M&A Integration Reality: Deal Economics vs Human Dynamics with Nicole Markowski

23:58Also, just being analytical. We are so analytical in our problem solving. And we see things very differently than people who don't have an engineering background do. And I'm a firm believer that multiple perspectives get you to the best answer. So it's just another great perspective to have in the room. That's true. I think you had a good point. There's sort of this problem-solving mindset that you're zooming in, zooming out, and connecting the dots. And it's just, yeah, there's something clearly there that's a good value add. 100%. And I see it in a lot of my engineering, like all of the people I went to school with.

24:30Most of them don't work in engineering. Some people are in IT stocks compliant at a big brewing company. Some are leading operations. Some are in growth and sales. I'm a big proponent of it. Even my kids. I'm like, you know, I get all these degrees. but honestly, engineering degree, it makes a lot of sense because it's just a mindset you learn at that age that it's really difficult to go back and learn it as an adult. I completely agree. And I was actually told at Accenture that they would rather hire an engineer over any other major because you already know how to think. They can teach you how to do the job.

25:01Yeah. Actually, the woman, Haley from Alpine, we did a podcast in her engineering background, partner at a private equity firm that just crushes it. So with engineering, let's talk about engineering the process. Yeah. Fire-led M &A, baby. Yep. There's obviously a lot of components around the framework, but the big one is connecting diligence integration. And you're a believer of this integration-led diligence approach. Tell me more. Tell me more of what it is. Why do you believe in it? Absolutely. And I'll be just straight up. I've done tons of these podcast interviews. And it's a concept that people will say makes a lot of sense, or the ones that have done it have a lot of great optimism about the results from it.

25:42rarely people actually do this. Do you hear your take? A hundred percent. So I am very much behind that. Integration leaders have a lot of contextual history of how integrations have gone in the past. They should also understand what is important to your work streams. What is a potential roadblock? What have you run into in the past? Looking out into the future, hey, this element right here is going to cause us problems over here. So let's talk about it right now and try to solve that problem so that it doesn't slap us. way down the road. To me, the integration leader is also able to marry the value of the deal with, hey, we have to solve this problem.

26:20We have to make this decision on this integration milestone. What's the best way to go about it? Because if you're making those decisions in a vacuum, in integration, so for instance, if you don't want integration to lead diligence, and you're having either your work streams or potentially corp dev lead diligence, they're looking at it from a siloed perspective. They're looking at it, how does this impact the way I am going to integrate this? Not how is this going to impact the overall integration into our company and the potential value of the deal. So it's important for me as an integration leader to even know what happened during diligence.

26:57Being a part of those conversations in diligence is irreplaceable. Me sitting on a call talking about person by person in the associate census, if I don't have that information, I'm not necessarily going to know who should I be sitting down with on site during integration to make sure that they understand how to use Teams and Outlook. If I don't have that prior knowledge, I can't make good decisions during integration. So you end up way more informed about the things that are going to be critical for execution and those roadblocks and things that could potentially blow up as well because you're coordinating the diligence.

27:33You're just ahead of it instead of, hey, integration folks, it's time for you to get involved and start doing integration planning. And then you're playing catch up or essentially rediligencing the deal again. Or playing a game of telephone. So if I have someone else trying to relay to me what came up in diligence, was that what they heard or was that what was actually said? That game of telephone is a great example of if I can't hear it firsthand, I may not be getting all the proper information and context around it. So true. Can you contrast the difference between the traditional model where it's usually a separate function?

28:08Corp dev usually running the diligence, somebody in Corp dev is quarterbacking diligence. Integration gets brought in when it feels like, okay, we're at the point, we got good certainty. Let's bring integration folks in to start doing integration planning. Traditional, that's typical versus integration leads going to run diligence. It really is difficult in the world where Corp dev is running diligence. Both sides are going to need a tight connection between integration and corp dev. You don't get away from that. Those two teams have to be working hand in hand, proactively communicating, understanding timelines, challenging each other.

28:43You need that in your organization between the two different sides. Expectation setting with sellers is also really important. So whether that comes from the corp dev side or the integration side, it doesn't matter to me. But clear expectations early in the process is very kind and will help you during your integration of that firm. It requires a clear understanding of timelines. So what I see the most is this push and pull between CorpDev and integration. Integration always needs more time. CorpDev always wants it to go faster. That's the common themes that I've seen between the two sides. What really needs to happen is integration has to have a really good relationship with CorpDev to be able to explain the why.

