able to maintain some low level of revenue growth? And if it requires a lot of spend to do that, maybe that is something that would get us to say, maybe we shouldn't be looking at this deal. And again, that's the kind of question that we're asking early, pre-LOIs. So we have that understanding. Okay. So the marketing thing is still, sounds like more OpEx, map things out. That's the theme. It's all very heavily focused on the OPEX side, but it does inform where things are going from a top line standpoint and how different marketing initiatives are driving your ability to grow that topic.

38:02This third section you have is data request by function. Yeah. And the first one is general corporate. And you ask for a management presentation, i.e. a sim. Where would that be for a company if they aren't going through an auction? Would they just have a general overview on the company? Is that what you're looking for? It's a great point. Sometimes they're not going to have that. And that's okay. I guess this is the ideal wish list. We're practical. We know that we might not get all these things. And you're right. If they're not going through a process, or if they don't have a banker, or if they've never sold their company before, some of this stuff might feel a little bit more overwhelming.

38:39But these are the kinds of things that ideally will help us to come to a quick conclusion on what kind of valuation we could potentially put on the table for a deal. These are the media information. You're asking for a cap table. You're asking for the different... That's obviously a SaaS. You're looking for the ARRs. Again, we're looking for on the ARR waterfall. We're looking to understand trends. We're looking to understand how they're doing from a standpoint of upsell, expansion, net new dependencies, things like that. And you get a lot of visibility into that with that ARR waterfall. Breakdown by product, quarterly breakdown by COGS expense segmented.

39:18And again, we're trying to just understand the cost structure as detailed as possible. And it's interesting for a company that's focused so much on operational efficiency, like Progress is. understanding what's going on in COGS and what kind of gross margins we have is very important. If we're trying to get an acquisition target's operating margins to be in line with progresses, which are around 40%, but say the target company's gross margins are, say, 60%, 65%, that doesn't leave you a lot of room for being able to preserve a lot of the people because you have to cut more from an OPEX standpoint.

39:51If gross margins are higher, north of 80%, it gives you a lot more leeway in your ability where you can find those operational efficiencies. That's why it's really important for us to understand what's making up the COGS piece and gross margin, as well as what are the pieces of OPEX. Most of the companies that we look at, the biggest percentage of OPEX is headcount. Is your headcount in high cost centers? Is there an opportunity for us to leverage some of our lower cost centers of excellence to get greater efficiencies while not losing a beat from a product and development standpoint? These are the kinds of things that we're trying to dig in on.

40:24How do you get confidence in the numbers? Because I feel like especially you're dealing with smaller organizations, a lot of crazy things. And it's just you start looking at one view and another like this stuff doesn't add up. We hire a third party. We hire a transaction services team that helps us do what we refer to as a quality revenue, quality of earnings analysis and really dig in. This early pre-LOI. Not pre-LOI, but once we have that LOI in place, we will validate. And again, it goes back to that same point. If what they told us is not really what is the business, it's easy for us to be able to, with a straight face, say, we need to walk away because you told us revenue was X.

40:59But when we went and did the analysis, revenue is really Y. And that revenue Y is a lot lower than the revenue you told us. And that's happened. You have to take the information representative for what it is. And if there are probably some immediate questions, you can raise it. And then the LOI will say, based on the information provided to date, we believe that the value of X is defensible. And when we dig in from a post-LOI standpoint with more detailed diligence and the information provided does not corroborate that, it's easy to go back and point to that. You got people you want the census and benefits template.

41:30We've put such an emphasis on M &A readiness and such an emphasis in our M &A playbook. We've built out our own anonymized census benefits template that allows us to get visibility into the things that are important for us to understand as we're thinking about where Where are there potential synergies? Where are there potential dis-synergies? For instance, like I talked about before, if a company is paying at an incredibly low compa rate, we might need to calibrate salaries to be more competitive and to be more appropriate. That's obviously a dis-synergy. The company might have significantly worse benefits.

42:05Maybe they don't have a 401k match. That's an additional cost. So we're trying to ask the different things in this template. It's really easy for the company to provide that. But that allows us to do that analysis and allows us to be a lot more efficient. What are other hidden disenergies that people miss? There are all kinds. There are all kinds. Bonuses and how they count for bonuses that can end up being a disenergy. The benefits piece, maybe they're not as robust as ours. So there are a whole bunch of things. Your census template, can you share that with me? I'm going to package it up with this diligence template and sell it for$10 ,000.

