The Art of Executing Programmatic M&A

25:32So dedicated resources for IT and the HR processes and the transformational cultural change, things are important to be supported as well. This is what we are focusing now in integration process. I'm curious about, as we talk about basically connecting the process end to end, is there anything, this is almost like leadership, enabling the collaboration, the alignment. I feel like that's one of the big challenges I always hear about is distributed team, a lot of people involved. How do you keep these team members aligned on the highest priority task throughout the process? Also here, talking to each other regularly.

26:10We as a team, first of all, our core team, M &A core team meets three times a week. Three times a week, wow. But it's more kind of a meeting for coffee. We call it a virtual coffee break. And then we have a bi-weekly regular, two-hour meeting where we align these activities with the extended teams in the due diligence. There is also weekly report hours and regular sessions. Talking to each other is the main topic. Well, so, okay, the coffee break, is there an agenda? Hey, what are you up to over there? It has no agenda, but every time it has an agenda. So there is no fixed agenda, but it's topics everybody's bringing in and what's highest demand.

26:49And it works quite structured. It works really like you are standing in the kitchen and drinking a coffee or tea with your peer and exchanging information. I'm thinking, and I'm trying to get a sense of how different or similar it is to the typical software stand-up meetings where you go around quickly and it's, this is what I've done since last time we got together. This is what I plan to do before the next time we get together. And these are the bottlenecks I'm running across. But it sounds like it's even less. It's even less. It's less than this, but this is already good. Okay, from Agile to bring something this in.

27:20This is a bit more how we approach our bi-weekly. The bi-weekly we have with a standard agenda with topics like this. I was expecting more engineering. I don't know why. Yeah. And then the bi-weekly sounds like that's more, is that pipeline review? And is that, I guess, you have more than pipeline. You have pipeline, in-flight, and integration. Yeah. Individual projects right now, different strategy. That's absolutely right. All the same. Yeah. Your M &A group is one group. When you look at adding the integration resources, they're going to be within corporate development, not a completely separate team.

27:51Yeah. Yeah, but within, so we will have it within this corporate development group. Yeah. That's good. And you want to keep everything connected. Let's say we have today, Belden itself is also evolving here. We had, I was mentioning before, three to five, even five different platforms. Today we have just two businesses. And with that is a bit clearer, the dedication of the individual people. Yeah. I think that's a great approach. Measuring success of a programmatic M &A strategy. What are the most important metrics? Changed. Changed a bit and there is right now, so Belden gave a commitment to the market.

28:25Belden is an industrial company, is a strategic investor. The commitment to the market was that we will achieve$8 earnings per share in next year, 2025. So highest priority to measure success and to identify our targets already and to bring them in is earnings per share target, which we are having as a leading indicator. And of course, it's a second important one. If we are doing an investment, we like to deliver a return on invest from day one on. And in year three, it should be 13%. This is what we are targeting. And this is the two main topics. Of course, I measure in addition my funnel inflow, my funnel target, given the acquisition targets.

29:11So this we do almost tracking like a sales funnel. is measurements according to lead times and close rates and things like this, additional topics. And the business itself, of course, measures against things we defined in white paper. There's a lot of synergies and development criterias, joint roadmap steps, which are measured there. So there is, let's say, a set, finally, for an integration, there's a set of 50 to 70 individual KPIs, which I do not have to direct the individual groups functions. Hard-tracking. You're such a public company. This is... Yeah. Yeah. So let's take like, here's an opportunity to acquire a company and you have to build a business case to present to the board.

29:58Your main goal is to tie it to that$8 EPS goal. Does that sound like you want to build a, hey, this is why we're buying the company. It's how it fits to the broader strategy so we can get closer to our end-to-end solution goal, given that, you know, this is what our target is. This is how we feel it's going to impact our share price or get us closer to the earnings per share goal. Yeah, this seems to be a purely financial driven topic. But of course, this is clearly identifying also the fit to our strategy and to our gaps closing in a solutions portfolio. It is a bit more challenging if it's acquisition of just talent, for example, or just a technology.

30:32But even there, we have already from the early beginning, a clear driven business case that supports our future solutions portfolio. The thing I think is strange is like EPS would be so much factored more on market perception because that's what determines your share price. So then do you put that as consideration of based on the announcement and how the market perceives it is really the determinant less than the financials than anything. It's more of what's the market perception going to be? It's a relation there. Is that part of the pitch? Do you pitch it up to the board and say, hey, we know the market's going to love when we announce this because the story makes a lot of sense as opposed to the financial details.