29:22So in their terms, it can't just be in integration terms. It needs to be in corp dev terms. So corp dev, if you make this decision, this is what it is going to do to integration. Here are the potential impacts to value. Because if you just say, this is going to put our work streams over capacity load and we can't get this done. They don't care. That's not in their terms. So you have to figure out how the two sides can speak to each other using the terms that make sense to them. Align. So I'm hearing, one, you're going to be able to get ahead of these relationships that ultimately make integration successful.

29:56Two, you're setting really clear expectations now. You've got the full picture. Three, much better alignment on timelines because it's just that visibility is there. And then going back to corp dev, what about you mentioned the key is a relationship there. Because I feel like for them, you're taking out a big chunk of the process because usually it's run diligence till you get to comfortability to go close. and that's like a big timeline that they want to own. Yep. Instead, it's like, okay, now we got integration lead running this. And obviously, you articulated the benefits for you running it because it's going to help you integrate better, faster.

30:31I would tend to say faster as well. Yes, maybe not exponentially faster, but definitely faster because I'm not playing catch up. And I'm not making decisions that are going to have unintended consequences that I was unaware of. You know, people don't talk about that, the value of fast integration. We always talk about all this financial stuff. If you integrate faster, you essentially can realize all your cost energy is faster, free of cash flow faster, improve EBITDA margins. There's a lot of good things that CFOs would get excited about. And that's the piece that you have to talk to CorpDev about.

30:59From my integration mind, my head goes to, that's a lot of change for an individual. The faster you get them in, the faster you break down us versus them. That's true. Now, I want to understand the trade-off with CorpDev, because obviously you've painted a lot of benefits for integration execution side. But for the corp dev to give up diligence, I don't know if it's necessarily giving it up, but it's just, it's a different model. It's all of a sudden for them, it's like, hey, we want to see the findings report, know the QE issues, work through them, get comfortable to close because they're usually working with the legal team on it.

31:30How does that change? So it means that integration leaders have to communicate early and often with corp dev leaders. So the corp dev leaders need to know, hey, we hit a snag here. This isn't looking great. here's how I see this impacting. What's your perspective? So having that open line of communication early and often with them. It's making sure that maybe they even get a view of all the draft diligence reports from the teams and say, hey, we need more information here. We need less information there. Dig in a little bit deeper here. This one looks good. So giving them a little bit more of that ownership of the diligence reports that ultimately will probably come back to them because they're likely the ones presenting the deals to the leadership team.

32:11They could also have an analyst walk the process with the integration leader. So why not have some of your more junior people understand how integration is looking at it and be able to make those own connections on their own as well? Because I personally think that's super valuable. There's a lot of ways that you can make CorpDev feel comfortable with not leading the diligence process by including them, communicating, allowing them some ownership of the diligence process steps. Collaboration. It all boils down to collaboration. We talked about this process. And when we look at this, what you're describing and running it at scale, another fire-led pillar here is running concurrent transactions.

32:56Everybody always talks about the fail points integration. Always people related. Agree or disagree? I would agree with that. We did a whole podcast about relationships. If anybody hasn't listened to it, it's a really good, unique podcast. I don't think we've ever done a deep dive in just relationships in M &A. I highly recommend looking for that podcast. Also, Nicole Markowski. When you look at doing the scale, how do you keep that people part intact? Because I feel like when you think of scale, everything is more checklist and things like that. And then you're pushing to get things done fast.

33:27You're stretching out resources. But how do you sort of manage this high volume and not destroy like those human touch points actually make the deal successful? Yep. So this is where the integration leader comes in again. So as an integration leader, as I am listening to what's coming out of diligence, as I am seeing the integration scoping and sizing questions be asked, as I am witnessing all of this stuff, I'm making mental notes. So if I hear something from diligence, like they've had three failed tech implementations, and their people are very afraid of tech, that's a bell in my head. I'm like, okay, That means that I need to move a little bit differently as we move their tech.

34:08So maybe that means me sitting down with someone who is on the older end of working age, who maybe isn't as adaptable to technology, isn't as adept at just exploring technology and using it. I'm happy to sit down with that person for 20 to 30 minutes. I'm happy to practice calling on Teams, putting a Teams call on hold, transferring a call until I start to see some of that uncertainty wash away. And then we have them do it live. And I actually did this in a recent acquisition. We had someone that was definitely on the older end, a little bit more afraid of technology and was unable to explore on her own.

