Transforming Existing Staff into M&A Experts

26:30I like that, humbly disrespectful. You don't want just humble, you don't want just disrespectful. Yes, exactly. If you have one of them, it's not 50 % there. It's pretty difficult. Do you have a test or anything that really gives you that, ah, I found that person? I would do normal interviews, but actually I had a case that would run with everyone. And it told me a lot of things, not just about problem solving, but also about collaboration and style and how do you face situations where you don't have the answer. So it told me so much about people's personalities as well. And it was really useful.

27:05So I was running it with everyone I was hiring for that team. Can you give me an idea of what that case involved? The case had nothing to do with M &A, to be honest. And it was a very simple question. It was, are there two dogs in the world that have the same number of hairs in their fur? Yes or no, and why? That's funny. So what kind of answers do you get? All sorts of answers. I think out of everyone that I've interviewed, maybe one or two kind of get it and they really answer right away and those are actually not the most interesting interviews the most interesting ones are when you realize that people are like gosh how am I gonna approach this and then you take them on a journey and figure out how many dogs are there in the world what type of dogs and how many hair can there be in the fur and then you walk through that together and you give little hints and the best interviews is when somebody has absolutely no clue at the start, but they're willing to sort of go out on this journey and just listen in to the kind of advice or tips that I'm giving them along the way.

28:10And then they finally get it and they're like, I really like this case, you know, that is such an interesting... Can we role play this out? Yeah. Okay. So the question is, if you imagine all the dogs in the world, and if you could hypothetically take them all and count the number of hairs that they have in their fur at one specific point in time. Would you then be able to find two dogs that have the same number of hairs or would they all have their unique number? They'd all have their unique number. Why is that? Because the probability is very, very low given that there's so many millions of dogs and they all have, let's say, five million plus strands of hair.

28:50So let's look at those numbers. So how many dogs do you think there are in the world 50 million 50 million dogs yeah and how many hairs do you think a dog can have on its body 10 million so if you as a human being have roughly 50 to 100 000 hairs on your head how many hairs do you think a dog can have 10 million what's the surface area of a dog versus a person's head would you say varies by the size yeah i'm not getting this job am i no you're doing fine you know do you think a dog can be like thousand times a person's head no or a hundred times the person's probably a hundred we got a range ten times we got a range between ten and a hundred yeah okay if it is somewhere in that range say you got 50 people's heads on one dog on average about two and a half million hairs yeah so let's say you have two and a half million hairs on a dog and you've got 50 million dogs in the world, can they all have their unique number of hairs then?

29:54They can. And there's potentially a probability they have the same number of hairs. You don't have to find the dogs that have the same number of hairs. But if you have 50 million dogs and you have, say, two and a half million hairs on a dog, and then you take the dogs and you sort them and you say, it's the dog with one hair, the dog with two hairs, three hairs, and you just put them side by side. And then you get to two and a half million dogs. And then you continue. Then you get to three million dogs and to four million dogs. You're probably going to hit the probability that... You're probably going to hit the ceiling, are you?

30:27Yeah. So would you find two dogs that have the same number of hairs? Yes. Probably or absolutely? Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. All right. It's called the pigeonhole principle. Actually, it's a mathematical principle. If you have more pigeons, then you have pigeonholes. and some of the pigeons will need to share. I didn't get this job. I think you did well. Yeah, but I know how you're going to close it. You're like, thanks for the time. It was nice to meet you. No, no, no. It's all about how to problem solve in a collaborative way. I see people getting really stuck because they've got something in their head and they don't want to question it.

31:05But you're looking for how they explain it too. If you dug into that, okay, how'd you get to that? And that gives you a sense of how they're thinking about it. When do you get the disrespect part out of that? Yeah, you do get a lot of the humbleness part out of it. The disrespect, you're not going to get it 100 % here. Maybe. When I say something like, how many hairs is there on a dog? You're going to see if people have their own views. I could just say a number. In some cases, I would say a number. But you can see if people take it at face value or if they actually think it through and they go, okay, you gave me this.

