Integration Starts with Hiring, Not the Deal with Brandon Batt

24:03When you have people in key positions that ultimately one day will be part of your due diligence team or the integration team, if they already have M &A experience, they're going to be ready in a much different way than someone who says, yeah, I've always wanted to be part of an M &A deal. What's due diligence? Even the ability to kind of look at a company with a discerning eye comes from experience of having done it before. When I say, you know, being ready, M &A ready starts even before the deal. We look at skills for every job that we hire within the organization. And you have key positions in the team that will be part of M &A at one point.

24:36It's thinking about those M &A skills in advance so that you bring on talent with that expertise from the beginning. One of my biggest inspirations for this buyer-led M &A, building a framework, it's just seeing that there's a huge gap. There's no standardization of how do you go execute buy-side M &A. And I've also noticed from doing all these podcast interviews, there's like a maturity of, and this is where I'm going with this, is from the first deal you do, and then it's like the third deal, then around the 10th deal, your whole process completely shifts to a very buy-side oriented process.

25:07And we talk about like the early integration planning and all these things to set up the deal for success. I want to hear more about that but i want first want to pick it when you go through that it's like you're what you described it's you have these individuals in the organization that are on their own maturity journey because like you just said you have a mix of folks that it's their first deal versus their 10th deal and that's something they don't talk about we just talk about like overall organization hey they have these broader lessons learned but then you have these individuals how do you level set that How do you think through that?

25:40How do you set those folks up for success when they're having their own maturity journey versus the organization is obviously a lot more mature? That's where you get some benefits of HR being in the mix a little more closely in Quadiant than other organizations having a key focus on talent throughout the process. The word that comes to mind is development and learning and wanting to ensure that we're increasing the maturity of the organization over time. from the first deal I did at Quadiant till now, you're right. It's night and day. There's part of it that's around experience and getting to know people and the leaders you're working with.

26:16But it's also, we've improved our own processes within the organization at the same time. Our M &A playbook from five years ago looks different than our M &A playbook today, just on the learnings of the organization and what works for us, which may not be the same for other companies at that time. Having dynamic talent and being agile in the way that you approach development of them, staffing them on projects, wanting them to be involved, but at the same time, ensuring that the people that are leading work streams, leading the integration, leading M &A, leading the business are fully competent to do so is where it comes together.

26:52So they're essentially working with folks that have that experience in the organization that can help them. I was curious of like, I'm day one over here working on your M &A team. What's that going to look like? How are you going to help me build my M &A muscle sooner than later? You know what? It's no different than if you're a head of M &A and you've got, let's say, a director and an associate. That associate is looking up at leadership to say, okay, what does good look like? And they may have their day-to-day where they're really good at financial modeling. But when it comes to actually going and speaking with the executive of a target for an acquisition, they've never done it before.

27:28So how does that start? It starts with them maybe coming and shadowing for a meeting, listening about it or sitting on the call and being part of it and absorbing what that looks like. So then one day, you know what? Go ahead and you take this meeting. The CEOs next Tuesday need you to go say hello, pitch Quadiant, see if there's an interest in pursuing discussions. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's that trust in people to keep pushing them so that one day your associate is your director and your director is your VP and you move on like that. It's no different in M &A than it is the rest of the business in terms of operations having a healthy environment.

28:02That's interesting because you're right. You can't just learn this from textbooks. You actually have to get the reps in. And it sounds like getting on that path where they're getting the reps in early at a low risk and then letting them get to that point where they're building that muscle and they're ready to go on their own and show everybody up. And you take where M &A fails often. It's when teams are in silos. They have differing levels of experience. Maybe they don't always have the same M &A playbook. I speak to a lot of companies that don't even have a PMO. So you just have an M &A team and they're passing the ball.

28:34Say, hey, IT, here's what needs to get done. And IT is brought in too late. And they're like, how are we going to integrate this ERP into ours? You know, fundamental questions. I generally think that everybody has a good intention, but it's them being put in a position to where they can succeed. And part of that strategic operations or the IMO office we have is organizing people in a governance so that they're able to succeed. Then it's up to us to make sure that they actually are equipped to do so. So we're bringing people and then have the experience at the right level. Making sure you're staffed right in these areas.