42:41Anybody listening? We'll take that offline. And then I'll split it with you. We'll take that offline. Okay, we got another idea. We'll take that offline, yeah. IT, you're asking for an overview of their IT budget, the key technologies they're using, and then the CapEx, OpEx items for the past three years. What systems is the company on? And where can we leverage our systems? Where are we going to have greater complexity transitioning to our systems? It really helps to inform where are their cost savings. And it also helps to inform the integration planning. This is an interesting one. This is one that maybe you would push on confirmatory diligence as opposed to free LOI.

43:19We have it on here. It's a nice thing to be able to get. You're trying to buy my data room company. We don't have it broken down by CapEx, OpEx. You know, it's getting there. You start with a sandwich shop looking P &L. And remember, we're doing scale acquisitions. So we're not doing tuck-ins. We're not doing aqua hires. So the companies that we're looking at tend to have a pretty decent level of revenue. The revenue is north of$30 million,$40 million. So they tend to have more robust processes, more robust data, more robust information. So it's a lot easier to get. But yeah, you're right. There are certainly companies where they're just like, we don't have this.

43:52Gotta deal with what you got. So then you got a field of facilities and marketing. Some pretty general requests here. Yeah. And again, on the facility side, where are there opportunities where they're spending lots of money on a facility where no one's showing up in the office? That's an easy synergy. So it's just trying to understand that better. Do they have facilities in the same city where you have facilities? That's an easy synergy. So it's really understanding some of these things. And so you can see from this list, both from the set of questions and the data request, that it's all really going back to informing valuation and where we think we can be.

44:25One, we're trying to see, are we still excited about this company as a potential acquisition target? And then two, what kind of valuation do we think we can pay that we think is defensible and supportable? How do you adjust this thing based on the deal you're pursuing and the deal rationale? Because it varies. You're buying a company, it could be an acqui-hire just for some high-level engineering talent. We would never do that. It could be for market share on one of your existing products that you're just looking to expand. It could be for the customer base where you're planning to buy the customers and eliminate the product.

44:56It varies a bit, doesn't it? Yeah. We're looking at a lot of companies and acquisition targets that tend to be interesting adjacencies to the products and the different solutions that we have on our platform today. And what it does enhances our value proposition. It further differentiates us as a key player in the areas that we plan. How much would you adjust this? Because it sounds like the whole theme of this podcast is you're really front-loading this stuff to get to an LOI that sets the tone. So that we can move quickly. Exactly. Yeah. From our perspective, it's very straightforward. They're simple questions.

45:29If the company understands their business, there's no gotchas in there. And the requests from a data standpoint are very straightforward and usually ideally are off the shelf minus the benefits and compensations in the census, which obviously they have to take their data and incorporate it into our template. But pretty straightforward to do that too. We haven't had much pushback from targets on that request. And then after you gather this information, who's processing it on your end? It's typically a small team. At that stage, it's a small team. We'll have the executive champion from the business unit that wants to do the deal.

46:02be a couple of folks from CorpDev, maybe a couple of people from the business unit, thought leaders, leadership members from that team. And then obviously our finance person who's helping to build the model. That person built a simple one-page template where you can just plug a bunch of numbers in and it helps spit out where we think we could be from a valuation standpoint. Because remember, we are very focused on making sure that we provide ample shareholder return. We're very focused on certain parameters for how we determine value. You said before, we're never going to pay 15x for a company from a revenue multiple standpoint because we trade it four and a half times.

46:37We're never going to pay 30 times EBITDA multiple because we trade it 11 times multiple. But one of the things that we do is we spend a lot of time thinking about from a pro forma standpoint, once we've executed our synergies and the operational efficiencies, how much value can we create for our shareholders? And if there's sufficient value that we can create, then we can get a lot of conviction around proceeding with that deal. And if we can't, we'll walk away. And we're comfortable doing that because we're just value driven. Yeah. I don't think the right fit for this deal, Jeremy. I'm just kidding.

47:07We really didn't talk about any of the really how to get through the 30 days. Once we get an executed LOI with exclusivity, we have a very disciplined approach. We have a very focused diligence request. We can lean on that. We refer to it as the highest priority items that we can get during that diligence period. At the same time that we're doing that diligence, we can start negotiating a definitive agreement. The goal is to really be able to do it all concurrently so that at the end of that 30 days, you can be pencils down on diligence and you can have a negotiated definitive agreement. And if all that comes into play, that's what's appealing to a seller.