31:11I would say yes. Yeah. So it's always my driving factor, but there is no disconnect between this and how a customer sees the completion of our portfolio. If there is, it would be a disconnect and the one or the other would not happen. So this needs to be, call it like, almost be married. Do you have to pitch to the board a lot when you do deals? No, I have to pitch to the CEO and CFO. and I'm directly reporting to a SLT member, the senior vice president for strategy and technology, and he is pitching to the board. When you pitch the executive team, teach me. What's your formula? How do you get good at pitching to the executive team?

31:48Okay, this goes back to that. I'm a technical guy. I'm an engineer. So I'm always driven a bit like completion of the solution portfolio and fit to our customer needs. This is my main driver. Of course, I have the financial model, according to before mentioned targets. But the story is the engineer, you're sticking true to the problem solution, basically. This is what finally delivers you the inflow because there is a customer and only the customer gives you finally money as a company. So this all goes back to how this is going to benefit the customer. What's the hardest part of programmatic M &A?

32:23The discipline and to work consistent and to follow things. So email is coming in, link it to... the project, bring it in there, things like this. And have an information flow as good and as complete as possible, but also as secure as possible. I was before mentioning a lot of discussions inside the company and you have, of course, also to take care that it's, of course, non-disclosed information and it's critical. So maybe this is the mix of being as open as possible, discuss all our targets, but keeping it as also in a circle that it's non-disclosed. This year's Hot Topic is all about AI. A couple of quick questions, just trying to get your perceptions since it came up earlier.

33:10How excited are you about using AI? How do you envision it being applied to M &A? Let's say I give it an eight plus, quite excited. And I was mentioning during this podcast interview a bit already, let's say, options which I dream of supporting me. We do not use this yet, but I was talking about a white paper generator or something where out of all of these due diligence materials, I can generate my white paper and have only to add the financial part. So in documentation, also doing due diligence, having these groups giving their reports. I think you're hitting it on. I think the strongest use case is taking unstructured data and structuring it.

33:53It's perfect for that. So much due diligence. The team will appreciate it. Yeah. That's a great starting place. That's for sure. Yeah. It cannot close a deal. It cannot sign an SPA for me. This will remain from my point of view forever in very individual negotiations and legal topics. So I see their limitations. We do not, by the way, use AI a lot so far, but we have also identified a project to investigate how and what documentation we need in addition, what rules, things like this. I know our team's working with your team, so we'll have some fun, exciting stuff. Do you ever use, do you ever log into Dealroom?

34:31I have a login into Dealroom and I use it and I have a good trainer. I'm looking to the left as he's sitting on the table here. They should have a dashboard for you that's just greens and reds so you know. Yeah. We have a number of, even VPs, heads of corp dev, I've had on the podcast. And so is the running joke of, I just want to see my report and know So what's green, what's yellow, what's red, that's it. So what I actually like is that it's quite intuitive. I'm able to step in and find what I'm looking for and the reporting structure. Even there, I was able, let's say, without any additional help at 10 o 'clock in the evening, it was on the other side of the ocean with my manager was three o 'clock in the afternoon to prepare for him something where I needed to pull a report out of the room.

35:17And this is good, yeah? The easier you make these things, the better it is. And of course, the dashboard would be always good. But I would not be able to tell you right now what I would like to have in this dashboard. This is really, from my point of view, already well managed. I can tell you the team, your team has been fantastic to work with. Anytime we need feedback, they come prepared for each own list of things that they would like to see. And it's been extremely helpful for us. That's good to hear. That's good to hear. But I mentioned that tool manager and as an important role also in programmatic M &A.

35:51And this is, let's say, part of this topic. It's not a sole role. It's a role which you are taking care of, but this is an important part. I know where it comes from. It's not them. It's you. It's you fostering the culture of continuous improving the tools. So I see why every single person on your team has a list of feedback to provide. Yeah, thank you very much for this. Can you contrast what M &A was like before you used Dealroom versus after? Yeah. I touched base on these changes. Nothing is consistent as they change. People are changing. And due to this before Dealroom, handover was almost impossible.