29:05Like any other project. Yeah, I think you're right. That's kind of what the fail point is. If you didn't have that right coverage, there's a gap and all of a sudden somebody's passed the buck and they're like, whoa, these two puzzle pieces aren't going to fit together. That's worked for us at least. Walk me through what, now we're going back to the organizational maturity, what you've seen. And I want to shorten my learning curve of building an M &A program and organization. How does it evolve? What were those lessons that you learned and how you've changed the way you approach M &A over the years?

29:34I think over time, I've come to be more formal in some ways and less formal in some ways. So what do I mean by that? Assessments, we've been talking about people a lot. Assessments of people, you have being more formal in terms of saying this is the level of maturity that someone's at as it relates to M &A and their expertise and putting them in a position, that sometimes is not as formal as it should be. And then other people have to overcompensate and that scale leads to challenges. So we're more formal about that now. You have more formality on playbooks and processes as a way for teams to move fast with very clear guidance.

30:12On the other hand, I still like to be more informal as it relates to giving people the room to do their work and follow their intuition or follow their nose. If there's things that come up in due diligence or integration that need attention and in any deal, you're not going to have a playbook for everything that governs. Maybe it's the 80-20, but there's a lot that still needs to happen in real life where you need to trust people to follow their gut and do the right thing. Trying to come up with guardrails and things that allow people to move fast and we lower risk while at the same time giving people the trust to do the right thing.

30:50When it comes to choosing a leader as, let's say, a sponsor of a transaction or a head of a work stream, teams should be having the conversation, has this person done this before? Do they have the bandwidth to do this now? There's a series of questions like any other business project that you would have of making sure that we're going to be set up for success. I'm more formal about that now for staffing projects and ensuring that the people that are going to be there are able to carry it from due diligence to the end of integration. versus having interruptions because something were to come up or not.

31:18And we go back to that accountability point that I mentioned at the beginning of the discussion around us wanting to make sure that we have continuity from beginning to end. Okay. So more rigid around the talent assessment. So that way you're ending up with better accountability. And then you're also ending up with that continuity from diligence or integration. Absolutely. Tightened up the playbooks, key things you need to execute, make sure they get done. but then you're also loosening up on these other areas that may not need so much rigid decision-making around, but to let people have to take their own judgment and execute on it so you can move fast.

31:52Yep. Exactly. Or like the big things you screwed up on some of your early deals. Like every deal has a surprise that comes up. There's never a deal that just moves all the way. Even if it's perfect. I know. And it's just, even like those surprises are interesting to learn just because you're like, how else are you going to learn about it without doing it? But it's like, When you get all these collections together, it's like somehow it's cool to know about it. You've got it from a scar tissue. So you're sure as hell not going to let it happen on another deal. There's good and bad surprises. On the bad surprises, it's typically around structuring and the complexity of founder-led businesses.

32:28And that the expectations of people change over time. When somebody, especially like executives, have not been part of an acquisition in the past. The founder started a business, etc. And then they have to go through an M &A on their own. They love the money, but they may not like the consequence of losing control. That's been a big point in terms of understanding what kind of leads to less friction. So I can give an answer on that. And the good surprise is actually that we've done, going back to that point about finding the right shareholders for divestments, we've taken more time on some deals and found now they're like best places to work.

33:02Going back to that, finding the right shareholder, finding the right people, that usually has been bigger or less than on the positive side. And based on these areas around talent assessment, playbook, enabling people to have some autonomy to make decisions, if you look back to some of the bigger challenges, how do you feel like this approach has really helped you overcome? What is the hardest part of M &A that you had to tackle? We've been very good about finding the right businesses for our strategy and bringing them on, where the lessons over time have been around structuring transactions in the right way about having as upfront as conversations as you can have, especially with founder-led businesses.

33:41We found some amazing companies with amazing founders who really built something special. But when it comes to post-life integration and things around control and what do they think versus what do we think, it's a good friction in many ways because they are the one who really led something special to be built. but oftentimes bringing in smaller companies within a large organization, things need to change for scale. Those growing pains in a very accelerated and pressurized way, we've gotten a lot better around how we go through those types of deals now than we did six, seven years ago. What do you do?

34:18There's more upfront discussions that need to be happening. You also know by experience what you get through certain structures like earnouts and those kind of mechanisms where parties are contractually tied. Once you get to real life, things get a lot messier than what you may come up with in a legal document. You know, the KISS, keep it simple, stupid, is something that we can keep in mind on almost every transaction as a way to ease the life of the company and the people after closing. I hear that often with the founder-led businesses, first time doing M &A, the process itself, they don't realize how overwhelming it is, especially on the sell side.