31:42I can understand where it comes from. If they can't, they're actually going to ask about it. That gives you a good hint about the disrespect part, actually. Fair enough. I like this. I'm going to have to try this one. Hopefully nobody listening comes interviewing for a job at our company. Well, they got a head start if they do. The early deals, you used a lot of these in a consultant. Was it McKinsey? I don't know how confidential these kind of things are, but we used some of the big consultancies. Okay, fair. And that's not what I'm trying to get to. What I wanted to know is, obviously you found some gaps and thought, hey, let's use a consulting firm to fill this in.

32:14Early deals, we want some confidence in what we're doing. And obviously, a bit of CYA there. How do you work with a consulting firm to make sure you're really getting the most value out of it? I ask because a lot of clients I've worked with where they look back and they've had a lot of negative stories about not getting the ROI or value and working with a consulting firm and things like that. But you've been on both sides. You've been in the consulting firm, you've hired them. You got to give me some ideas and how to make sure that you're going to get the right value from hiring an external firm, especially a big one, because we know they don't come cheap.

32:45Yeah, no, they don't. And it's so interesting. But what's important to remember is that it's a people business. The firm's name will give you quality assurance, but the people that are on the project are the ones that are actually going to deliver. The person on top in their team is going to have a huge influence in terms of how much you can get out of the firm that you're hiring. Somebody who's really influential in their organization is going to be able to get all the best experts on board your team. So that actually plays a very big role. If you look at the big management consultancies, you're rarely going to get a poor output.

33:27But if you really want the best of the best, you've got to make sure that the person in charge of your project is important for them and they are important for their firm. That's how you're going to get the most out of it. I like this. How do I do that? Everybody talks a big game, but how do you, can you validate that this person is super well-networked in their organization? And right away, I'm thinking tenure, how long have they been in that organization for? Because if they're brand new, they probably are still the early phase of got to prove themselves versus somebody who's been there 10, 20 years.

33:57I like, how do you look at that? Tenure actually matters. You might have a more hungry person who has a lower tenure, but if you want some leverage inside their organization, you want higher tenure. So you want somebody with high tenure who actually thinks your account is really important, but also their informal standing is really important because there are people with high tenure who maybe are not great at getting the most out of their organization. So hopefully some people inside the firms and you can basically check who is this guy or girl and what is their reputation and what do they get out of it.

34:34So you do your own diligence of that person. That's one thing. The other thing is ahead of a project, you probably set up expert calls and you can tell by the number of experts that they get on board, how flexible they are to your schedule, if I'm very honest, and how well prepared they are when you talk to them. That's going to tell you a lot about how important your top person is and how hard they worked to get the best of the best to join your call to convince you. Now, also got to make sure that this is not just a sales pitch because it's common that you get people pitching for a project that are actually not going to be so involved later on.

35:17What you also want to do is make sure that the ones that impress you the most are going to be most crucial for a project. You have to get a commitment about their commitment to the project so that you don't just get all the fantastic experts for pitching the project. And then when it's delivery time, all of a sudden they got other sales pitches to do because that can also happen. Yeah. Yeah. People are just busy focused. Yeah. What you got to remember is that it's a people business on both sides. And that means that if you're nice to work with, people are going to do a better job. I'm an ex-consultant and ex-consultants come in different shapes and forms.

35:57One type of ex-consultants are the ones that want to push as much as possible to get the most out of the consultants that they hire later on. And they do stuff like they move the final presentation from a Friday to the Monday and they add a couple of additional questions to look into. And then you know that the team is going to work all weekend just to finish it off. That's a short-sighted approach, I would say. You're not going to be a very popular client. You're not going to get the best people on the project and you're not going to get the best output. You should be tough to work with. Or, you know, I wouldn't say tough, but if you've been promised something, you should make sure that you get it.

36:36You shouldn't be a pushover. But at the same time, it's just like having colleagues in a regular organization. If nobody likes to work with you, nobody likes to work with you. You're not going to get the best. If you're a great person to work with, if your company is a great company to work with, you're going to get a better result also from external consultants. Good advice. When you do retain that firm, how do you set them up for success? We talked about one of the advantages of internal folks is they got all access to information and resources. Working at this external firm, they're going to have to work with your internal team.