36:27And follow-up by others was almost not manageable. Improving handoffs and follow-ups. Pretty important in M &A. Absolutely. And then from time to time, you need, let's say a year, 18 months, 24 months later, again, access to what you did at that time. And this was in the past. So there, when I started four years back, I found a lot in traditional files in a cabinet and written notes and things like this. What were the key things that made this transformation in your M &A process successful? If you were to summarize that, we hit on three big themes in this conversation. Like we really talked about having strategy defined in such a way that is so clear that any opportunity to look at, everybody knows where it fits into that strategy.

37:11We talked about tools and that keep improving that workflow. So it keeps getting better and better. And then we talked about the initiative of really connecting the life cycle, having your strategy run through your diligence process and connect it to your integration process and really get that continuous flow there, which lends to those handoffs and follow-ups. But when implementing this, because it's really formalizing a program, a lot of companies will do M &A to the point that, hey, this is going to be core to our growth and that we want to formalize this. What were the key things that made that successful for you to do it in your company?

37:49Yeah, this is maybe not that easy to answer. So let me make it and give you one different aspect a bit to all of this key performance indicators and financial results and positive things which we have as a story right now. but are also depending on the current global economical situation, how this is developing, macroeconomical things. And, you know, crazy years are behind and maybe ahead of us where every quarter things are changing dramatically. My observation is a bit also the motivation of the team you're working with. This is maybe a completely different aspect, but the better the tool, the better information change is, the better communication and the more open it is, the more motivated are your team with you and have fun while they're doing things which are hard work really to deliver.

38:41But this is an important aspect also. We were talking about customer satisfaction, voice of customer, and it is also the employee engagement and the employee focus in these activities. And there we see a significant improvement. But tell me, what would you do though? You know, is it, hey, I'm going to send you guys some bottle of wine every so often and something like that? Or is there anything that... No additional motivation there is, of course. We have a rewarding program implemented where you can give points to people who are doing good things. But this is not the motivation. The motivation is how things are flowing, how input is turning into output, and with, let's say, how many fun you have in between in delivering.

39:26I feel like it's almost like how you engage them or get them involved. Soft factors. Yeah, it's correct, yeah? Okay. Yeah, let's say the roots are really, to my analysis, that more and more people are understanding the high-level strategy. Communication is an important part for that. And with that, the motivation is immediately increasing. And there we made inside belt and significant progress. It's a great place to work measurement. We do it regularly. And it's not the measurement and the result only. It's the feeling. You feel it if you walk through our offices, through our factories, facilities, you feel the motivation.

40:01I thought that was cool when you showed me the area where they have a program that they bring fresh recruits right out of undergrad. And they're literally getting them directly experienced with real world work, not just running around fetching coffee. That sort of speaks of the company culture right then and there of just giving people opportunity to go create value and learn the skills. And this in a 120 years old company, 122 Belton was founded in 902. We have talked today about the 100 years of the brand Hirschman we are celebrating this year. And it's not a pure startup, but you feel like right now with our solutions approach, like you're being a startup and have this motivation.

40:38And in an established company, this is not so easy to, let's say, to leverage this. I got to ask you, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? The craziest thing in M &A is if you buy something and have to sell it, and they are selling it a year later to half of the price they bought and things like this. a bit like misinvestments and buy low sell high buy high and sell low yeah good way to do business but other than that yeah I see right now a lot of activities it's not maybe not completely earning season this day but I see a lot focus on just purely driven organic growth and I think this is also not good I would not say it's the craziest thing the craziest thing is when you buy something with this motivation and sell it a year later this is a bit what I saw and observed yeah I'll take it This has been a fun conversation.

41:28I learned a lot. You've helped me become a better M &A scientist. It was my pleasure. I learned a lot from you, and I'm looking forward to a joint calibration going on. Oh, no, that's been an awesome privilege, opportunity, and to come meet you actually in Germany and get the factory tour. This is nothing more I can ask for. Wolfgang, thank you so much for your time. Those of you still with us, hang tight. We got a little extra bonus interview here. Thanks for taking the time. I'm Oleg Cottridge, Business Development Analyst at Belden. I want to talk to you a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of being hands-on with the process improvement initiatives.

42:03But maybe you can kick things off a little bit about your background and current role at Belden. So I joined Belden around three years ago through our postgraduate program called Launch. We'll focus on hiring people straight out of university, right out of master's program, giving them opportunity to develop themselves through a three-year program where every year you rotate into a different role. I'm coming from finance, background in finance, and I did a bit of ops controlling in my first year, commercial finance in my second year. And then in my third year, I joined our M &A team almost a year ago, I think to the date, actually.