34:56because buyers, you put the whole team over there and the sellers don't want anybody to know about it. So they keep the tent as narrow as possible. And which means a lot of work for a few people. And it's a lot of weight on them. It's a lot of pressure on them, but it's usually something that they've worked years to get to. You've got them after close, especially the earn out, then life's totally different. That can be... Yeah. As an organization, you have these like amazing talents. How do you know they're going to be in the right place post-closing? And I think that's something that every company needs to think about very closely before they run the org design and how they think about post-closing transaction before closing and shaking hands.

35:32What is the key thing you're looking for when it comes to talent on your team? So I don't know if there's any one key thing, but what I will say is the common denominator of success is finding people that are multidimensional in terms of experience. So T-shaped talents where you're not just an M &A professional vertically up your career, or you're not just in integration or name any function, but people who have gone not only up but left and right throughout their career. It brings a different perspective, a different experience. The lens at which they view information is different than if you only see things through one swim lane throughout your career.

36:10It's been a common part of our story of not only encouraging internal mobility within our organization so people can gain new experience. It's enriching for their own careers, but I think it actually makes them more valuable professionals as they're approaching complex projects like M &A. So expertise, but also versatility. Is there a way that you can detect it or track it when you're interviewing people? Absolutely. From the interview stage, a company's lens of how they're hiring professionals really matters. And you have differing levels of sophistication from the hiring manager gets a resume and says, Hey, Jim, how's it going?

36:45I see here that you're from blah, blah, blah, to more sophisticated ways of looking at a CV and saying, Okay, what are the different experiences that they've had? Are they at a job for long enough, not only to do the job, but also to see things through? What are the skills that are necessary for the different roles that they've had? And to your question, when you look at someone's experience, you can see like, Like, hey, sometimes what used to be off-putting of saying, hey, I saw you were in M &A, but then you went over to finance. Now you're in revenue operations and now you want to be a VP of M &A.

37:16That's gold for me. Not having a traditional path brings a non-traditional mindset, which ultimately usually has much more agility and perspective over time. And so there's a balance of commitment and having enough experience to be dangerous versus just having done a job. but you'll get that through your interview process. It's why I say you're the head of M &A and you're not best friends with your CHRO or VP of HR. It's like that's the relationship to have. So choose the diversity over cookie cutter and then the HR folks are fun to hang out with. If you think M &A people have stories, go hang out with the HR team.

37:52It's true. What were like the biggest game-changing deals that you've done at Quadiant? I think what we've been very good at is we found super specific targets to meet very specific business needs. I'm bringing on board functionality. Number one. Number two is the game changer from a transformation perspective has really been that portfolio simplification I talked about at the beginning. But it's not one deal. It is like a resilient persistency over three or four or five years of continuing to simplify the portfolio during the early years of our transformation. You're talking about doing more divestitures in the early days?

38:30In the early days. And the work is not only finding buyers, but the right buyers. We had several processes that were in place that ultimately the money may have been right, but the transaction was not. And as a business, we had the patience to make the right decision for our stakeholders and for the employees in those situations. And so I don't know if it's any one deal at Quotin so far. My point is more around transformation is a marathon and not a sprint. and getting through year after year, just constantly making change. You find yourself at the end in a very different business than when you started.

39:03Divestitures is coming up more and more. Just as a podcast the other day about divestitures, you're seeing it come up in the boardroom where people are actually looking at portfolio review and coming to those conclusions. Going through a series of it, what did your process end up looking like for doing a divestiture? Was it we hired an investment bank, let them do everything, or you sort of had your playbook for doing it? And what did that look like? It starts from the beginning, the strategy that mentioned the back to growth that we announced to the market. That was very clear in terms of how we segmented the businesses that were not necessarily part of the core part of our strategy.

39:35So they were either needing to grow and become part of it, or we needed to find a better home for them. So we, from the beginning, starting with strategy and the business context, identifying the assets for divestiture. After that, the M &A team goes through those processes like any other. So to your question around playbook, around how do we find buyers based on the size or the market or the type of business it was, maybe we'd find specialized bankers that would help market the business to find suitable buyers, etc. But oftentimes we are able to do it ourselves. There's been an immense value within Quadiant that was either created or saved by us being able to do a lot of this internally versus the usual habit of going out and paying X millions per transaction to have, let's say, professional investment bankers doing the heavy lifting.