37:09Is there anything there that you want to get clarity on or address to set this external firm up for success? For us specifically, we teamed up all projects with internal people. We wanted the project work stream lead to always be a Unilever person. And then we basically asked the consultancy to make a bit of a mirror organization. to our organization. They wouldn't be in all the work streams or they would be in all the work streams depending on what we knew and what we didn't know and where we needed the support. But we asked them to mirror our organization and basically team up person to person so that when their report came in the end, it wasn't second guessing what we had done.

37:57It was seamlessly integrating with what we had done. And this is something we actually needed to have a bit of a discussion on because some teams that we discussed with some external teams they were used to being brought in as a stress test and basically have their own independent opinion pretty much second guessing the work that the internal team had done we never found that to be particularly productive we thought it was better to actually work together rather than siloed that doesn't mean that we didn't want to hear what they had to say but we wanted to hear it during the course of the project so So if they had a different view about the potential in supply chain synergies, for example, we didn't want to hear that during a final presentation.

38:40We wanted their supply chain lead to talk to our supply chain lead about it. And we wanted to make sure that we could bring in their input and expertise during the project. If the team aligned and integrated with your team, that they're really working together? Yeah. Did you end up with resources that were full-time part of this team doing M &A, or were they fractional? I was curious about like, how do you sort of manage fractional versus full-time resources? Yeah, we had a core team, which was full-time. And then we had what we called an extended team that were supporting us in specific projects.

39:17We rarely had people who would spend, say, 20 % of the time on an ongoing basis. It was more project-based. And to be honest, a lot of people would do their day jobs and they would support us on top. But we had a mix of the both models. This is a challenge. I talk to a lot of companies and this is a tough thing, especially sometimes what sets precedence. Is it more important to work on the M &A project versus you're working on the day-to-day? The other element is burnout. How are you managing that? For the part-time resources, that's why we called it Coalition of the Willing. So we would only bring in people who would actually want to do this.

39:56And they were really passionate about the area. They were passionate about the work. they really loved it, they would make it happen, not from tactical career perspective, but rather because it was their passion and they wanted to follow their passion. The burnout, whenever you work on M &A, it's a real topic because it's very high-paced, intense work. And when you have a process ongoing, you don't have a lot of influence about when things happen or how much time you have or whatever. To me, that was a really important topic specifically for the full-time resources we had. And we did a few things, some structural things.

40:34For example, we made sure that you didn't run due diligence after due diligence. Ideally, you would work on a strategy project. You would do a long list of targets. You would identify one of those targets, start discussions with them, do the pre-DD, the DD, the transaction, and then you would lead the integration work. And that's really the end to end that we went to a few times. Obviously, you don't buy every company that you diligence, but we made sure was that if you had just been through a big due diligence, you would not jump into leading the next. And that was a really important structural principle that we had.

41:10And in addition, what we did more operationally was that we had stand-ups on a weekly and daily basis, 15 minutes every morning and every week was half an hour. And it was my team, but it wasn't for me, it was for the team members. So we had the most junior person on the team would moderate it and it may seem very boring, but we didn't talk any content. We only talked process in those meetings and everybody went through, these are my priorities. This is what I'm going to do. A lot of the time they would find synergies between their different pieces of work. They would realize that somebody else was working on a similar thing.

41:46Or when somebody said, I'm really struggling figuring this out. Somebody else would say, look, we actually did this in a project way back and this is the person who led it. So it led to a lot of knowledge sharing, but it also led to reprioritizations and reshuffling of work. So we would always ask who's got a lot on their plate, who's got a little on their plate. And the team very independently would reshuffle the work between themselves. I listened in, but I would rarely get involved. there was more when everybody had too much on their plate and reshuffling didn't help, then I could support them in reprioritizing all the things that we had on our plate.