47:44Not having this process linger for 3, 6, 9, 12 months. But to know that in 30 days, we can have a deal in place. But you have to give us the exclusivity. 30 days is a sexy target. I feel like it's part of me like, yes, let's do it. I'm on board. I want to get things done fast. But then there's just something pops up. They need some license transferred or some entity needs credit. Something's going to delay that 30 days. You sort of just go with this high level of optimism. Yeah. You're always going to say 30 days for exclusivity with automatic extensions as long as you're continuing to negotiate in good faith.

48:19Because you're right. Take, for instance, the company isn't prepared to have the data room go live on day one post-LOI. That's going to delay the diligence process. Or the negotiation is taking a little bit longer than you expect. That's going to delay the process. We all like to set that aggressive target to 30 days. And it's certainly realistic and achievable if all the stars are aligned. If the data room is in place and ready to go right from the get-go. If both sides are practical and reasonable from a negotiation standpoint. If the sellers aren't being reasonable and just trying to fight every single deal term.

48:56could take longer. Taking time to build out the disclosure schedules, it could take longer. So it really requires everyone being bought in and there being alignment and everyone being prepared and ready for that process. And if they're not, yeah, the 30 days can be very aggressive and unrealistic. It's a lot. It's a lot of details we can even talk to. But I feel like our previous conversations, those of you first time here and Jeremy, we've done multiple interviews. I think like three of them. This might be your fourth time on M &A Science, where we've actually dove into a lot deeper details about executing diligence.

49:26A lot of fun nuances. We did talk about board approval on these deals. I highly recommend checking those out. We're running short on time because Jeremy's so popular and booked up his whole schedule here at DealMax. But that's what happens when you come out of DealMax. You get a lot of networking. It's a fantastic form. Over 3 ,000 people here. Private equity professionals, investment bankers, strategic acquirers that you can share best practices with. It's a great event. And kudos to ACG. I'm hoping next year we to collaborate a little more. I'd love to see a live podcast at ACG. So maybe we can do it on stage next year.

49:59Would love it. And always love spending time with you, Kisan. And the M &A Science team is great. Great materials. If you're a deal practitioner, so highly recommend utilizing them. And that's not just a self-plug. I've used the tools. I've read the books. It's great material. And it just helps to inform and improve your processes. And I've been doing this for 25 years. And I'll be the first to say that every single deal I do, I learn something new and we enhance our playbook in using tools like M &A Science will just continue to do that. I mean, I try not to make this a commercial for Deal Room, but that is a whole thing that's continually evolving and shaping.

50:31But with contributors like you, I think it's great, the thought leadership and being able to learn and build some cool things around it. Absolutely. I got to ask you though, before we wrap things up, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? I'll go back to it. The craziest thing for me, and we talked about this at one of the roundtables yesterday at the Strategic Fire Reform, where you can get all excited about an acquisition, You got the seller on board. You execute an LOI. There's alignment on valuation. You're negotiating the definitive. Get to the point where you're ready to sign a definitive agreement.

51:02And the seller gets cold feet. They go and hire an independent valuation expert who says you can sell for 3x what they're paying you. They get all spun up. And the deal ends up getting blown up. It's crazy to me because 9 times out of 10, they'll never get the kind of valuation that these independent valuation experts will say. They'll never get a deal as good as the deal that you have on the table now. And you hear that all the time. At the end of the day, again, we're disciplined. And if they want to show that kind of naivete from a standpoint of a deal process, we're happy to walk away. And we're happy to let them continue to execute.

51:39And when they come back to us and they're looking to see if maybe we'll buy them then, the answer is typically no or the valuation is typically something different. That's your craziest thing is just high valuation expectations? The crazy aspect of it is the fact that you've done all this work, you've done all the diligence, you've negotiated the deal, and you're at the finish line. And they're willing to walk away after all that. Where they've increased their expectations. Or they get cold feet. There's all kinds of crazy stuff in M &A. We could probably do an entire session on that, but that's for a later time.

52:09We've got to do that as a whole group therapy. We do do them. And I've been doing this long enough. I've got thick skin at this point. I was going to say nothing surprises me, but I've certainly had surprises over the years. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a first. But that's what's great about doing M &A. Every deal is unique. Every deal is different. And you learn something new every time you do a deal. I agree. Thank you for taking the time, Jeremy. Every one of these interviews helps me become a better M &A scientist. I appreciate it. I know you got to head to this next meeting. Those of you joining us, thank you.

52:37You're also a fellow M &A scientist for sticking through this far in the interview. Love hearing feedback. If it does contribute, add value. I love hearing about it. Opens up conversations for other interesting things. Thanks, Kisan. Until next time, here's to the deal.

53:03Thank 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.

53:48Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

54:01views and opinions expressed on M &A science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual this podcast is purely educational and is