40:24It's the whole process you pretty much did in-house, the whole scoping out, prepping business. It goes back to what we talked about, Kisan, with that team knowing our business. Ultimately, within any company, it's for investment bankers, it's consultants, etc. Nobody knows your company like you do. So to do it properly, you need to get your hands dirty. And sometimes it takes a little more work. Sometimes it takes more resources. But the right conclusion that's typically better for the sustainable long term is to do it yourself. We have great partners in terms of banks, consultants, etc. but you run the risk of being too detached from life after they're gone.

41:01So the more ownership you have to the process on a day-to-day basis, the better you should be. So you know when it's going to be a series of those types, you want to build that capability in a house versus if it was a one-off, you may have just leaned more on advisors. Yeah. We still have things where you have a very specific project of a specific size or place that you find the help you need. Can we talk about collaboration? Because you have this transformation office. I'm going back to this theme because I feel like it's a little unique, the structure you have. It sounds like that's kind of what I'm concluding is you're enabling all this collaboration so you can end up executing better, getting better results.

41:37I'm curious about like when you get to that tactically, is there certain things that you're doing or like a model where you're bringing people together so that there is cross-functional alignment? I feel like people talk about it all the time, but like, how do you actually make it happen? There's not really so much magic here or models. From the beginning, we've had this saying of collaborate like crazy. And our organization's own story is we've come from a decentralized to a centralized organization. So starting to decentralize, each executive would have, or leader would have their country with a full P &L and all resources.

42:12And like, we might as well as been two separate companies or 30 separate companies from that perspective. Coming together as a centralized organization, we really pushed teams to collaborate. Part of our culture today is around that collaboration theme. You witnessed that? You were there when the company made that shift? Yeah, we did it. The point is really, it's ingrained in who we are as an organization. I'm working with this new vendor. We're getting ready to license a new learning management system, part of carving out M &A science. They're a Swedish-based company and I visited their office in New York and it blew my mind how flat this organization was.

42:48I'm a bit boggled by it. I'm like, how do they actually operate this way? We've got a bunch of kids running around, but they just, they go to the person they need to and they get stuff done and there's just... It's functional. And I'm like, why in America do we lean on this hierarchical order so much? I'm really trying to extract some tactical approaches of like, how do you enable collaboration, the cross-functional and really make that model work? The best advice I can give to the M &A professionals out there, if you're not best friends with your CHRO, you need to be knocking on his or her door.

43:22The secret to our collaboration is in our culture. Part of our values, we have epic values. And the C of epic is community. And from the very beginning of our transformation, we talked about collaborating like crazy, being one community, and ignoring the hierarchical lines of who's your manager and who do you report to type of thing. but thinking about things more functionally across the organization with the business objective in mind. And we're not perfect by any means, but our employees tell us that some of the hallmarks of Quadiant being a great place to work is around collaboration, is around teamwork.

43:57And we still have areas where we'll hear we operate in silos in some places, or I have great collaboration in my team, but not over there. But when it comes to M &A and the governance that we set up, we don't care so much about hierarchy. We bring people on that are going to get the job done and we try to organize them for success. I'm just curious in general of frameworks or things that you sort of come about where you kind of have like, hey, here's these like staple, either a framework or like principles that kind of guide us through making these deals successful. There's let's say a few principles I live by.

44:32One is it always starts with a business. M &A could be like anything else in that. If they're doing things on their own that's not actually connected to the reality of what the company needs, you're going in the wrong direction. And we start everything off from that perspective in the business strategy and the business needs. Two, we heard early on from some of our partners the saying, it's not about the child serving the parent, but the parent serving the child. And what that means is oftentimes larger corporates buying smaller entities will have this idea of, okay, now you work for us and you need to perform.

45:06and here's your KPIs and da-da-da-da, and you lose sight of why you partnered and acquired them in the first place. What can you do as a parent to help grow them versus expecting the other way around has been something that has brought a level of empathy into our integration planning, but also how team members should be thinking about deals, which is we're all partners in the same one quadient family. There's no hierarchy in terms of acquirer and acquiree after closing, which is important. That's so true. One of these org psych books I've read applied really well to parenting, where it's a lot around empathy.