34:51So I sat down with her for 20 minutes. And all we did was I explained teams overarching at her practice calling me. I called her. She put me on hold. She transferred me to someone else. And after 20 minutes, she was doing it with live people. To me, that level of relationship building, it also goes back to relationship building, is invaluable to keeping that human element alive. It's finding the ways to help ease people's uncertainty throughout this whole integration process. Because integration is hard. Integration is uncertain. To be that integration leader who can keep the human dynamic forefront in all the conversations and when decisions are being made, it has to happen because CorpDev is always going to look at the financials.

35:36You're essentially baking this into your process of really informing of these people elements as you go through it that are really unique to this organization and the deal. And that's like part of the process. So you make sure you retain that and that's like carried forward and how you go execute it. So you can keep doing that at scale. 100%. We can change the way we train. If we have an organization that is very technology adept, cool. We can do virtual training for you. We can do recorded trainings. You guys are going to be just fine. For an organization that's had two technology implementations fail, you can bet we're going to be on-site training your people in person or this isn't going to go well.

36:11Number one biggest risk in M &A? Humans. What's the worst thing that happens if you don't nail the human part? You will have people exit. You will have people exit with institutional knowledge. You will have people exit with relationships. More than likely, what you're going to see is your A players are going to be the first ones to exit because A players aren't typically going to allow a lot of that to happen in their life. There you have it. That's not from me. You're made up. This is bottom line. It's a churn. You're going to lose valuable people if you screw this up. And likely clients then.

36:48So the first one to exit is the humans. The clients follow. That person had the relationship with the client. Now the client is going to get a new person anyway to build a relationship. Why not go look at another firm? Now, a key thing on this, we put a lot of emphasis on the integration team. Ultimately, it's a lot of this leadership, especially leadership on this selling entity. Those are the people they know and trust. How do you work with the sellers to work through a lot of these people things and reduce the churn risk? Yeah, 100%. So something that I try to bake into the process is as much understanding early in the process that we can get about their people, the better.

37:25Those really tough two to three hour conversations where we're going line by line, talking about your individuals, asking about job responsibilities, performance. It's key to making sure that we're placing them in the right places with the right titles, with the right reporting structure as we integrate them into the organization. So a lot of those steps early on with the sellers is super important for them to understand and start to get the full picture of where their team will be. How is this going to change for their people? So that when they're asked those questions, after they announce to their people, they have a good answer.

37:56They were involved in the, for the most part, in the decision making. I'm not saying sellers get all of their say, but they should have their voice heard in that process. Because at the end of the day, they should know their people. I coach a lot of our sellers on venting upwards. So as you're announcing to your firm, you have to stay positive. because you are the one that made this decision. They did not make this decision to join the organization. So they're looking to you to set the tone of, are we excited about this? Are we not excited about this? Are we indifferent about this? And with integration being as challenging as it is and as uncertain as it is, you have to approach your staff with an air of empathy, positivity, understanding, and as much truth as you can possibly bring them.

38:43We all know that sellers can't necessarily open the gates and tell their people everything all the time. But you can acknowledge that integration is hard. You can listen with an empathetic ear. You can acknowledge that, yes, this is really hard. But on the other side of this, look at all the benefits we're going to gain. You get new team members that help you deliver a client work. You get to sell services to your clients that they've been needing for five years with you being their relationship executive. So helping them understand what the benefits are going to be in the future, acknowledging the hardship in the present, and staying positive are three of the best things that sellers can do.

39:20Yeah, I think that's a key part. You understand the people, the transparency, being able to have them like part of the decisions that they can convey that to the broader organization. So the leadership part, culture is something that we've already referenced and it's a huge part of it. How do you think through the culture piece? Because I feel like the challenge is field team just LOI signed. Hey, we did some cultural assessment. We toured their office and it seems like a great fit. And then you get involved. Are you involved before LOI at times? Okay, so you're involved. I'm trying to understand.

39:57It's not like black and white. Culture isn't black and white where it's like, oh, this is a good fit. This is bad. It's sort of unique. How do you take that understanding that there's different models of how they make decisions, how they get work done, and bridge that over to how you ultimately integrate the company. And understanding like there's a variance there of, oh my God, this fits so well. They're very similar way of operating. Oh, there are different ways of operating. Oh, hell no. These are completely different. How do you think through that? The first part, assessing the culture fit early in the process.