42:24I love standoffs. I like how you highlighted the value of them because when you have everybody giving these quick updates on what they've done, what they're going to do, you identify the synergies and the work that they're doing. I think dependencies also come up. We always talk about that. It's so much work to map these dependencies. But if you're talking about it and everybody's pretty clear what they're working on, they figure out those dependencies. And then you made a good point of prioritization. I haven't even thought about that. You'll quickly know where you need to address prioritization.

42:51Also, my experience is that you'll find where you do need to have meetings. Instead of creating a bunch of structured meetings, you identify it's okay. You two need to go talk about that and figure it out. So love that you're using stand-ups on the daily and weekly basis. The end-to-end part. Tell me about that. You have team members that are running through the whole process. They're doing the diligence and then they're running the integration. Yes, that's right. And that's one of the core principles of programmatic M &A. You used that term earlier. Let's break down programmatic M &A. Overall and on average, M &A does not create value, unfortunately.

43:22I think most of the research will show that. And the approach within M &A that actually consistently creates value is programmatic M &A. I find three key principles really important. One is that M &A is more than a transaction. It's actually an end-to-end process. It starts with a strategy. It leads all the way to integration. Another principle is that M &A is a capability and it's not a one-off event. You have to build this capability within the organization. You have to build it like a machine. And it's both a personal capability, but also an organizational capability. And the third principle is that there is no such thing as a must-win deal.

44:02When you fall in love with a deal, that's where you're going to make bad business decisions. Just because you love a brand doesn't mean you should own the company. And just because a company is fantastic, you shouldn't buy it if the price isn't right. But you really need to make sure that you have a big funnel of great companies so that you don't feel too dependent on closing every single deal that you're working on. So those are the three principles. And you were asking about the integration and the end-to-end approach to M &A. So one of the things that I've found that is really tricky within M &A is when you do the transaction, you have a bunch of people who might want to do the transaction a little bit too much.

44:41Yeah, it could be because it's their job to do transactions. But the risk is that if you're only responsible for the transaction, you're not going to think it's so serious or bad if it doesn't land 100 % right. But if you're also responsible for the integration, you're never going to take on board a company that you don't want to integrate or capture the synergies from and really bring on board. What I've seen is that when you have a cut between the ones who do the transaction and the ones who do the integration, the ones who do the integration are going to look at the business case and their first reaction is going to be like, oh, this is bullish.

45:18And then they're going to start by renegotiating the business case. And already there, you've lost a lot of value. If you are, as a work stream lead or as a project lead, if you're also responsible for capturing the value that you identify, you're going to be pretty realistic about how much value is there. And if you've done the business case, you're not going to start by renegotiating it. You're going to go and make it happen. That's why it's so important that it doesn't end with a transaction, but it also doesn't start with the transaction because what I've seen otherwise is that there is a big risk if you don't connect strategy to M &A, you're going to look for the wrong type of targets.

45:58You have to really own the strategy and develop the strategy so that you can find the right companies to approach and do the right type of considerations when you're evaluating them. The golden piece of advice in the whole interview. I've done a lot of these interviews. I think this is probably the key. I've seen where you have separate teams. They're disconnected with what you described. They start renegotiating the whole investment thesis because they look at it as too unrealistic. but it sounds like here, you're really bringing people along the whole journey and giving them accountability for end results.

46:32And to recap, when we said programmatic M &A, the driving principles of it is the end-to-end process so that it goes all the way from strategy through integration and then the capability of M &A that it's just not a one-off event. You're actually building M &A as a capability of the organization and that there's no must-have deals. You can't fall in love with the deal. Try to get it done by all means. You should have a robust funnel and do the stuff that truly makes sense for the organization. Absolutely. I love it. I think that's really the big practice. If organizations aren't following, that's the big thing that they're really missing out on.

47:04I published a book a couple of years ago. It's like the whole thesis of it was you got to connect your diligence integration together. I wonder what was the Christmas gift to all the members of my team. Your book. Did you? Really? Yes. I gave it to everyone on my team. Oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. I'm flattered. I didn't know that. We learned from you. Oh, wow. Wow. Those listening, that was Agile M &A that we published in 2020. I'm flattered. I didn't know that. I'm surprised. Thank you. You shouldn't be so surprised. It was very useful. We should thank you. We built a two billion business off the back of it.