45:43I remember a specific moment. I think my daughter was like nine years old and I did an exit interview for an employee that left the business. For some reason, I did like an interview with her of just like almost like a performance review on me. It was like the funniest conversation. She had the most like great feedback, some real specific areas to improve. It just took it really well, but it's like a similar approach. It's, hey, can you be really receptive and just the empathy part with everything going on and what you're trying to achieve. So yeah, I like that principle a lot. At the end of the day, it's all about people.

46:15And if you don't respect, then you get what you get and you don't get upset. So true. It starts and ends with the leadership people. Yeah. I know for a lot of teams, tech is a key part of just orchestrating their process, organizing their team and data. Quadrant's also been a deal room customer since 2020. Can you talk a little bit about the technology side and how the platforms help support your team? Yeah, we've been a Dealroom customer since 2020. I think we are still a customer because it works. When you have a platform, often the feedback we've had on other platforms is it's not intuitive.

46:50The teams don't know how to use it. It feels too technical. And what our team has at least found in terms of Dealroom is just it's friendly. It's one of those things that it's not talked about because it works. and then we keep using it and everybody knows it now. And it's just part of how we do deals. The user experience, the ease of the platform, and then the deal room team has been great in terms of we've had conversations with them around advancements that they're being worked on, AI, et cetera. And so even from a customer perspective, it feels like the deal room organization's kind of trying to stay at the front of where deals are going and what companies like Quadiant need.

47:24Yeah, I remember actually working on the early days because it was a different team members back then, but most of them were based in Paris. Yeah. We'd always have to schedule our calls early in the day and then kind of work through a lot of the different requirements for compliance. And I think we found you because we were unhappy with other companies at the time and then we've just never left. So. So if you look at the biggest benefits, this is still an emerging thing because I feel like when I look at the industry as a whole, we're used to the sell side having some kind of tech to manage the sell process.

47:53And that was a premise of when we look at Dealroom, it's a five, 10 years out, there's going to be a future where sellers got tech, but the buyers also got tech. How do you sort of use that platform? What are the main benefits for you? The theme of collaboration we've talked about throughout the podcast, but we use deal room even for non M &A projects. It's a great place, just a platform for teams to collaborate on even non-organic projects where you have a number of people needing access to documents and needing to all work together towards a common end. It has many use cases. Easy to use, enables collaboration, or helps facilitate collaboration and design for M &A.

48:29Yeah, simple. You've worked on all these deals, but I want to kind of dig into one because I'm curious. Let's talk about a deal that you're most proud of. I am proud of a lot of the deals we've had. One memory that's in my mind as you're asking it is when we acquired YePay, it was in the middle of COVID. And the conversations that I was having with the CEO at the time were completely virtual. And it finally came to the point of the discussions where we realized like there's a decision point. Are we actually ever going to meet? And we're talking about a lot of money and we're talking about something that's really important.

49:03And even though everything could be facilitated through teams, virtual conferences, sharing of files, it just didn't feel right or feel normal to make things work. And to say, meet my own requirements, I ended up taking a car through the channel from Paris into London. We met in our offices. We respected all social distancing rules and whatnot. But even the people at the station were like, why are you leaving kind of thing? I was by myself. It was just completely silent. But M &A practitioners will, and just executives will understand, like when you have an ownership mentality of wanting to get the right result for your company, you do things that you wouldn't otherwise think you would do.

49:46Going, meeting with him. Ultimately, we close the deal and still have a good relationship. It's because of that first interaction. I like hearing that. I'm in a similar vein. So you heard about stories about people doing deals without ever meeting. I'm like, I couldn't do that. I just think I got to look across the other table and just get some vibe feel and build that trust. Yeah. So I'm happy you did that. It's the only way to make it work. Any takeaways from that experience that you look at applying today? The experience during COVID was that we all got further apart from one another. And even today, you look at reality from where we used to all be in offices, all walking down the hall, and life feels more remote than it does in person from a professional perspective for a lot of us for a lot of the time.

50:34I am all in on AI and where automation and that kind of technology can bring companies, personal lives. There's many, many, many benefits. But at the same time, that story of needing to meet the founder, understand the story from his perspective in person, we look at AI now and all the benefits of due diligence and where teams are finding efficiency. And it may be an old school thing. Some of the best nuggets of information were found through somebody coming through a minutes book or coming through commercial contracts. And I just wonder at this stage of the technology, whether the summary of the summary through a filtered language model is going to be getting us those nuggets or whether those will be missed because something's not spelled correctly or whatever it may be.