42:34I was brought to the team actually to integrate Dealroom into Belden. And now I'm learning, supporting all processes from cultivation to due diligence to integration, whatever you can imagine. What Wolfgang also mentioned is that we would try to accelerate our programmatic M &A, and we needed to bring some structure into our processes. to make sure that we have all documentation ready, make sure we have one single source of truth. And thirdly, that collaboration can be done seamlessly and easily between different departments. When I think of improving an M &A process, I always think of collaboration.

43:07Can you tell me about your approach when it comes to collaboration? And I'm thinking you have internal team, leadership, your different functions, departments, and external teams. How do you manage all that? So currently we are managing it through the emails or team calls or face-to-face meetings. There's a lot of communication that's done on a day-to-day, a weekly basis. If we're at the early stages of the M &A processes, we are involving, of course, the core M &A team. We're, of course, talking to our product managers, our R &D people, our technology people to make sure that we completely understand strategic fit of the company that we're planning to acquire.

43:47It can fit into our solution selling strategy. Then if we move to due diligence, then, of course, there's all the departments involved and their communication is key to ensuring that due diligence is done in a fast manner, accurately, and to make sure to flag all the risks and to identify, of course, synergies. And with integration, I think the communication continues to be the key, again, to ensure the integration of the company is done accurately as well and all the value is realized. Role of technology M &A. How do tools like Dealroom and PitchBook enhance your M &A strategy at Belden? Those tools bring structure to our processes and clear overview of responsibilities and roles.

44:24So that's where Dealer Room comes in. In terms of PitchBook, this is just an easy way to access information. It just saves time rather than going into the internet to look for things by yourself, Googling it, looking at different websites. It just consolidates information in one place and basically spits it out for us to use. You mentioned integrating M &A tools. Talk to me about your experience. What were the challenges when you were integrating M &A tools? How did you overcome them? I must say I'm really grateful that I had support for our leadership because I know that in some companies, the fear of change is quite big.

44:55I feel like in Belden, that's not the case. So I had full support, first of all, from my management, from also the team around me, but also in other departments. When you show people the value of this new tool that it can bring and that it can use their life, and you show that, of course, if you put some time in training, if you put some time in helping me to develop it within your team, It will save you time, bring back some resources, save money. The key here is to show people that this tool will not be a burden, but rather than it will help them to achieve their goals. So it sounds like you're more responsible for the enablement of the tool, probably more hands-on day-to-day than most of the other folks.

45:32I was brought to the team to integrate it. I'm working also with the dealroom team to make sure that the product is running smoothly, providing feedback. It's been really fun. Okay, so this is good. That's why I want to end the conversation. A lot of the folks on the top of the chain, you know, it's sort of there's the tactical components of an M &A process. And it sounds like you're definitely more in the weeds. But even where you're implementing it, when we talked about continuous improvement of the tool set, you're more hands on to that. And the one key thing you mentioned was how you enable it was really showing the value add.

46:05Can you give me a specific example of something that you did and how people actually adopted it? I feel like this is like the biggest thing that stunts a lot of companies and why 80 % of this market is still using Excel for like literally everything. Yeah, using Excel nowadays to track everything, just criminal. That's a good way. We shouldn't pass a law that makes it criminal. Right. I like that idea. Besides showing the value of the tool to M &A team, I think that's pretty easy. And there is no conflict there because it literally brings back the time that people invest in. I think the tool was shown to external people outside of M &A team during the diligence of our project.

46:39And there, there was a bit of a resistance because people are used to tracking it on Excel and emails flying around. Over time, people realized that using these productivity tools will save them time. And the way I facilitated that, I kept reminding them to use it. I didn't annoy them with that. I made sure that it's so polite and very fluid. I'm there to support them in any questions at any time that they need. So let me ask you, how do you use Dealroom? The M &A team, we use it to track the pipeline, our inflow. We use it for, of course, due diligence, and we use it for integration tracking.

47:18Additionally, we use it for reporting processes through the dashboard capability, where we build different dashboards for different users, just copy-pasting it into PowerPoint and presenting it to various stakeholders. It's kind of from start to finish. That's what we're aiming for. That's what it sounds like. Like pipeline, the due diligence process, integration, and then reporting out. Exactly. Which would be all those areas, pipeline, diligence, integration. Precisely, yeah. When you look at enabling this technology, do you have like a specific example of how you've been able to get folks to actually adopt?