40:27So as you said, there's obviously some kind of standard culture fit questions that are asked for the LOI. I haven't found one clear way from anyone to be able to truly assess all facets of culture. So culture is a bit of an iceberg where you have the top piece of the iceberg is the mission statement, the values, the strategic goals, the handbook, the benefits, all of that kind of stuff shows you what they are intending for their culture. What I find is that you are never going to be able to fully assess culture, especially that bottom piece of the iceberg until everyone is under the tent. Because what I found is a lot of people up at the top, They don't see the undercurrents of culture.

41:09They may have been aware of some of them, but they don't come to mind when they're asked about culture. So for me, as I am talking to, let's say, a manager instead of a higher up partner, and I could say, okay, well, how do you think your team handles change? They're probably going to give me a very different answer than the person at the top because they're closer to those junior levels that may struggle. They're closer to maybe some of the older staff that they have to help get through those transitions. Another question, what accountability measures do you have in place at your organization?

41:43That's going to tell me, are you structured or are you unstructured in a lot of those? And that's a cultural element that isn't just going to likely come out naturally. I would also say back to the standards of communication, how do you communicate to your staff? Are you formal? Are you informal? Is it just water cooler talk? Like you talk about changing the strategy from one person at the water cooler and that then spreads through the rest of your organization? Or are you very intentional with we're going to have firm-wide meetings? That will tell me a lot about your culture as well and how my potential communications are going to land with your organization.

42:19My M &A team members also play a large role in assessing culture. so my work stream leads understand that it is also their job as we are going through diligence and asking questions to raise any red flags. Hey, I noticed that this partner was really tentative to talk about this topic. This may be something where we run into some trouble. Or, hey, this statement in their handbook is completely opposite to what we have in our handbook. Do we need to close this gap or not? Then you can take that conversation forward with the right people in the organization. So to me, it's a combination of asking the right questions, having everyone under the tent, and your M &A leads need to be looking out for those things and communicating them back to the team.

42:59Okay. So we go through this exercise and it helps, right? It helps you shape your integration thesis, how you're going to approach it. So you look at a company, I've actually had this, where it is extremely micromanaged. How do you look at that deal? But it's a good deal. Like it's a good deal. All the economics makes sense. Great deal. I just, I know this deal is the way the operator runs it. It's highly micromanaged. I have some concerns around how we got to reconfigure things around it. But like, I'm just curious as an integration pro, what do you do? When I see a micromanagement culture, and I know that the organization they're coming into is not micromanagement, that requires some hard conversations with the seller.

43:35So the seller needs to understand when you join this organization, this is going to be the expectation of your role. This is going to be the expectation of how you lead. here's what our organization looks like when it comes to these types of factors, whatever you uncover in that micromanagement. And the unfortunate answer is if that seller is unwilling to change, it's probably not going to go well. Have you seen that where you end up having to split that role up into like multiple roles just because it's just too much control under one person? I would say yes. And usually we are acquiring smaller firms.

44:09So a lot of the back office accounting, a lot of the having to set up what a performance cycle looks like for the associates, that's all taken off of their plate. They don't need to be in the weeds of billing with a centralized billing team. They don't need to be selecting benefit plans because we have an HR team. I do maybe sometimes see if micromanagement is the natural style of that leader and they have too much on their plate. Some of that naturally falls off and sometimes the micromanagement completely disappears. If it doesn't, that requires the harder conversation. You get basically some foreshadowing from seeing this of, hey, there might be these challenges that come up.

44:52And then you're assessing as you go through that integration and then confronting those as you see it not going the direction you want. And communicating upward. So within my own organization, we have a deal sponsor that's responsible for the deal. So likely they are the practice leader of whatever organization this deal is coming into. To me, it's really important that the deal sponsor understands some of these tendencies because at the end of the day, I walk away at some point. I'm not going to be there for two to three years. I have to move on to the next acquisition. While I would love to stay involved until they're quote unquote fully integrated, I can't.

45:31A lot of that then rests with the deal sponsor and the deal sponsor's leadership team as to how to hold that partner accountable for the hard conversations that you had. How are we going to make sure that they're not micromanaging their staff or micromanaging the tasks that they're doing because that isn't the work style that's going to work in our environment. That's a thing you just get ahead of, be proactive about and kind of coach it through. Absolutely. It's interesting when you brought the deal sponsor. Can we talk about structure of everything? Because you have CorpDev team, you have integration leads, you have this deal sponsor that heads up the business unit where this business is going to fall into.