51:25And it's probably a point for all of us that as we continue leaning into new technology, remembering the thing that brings usually the most value for a transaction is that human touch and that human intuition and usually the human eye on things. So I'm not sure technology is where it needs to be today for us to take our hands off the wheel. So it's probably something for us to keep in mind as we explore. 100 % with you on this one. I feel like there is a, going through a big hype cycle with AI, because some of these companies I talk to, it's like, we're going to fully automate doing due diligence.

51:58Yeah. But like we just talked so much about in this interview, all the cultural elements. And these are things that you learn about through human interactions. we're not going to get some maybe well i may speak too soon but here's a spit out of what the culture is and how you integrate it at the end of the day it's it's all about people working together you're absolutely right there's a right balance where i think there's hey the tactical opening control left copy paste over and over sure that can go let's get rid of that but i think you're right like the full readouts and it's just you skip the conversations to get to some of those readouts it's like that that you got to find that balance there because you can't get away from that Yeah.

52:36And it's ultimately, it's a, it's probably a question of risk. What you give up for accuracy to gain speed comes at a cost typically. That's true. I feel like I've done enough on the stage now, not in the other room, but when I was involved with the early AI, there was the right balance. So you got stuff that's inaccurate and obviously humans can miss stuff. So, you know, you sort of need to keep both around for now. Yeah, true. This has been a great conversation. I got to ask you though, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? I think M &A is special in the amount of money that goes around.

53:12And usually the craziest things we all see in M &A are the companies that have more money than expertise. And they make big bets and they're not ready to back them up. And you end up seeing just a complete value destruction because somebody was excited about something and went after it. So the craziest stories I've seen are just millions or billions. ultimately probably should not have been changing hands, but we're from that perspective. And what I was thinking about the other day, I had just gone to another conference a few weeks ago and they were saying like, oh, we wasted this. We wasted that.

53:44My CEO loves M &A, but we haven't had one work in five years. Great one was the guy was like, yeah, my CEO's got money burning a hole in his pocket right now. And me and the rest of the leadership team have just come in in the last year. This is like a business leader. And saying, he's like, I've done deals, but I know our head of IT is not. Our head of HR is never. Our head of legal has some experience, but like, we don't have a PMO. We've never done this as a team before. And my CEO is looking at this like billion dollar acquisition for us. And he's like, super excited. He asked the CEO, like, who's going to do that?

54:18Who's going to make sure that we integrate properly? And the CEO is like, well, call Tom. Tom will figure that out. It was the typical story from all your podcasts of where just good ideas gone wrong of somebody who's given the authority to spend money, had no business of making that judgment call and taking that risk on behalf of his shareholders. It just feels like every day there's just wacky things going on of people who have no business doing M &A, but CEOs replace strategy with M &A. CEOs distract from their lack of strategy with M &A. CEOs decide to cover up lack of growth with M &A. There's so many things where this money goes out the door without necessarily having a super solid plan of making sure the shareholders receive the value.

55:00That's absolutely right. You think it's probably the best bet is to start off small, get something for you at the whole house. Yeah. I think there's a point from a CEO's perspective of testing the team too. Yeah. If you're not getting the right rhythm, the right returns, if you're looking at engagement surveys afterwards and employees are upset about what's going on, They don't have good communication from managers, just like basic things for a company to be operating normally. It's usually a red flag that maybe you're not ready for the next one. This has been a great conversation, Brandon. I appreciate taking the time from doing deals to help me become a better M &A scientist.

55:33Thanks, Kisan. Nice to be here with you. Those of you still listening, fellow M &A scientists, I commend you for listening to the whole entire interview. Would love to hear from you. Always appreciate feedback, topic ideas, and criticism. I'll take it till I get better at this. And some of you know, we are carving out M &A Science from Deal Room. So it's an opportunity to reboot M &A Science. Going to be putting a bigger emphasis on it. So love to hear ideas and anything from new formats. We're planning to experiment with some new co-hosts and things like that. Reach out to me. LinkedIn is probably the best way to connect with me.

56:07Until next time, here's to the deal.

56:21Thank 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.

57:05Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

57:29Thank you.