47:56I think the most important part of my effort was to make sure that people use this tool during due diligence. That's what we use this tool for outside of M &A, outside of pipeline tracking. And to make sure that people use this tool and make sure that there is the least resistance possible, I make sure that they know that there is support available to them at all the times, which is coming from me, and that I keep training new people. I keep repeating the same things all over again with patience and without being annoyed at them. I think it's very important to show that we're there to support and support is given without even sometimes being asked for.

48:30If I see people are struggling, I'm on a call, helping them, supporting them, making sure that there is no issues. So it sounds like there's enablement internal teams, which you got more time. You can get the buy-in. But then when you got enablement with an external team, i.e. the counterparty, you got a tighter bandwidth. And it sounds like that's an area where you definitely got to be wide awake on. Of course, there's time investment from my side. But for the next due diligence, for the next projects, people start to use it more and more. And when people educate themselves, they start educating their team members.

49:02Also providing support and relief to me. So we just need to train the organization to use it. And after that's done, then it's done. Like why the tool set? Why Deal Room? How did that fit into the scheme of things? Yeah. So before I joined the team, what also Wolfgang mentioned before is the whole process was based on putting stuff on paper, shooting emails, having files in different locations, different laptops from different people. Very standardized, inefficient, and time-consuming. I have more of an optimization mind, if we call it like that. So if I see a process, I always think how to automate it to make sure that people are focusing on, say, more important things than just doing routine aspects of their jobs to just providing relief for that.

49:52When I see a process in our team, which is not standardized or inefficient, try to automate it or facilitate it. And how I do that? I do it through different tools. and Dealroom is one of the tools. Driving efficiency, it sounds like, was a big why. Yep, pretty much. Is there any approaches you found helpful to support integrating newly acquired companies? The key, or at least what I've seen, I think the most important part of any kind of process that would be due diligence integration process, it's ensuring that collaboration between different people is extremely easy. And to do that and to ensure that, you need to make sure that people understand all the processes all the aspects of other people's jobs and what other people do.

50:34So people know who to come for any topic that they have. So for instance, if a person in HR has a question regarding a contract from a legal standpoint, they will know exactly who to contact in a legal department. That's one of the examples. So standardizing processes with the company and ensuring that people know what's happening, who to reach out to, and what the process is, I think that's the key in any of the stages of M &A or I think just in general. It ties back to enablement. You can architect the process for days, but it's more about enablement, having people buy in, understand how it's going to work, who the other people involved are, and give them a little bit of autonomy for them to figure things out on their own.

51:18Also, the commencing and ensuring that there's a place where people can just come and either have a training or just have a learning. Do you do that? You have to hold your own sessions in-house of, hey, here's how we design the process. Here's the tools we standardize on. This is how you're going to use them. Are you pretty involved with that? So we do those trainings when we pull people into, for example, integration of due diligence. If we separate M &A from all the other built-in activities. And then if a person never done that before, or if there's a department, a group of people never done before, then yeah, we do the trainings.

51:52I do the dual-in trainings for any employees that need support there. when we have a new process, same thing. But really the kickoff meetings. Exactly. Exactly. That's a good way. What are some of the unique challenges of conducting cross-border transactions? The time zone is definitely, I know it's an obvious one, but it's a challenging one. Especially if we're based in Germany or in Netherlands. And then we are talking with someone somewhere in like California, like in a Pacific time zone. That's a really big time difference. And especially at the end of the, closer to the end of the deal, we have, constant communication to ensure everything's aligned, there's deadlines coming up, the time zone, the time difference just brings more hours outside of your normal working hours.

52:34That's one of the aspects. And of course, then the second one is culture. It could be from either even cross-border, even between two different European countries. There's 27 countries in Europe, and every country has a different culture. And you need to consider that. I'm learning. There's a lot of layers of culture. Because even in America, you talk about culture and it's like culture between different companies, but we don't talk culture between different countries, like layers of culture. And even culture between different regions in one country. Yes. What motivates you to continue growing in the field of M &A?

53:05How do you approach learning from diverse teams? I absolutely loved my last year at M &A. I've learned the most about all of the things regarding to different departments within Belgium and just in general. I learned stuff about law that I never learned before. I learned stuff about now operations, our supply chain, commercial side of things. Of course, coming from finance and accounting, that aspect was known to me. But now I can see how those processes and aspects are taken into account from a global perspective. And I am extremely excited to learn more. And there's so much more to learn for me.