46:08Yep. What is structures? Have you seen what works in terms of CorpDev reporting up to who, integration reporting up to who, sponsor obviously goes right up to the business execs. But what have you seen and what works best? My ideal scenario is integration and corp dev report to the same person. Back to that us versus them theme. When corp dev and integration have two different kind of higher up leaders, like eventually I know they fall under the same person. But ideally, it's like that next layer up is the same person. It breaks down the us versus them. That leader gets to see both sides. And ideally, that leader is thinking about what this one is doing over here and how that's going to impact over here.

46:46It also allows you as you're setting up M &A processes and as you're improving them to look at it from a whole perspective, not just the lens of what's CorpDev's process and then what's integration's process. It's what's our M &A process and what's our M &A lifecycle look like. Because if CorpDev makes a decision to change a piece of the process, let's say that they want to remove something in the briefing document, but integration isn't consulted, probably not going to end well. So it just is that natural way in my mind to break down the us versus them. So that's my preferred style. What about integration reporting into CorpDev?

47:23That's fine too. As long as the corp dev leader can understand and appreciate integration roadblocks and issues that they also need to remove. So if it's a corp dev leader, you can't just be helping the corp dev team. You also need to learn the process over here so that you can help the other side of your organization. This could turn into a whole topic because there's like the whole incentives for them to get aligned around. Right. I've seen that too. Corp Dev will have incentives that honestly sometimes damage deal value down the line. Their incentive is maybe to get this deal closed as quickly as possible when the reality is...

47:59Why a revenue, Nicole? I understand. But the problem is you look three years down the road. And if you push that close through when we didn't talk through an issue, you might have just destroyed value without even knowing it three years down the road. Yeah. Get alignment so that there's clear incentives on both sides, getting the deal to close, but also making the deal successful. Yes. A couple more fun questions for you. Can you tell me the difference between a project manager and an integration leader? How does one become an integration leader? Absolutely. I was a project manager. So I came up through the project management organization.

48:31The unfortunate reality is not every project manager can make the leap to an integration manager. Yes, you need to have the foundational skill set to be able to be a project manager and coach people in project management. Because full honesty, I work with a lot of people who don't have that project management skill set and need my help and support in making sure that goes well. But in order to be an integration leader, you need to be able to understand your organization's operations, M &A, what's important to your work stream leads. A lot of things that project managers don't necessarily have to worry about.

49:02What I recommend for integration leaders is you should be there at least a couple times while your IT team is ripping stuff out in the office and putting new stuff in over the weekend. You should be there for support to see how the people are coming to your staff, what type of questions are coming up. Do we have the proper staff there? So a project manager doesn't necessarily have to worry about a lot of that stuff. Now, I would say a technical project manager is probably somewhat similar, but a technical project manager, just like a project manager, doesn't necessarily have to understand the organization as a whole.

49:33To be a great integration leader, you have to understand your organization and you have to work towards understanding the organization coming in. And that requires a lot of curiosity, a lot of deeper question asking, a lot of dot connecting, a lot of bringing the right people into a conversation. And yes, project managers use that skill set, but it's on such a limited scale, likely, and they have very clear defined stakeholders where integration doesn't have that. You do have to have experience with, I've seen that before in the past. I know that's going to impact these people or this is super new.

50:06It's going to impact these people, but let me see if it's going to impact anyone else. What about the term program manager? I mean, does that sort of put the bill closer to integration management? I would say yes, we're getting closer. As you get to program management and portfolio management, you probably have more of that skill set. However, the key piece that I see missing in a lot of people is the want to understand what the work streams are doing. So a lot of people want to just be like, that's in their little silo. I don't have to worry about that. I don't subscribe to that. I want to know what matters to my work streams.

50:37I don't need to be in the detail of the process, nor am I. But I want to shadow them. So when I started as a manager, I shadowed HR through every single meeting, every single email, every single conversation to just get a sense of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how they were moving so that when they come to me and they have a problem, I can better help them problem solve. Because if I don't know your world, I can't break through and truly help you problem solve. I can ask you questions, but I can't really help you solutionize. This is good. You're creating the profile for a good integration leader.

51:10And it's not always just default somebody that's a project manager to be an integration lead. Again, project managers can absolutely become integration leaders. Not every project manager can be an integration leader. One thing that we talked about, I don't remember if I was complaining about challenges working in a remote environment, but you had some interesting ideas of how do you sort of navigate that? Because I feel like things can be harder to do, especially working with new people and things like that. What are some of the tips and tricks? This is going to go back to the relationships podcast.

51:40So to me, it's all about forcing some of the interactions that you would have in person. For instance, with my work stream leads and their leadership team, we're going to have a regular meeting, whether that's monthly, whether that's weekly, it depends on your experience in M &A, how seasoned you are, how comfortable you are at making decisions in M &A. But a lot of the time that gives way to some natural conversation about people and how they feel about things going on at the organization. And that's something I kind of catalog in the back of my brain. It also gives me the chance to understand people a little bit more personally.

52:14So if I run into someone at an event, I'm going to put it on my calendar two months later to be like, Hey, really great to see you at that event. You talked about the home buying process. I really hope that finding a new home is going well for you. Remembering personal things about people and things that are important to people is super beneficial in a remote environment. So I force some of that water cooler talk by setting up those meetings, but I also monitor people in meetings. So if I see that you on a consistent basis are usually positive, upbeat, super chatty, like putting your opinion out there, and then all of a sudden in a meeting, you're closed off, you don't seem all that positive, you're probably going to get an IM from me like, hey, is everything okay?

52:55Hey, your energy seemed different today. Is there something I can help with? hey, I'm thinking about you today. That kind of stuff matters. It really matters to people. And even my prior direct report, hey, how did your kid's baseball game today go? Hey, did coaching go well? That kind of stuff, being able to either remember or document in a place that you can look at goes a really long way with people. You have to see them as human. Now, in-person is always better. I will give you that. What I have done in the M &A process is early in the process, I'm meeting the sellers in person if I can help it.

53:28There's something that you still can't get virtually and that's seeing another person as a human being live in front of you. I truly think that starting a relationship in person and then carrying it virtual is a lot easier than just starting virtual and carrying it virtual. You can do it, but virtual, I mean, that culture virtually takes a lot of very thoughtful work. Yeah, that's interesting. So you got one end of orchestrating people to just talk to each other on more of a regular cadence, picking up on these details to make more of a personal touch. I think you had a really good point. If you can start things in person, it builds fortitude of a much stronger relationship than you can keep up with remotely.

54:09100%. What's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? I already gave one of my answers on the relationship podcast. So I thought of another one. We were acquiring a firm in Denver. We were at, so in professional services at Whitley. we did the announcement before probably about two to three weeks before the closing date. So the associates were under the 10. Unfortunately, during that announcement, every single person on the IT team walked out. And the IT team not only had internal responsibilities, they also had client responsibilities that they were servicing. So we had to scramble to get someone from our internal IT to commit to basically being on site Monday through Friday for a span of at least three months before we integrated them.

54:51And then we had to get someone who serviced the client side to come in and take over those client relationships on site for a couple months before they could assume that. And we closed the deal and integrated them. So that's probably one of the craziest. Whoa. They just caught wind of the deal and said, we're out. Yeah. So come to find out, they had been part of a firm before that went through a really bad acquisition where their roles were cut. And they basically said, I'm not doing this again. when in reality, the way that we did it, that would not have been the case, but they didn't give us a chance to explain what it would look like.

55:28Yeah, that's wild. Yep. It was tough, but kudos to the two people that kind of picked that up and ran with that ball. Made it happen. Yeah, so how do you do it? Like if you lose all this access, credentials and things? It was hard. You have to reverse engineer that. Now, granted, this IT team did leave behind credentials, but I do know of another situation where they actually had to whine and dine the person to finally get the credentials out of them. Yep. There's always a story behind a story, a devoid A. This has been so fun, Nicole. I appreciate you taking the time from doing deals to have this conversation and help me become a better M &A scientist.

56:01Absolutely. Always happy to do podcasts with you. If you're still listening to this, you are one amazing fellow M &A scientist. I love to hear from you. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I don't check my emails anymore. My EA does. But I do answer my LinkedIn. So reach out to me. don't ask me for crazy favors because I really don't have time these days but I love hearing feedback on this podcast if you love the content like I really like hearing about what you like how do you think we can improve this content how can you get better at doing these interviews I'll take the criticism so with that look forward to hearing from you until next time here's to the deal

56:48Thank 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.

57:33Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

57:47Views 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.