53:37What's the goal? Where are you going to end up? Still considering that, to be honest. I don't have a certain position in mind. I would just love to develop more, lead people, and kind of develop more further. I know it's a very vague answer. I'm still early in my career and I'm still developing. Up and comers. I'm just trying to read you out. Yeah, absolutely. Any other takeaways or things you'd want to share with other practitioners? If you're struggling with running diligence, integration, or any other kind of processes, just make sure that it's standardized. Make sure it's documented somewhere.

54:08Make sure that it's as streamlined as possible and people are educated. I think that's one of the biggest takeaways that I learned and that I would like to pass on to others. I guess that's like the crux of making Emanate into a program, which has been the theme of this podcast. It sounds like documentation process is a big part of it, but then enablement was one thing we actually talked about. It was like, how do you get people to actually adopt, educate them about it, and then I guess be dynamic in a way they are experienced if they're new to it. So you can put that emphasis on training them new things they need to know.

54:41Yeah. During the interview with Volgang Schenk, you mentioned or you asked how does leadership motivate the team to go forward, right? To move and execute these deals in a fast environment, in a fast-paced rhythm. At least for me, and I think that's what I noticed, is that the appreciation of your work, at least for me, is the biggest and interesting motivation. Appreciating people's extra hours or extra commitment, I think that's the keys, at least that I take away with for my future leadership positions. Feeling appreciated. Exactly, yeah. I like that. You got to really appreciate your team members.

55:14And I think that's the thing that you found value that keeps you motivated as part of this team. Was there anything else in that conversation that you may have answered different? I just wanted to say that regarding AI and artificial intelligence. So during Wolfgang Scheng's interview, he was at eight when he marked how excited he was. Personally, I think I'm at 10. The adoption of artificial intelligence would be the key to progress further than to stand out from the companies, organizations that do not use capabilities for their processes. That could be either internal or external. So looking at so rapid development in this field and thinking how to use this amazing technology within M &A, extremely excited for the next maybe even two months.

55:59Nowadays, you don't know what's going to happen. GBT for O just dropped and it's groundbreaking. I agree. I'm optimistic. I know you're testing some of our new beta functionality. So I'm excited to see that progress as we continue working with your team. And develop with that regard. Yeah, we talked a little bit about the templates or as Wolfgang referenced, building out the white papers. Are there other views or ideas that you have of how AI could impact M &A? At least at the current state of AI or Gen AI development. First of all, of course, drafting different documents or drafting due diligence reports, that would be extremely useful and extremely time-saving for the team.

56:37I also mentioned a bit about redundancy of due diligence requests. Sometimes the cell side would be a bit overwhelmed with the requests from the team. And if the teams of different work streams don't really see each other's requests, sometimes because of close permissions or just because of such a big workload that the team cannot really check what other teams submitted, I think it's pretty fair. The AI would help a lot here as well to make sure that the request either has been maybe already answered or has already been submitted. Oh, so you got some real process assistance. Yeah. I think that would be extremely helpful.

57:13I like what you're thinking. Structuring integration process based on previous integrations. Yeah. But to be honest, again, this is the current capability. I don't know what's going to be in one year, which would be something out of the box that we can't think of now. It's moving fast. I agree with that. It's going to be exciting as well to see how things evolve. Ayle, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? In my limited experience, Maybe not the craziest thing at M &A, but the expectation that I had coming in of how complicated a deal could be. How many moving parts there are in one transaction.

57:48Because you read those news articles, oh, Apple bought this, Microsoft bought that. It's okay, thanks for announcing it. Your stock goes up or down depending on what people think. But then you go behind the scenes and it's just so many people, so many moving parts, so many things to consider in a such short amount of time. I think that's left impression on me. Emanate touches everything. Exactly. Oleg, thanks for taking the time to have this conversation. Absolutely. I thought we wrapped things up. I got to hijack you for a little bit more time. There you are, folks. You got both sides of the deal team.

58:20I don't know both sides of the deal team, but you got top to bottom. You got your head of corporate development to the new up-and-comer on the team. This has been a fun conversation. Again, thank you, Oleg. You've contributed just as well as Wolfgang helping me become a better M &A scientist. If you listen to this podcast, I love feedback. Find me on LinkedIn. Love to hear from you. Give feedback, topic ideas, and just want to keep improving this content. Otherwise, till next time, here's to the deal.

58:59Thank 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.

59:43Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

59:57views and opinions expressed on mna 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