47:38So well done. We published it in 2020 and COVID happens right after I publish it. I was like, I don't know if anybody's going to read this. Yeah, we certainly did. Wow. That's really cool. That sounds like really aligned with the whole philosophy that you executed on this and had a lot of great success. The 2 billion, how many deals did you end up doing? And it sounds like the platform's still growing. Yeah, no, half a dozen. Although the billions, there is quite a bunch of organic growth. We really bought fast growth businesses that continued to grow after they came on board and some of them even accelerated.

48:09So it's been good. Maybe this is almost like a sidebar question. This is something I've been thinking of because I'm CEO of a company that's up and coming. It's a high growth company with about 50 employees. I always think about M &A. I spend all this time learning about M &A. I've done M &A. It's been about 10 years since I've touched a deal. I'm dying to do deals. I'm waiting for the opportunity for this organization to become acquisitive, build an M &A capability. But right now, we have so much organic growth. And I'm always looking at this as a trade-off that if we start doing deals now, it's going to be a big distraction because you're still a small team.

48:44You're still striving for the right resources and filling it out. that a lot of these opportunities, I'm writing them down because I know how much it's going to take a bite out of the focus on their organic growth. I'm curious, just from your perspective, how do you think about that or put considerations? Or maybe it is too early and I do need to let the company mature a little bit to let organic growth is under control and predictable and then start thinking about it. In a people-based business, as you are, you say you're 50 people now, that's the worst hurdle to overcome. So if you're able to overcome it, that is a big win in itself.

49:21Because what happens around 50 people is that up until that point, everybody can have a view of everything and everybody can be involved in everything and really feel like they got ownership for the whole company. All of your employees, I bet they feel that. What happens when you go above 50 is that it's not possible anymore. and it becomes extremely painful for a lot of people because all of a sudden they don't feel as important. They don't feel as valued. It's not true, but they feel like the business has run away from them. So from a mindset point of view, breaking through the 50 barrier is the most difficult thing you can do as a people-based business.

50:02Once you're through it and you say you got fantastic growth, so maybe you're on a good path to actually break through it. But once you've done that, you've done the most difficult thing. I would say probably while you're in the process of doing the most difficult thing you can imagine in a people-based business, maybe don't load a lot of other things on top. However, if you find it hard to break through, sometimes it's just good to load on. Keep growing organically, inorganically, do everything just to get sufficiently high above 50 because then the continued growth is going to be easier. That gives some good things to think about because I restructured the management team second half last year.

50:45Now we got a full deck, new COO in place, all the depart functions reporting up to the COO. And you can just tell it's going to be the next year is going to be a lot of getting bearings in order and getting a lot of internal organizational shift through each department as they continue to build for scale. So maybe you got a good point there. Just need to hang on for a little longer until you really sense that the team's ready for those kind of special projects. Yeah, let's see. I hope you get through the 50. It sounds like you're set up in a good way for it. Fingers crossed. Yeah, we probably shouldn't refer to M &A as special projects, by the way.

51:18I heard that's a no. Yeah, it's a capability, right? Yeah, exactly. Given that, you know, programmatic M &A, a lot of it drives the ability to execute integration, which ultimately is the capturing of value. That's the most important part of the deal. You either lose value if you don't integrate properly or you're going to create value if you do it properly. How do you execute integration? Have your team really focused to do it well? We started with the organization, really. And if you're leading a due diligence in my team and we acquired a company, you're also the project leader for the onboarding or integration.

51:58And the timeline we set for that was 100 days. So for the first 100 days after closing, you are in the lead of realizing the value creation plan that you created really during the due diligence. From a work stream point of view, if you lead a work stream before the transaction, you're also leading the work stream after the transaction. So you're responsible for putting the contingency plan to life. For example, we had a lot of them for regulatory. I mean, it's a heavily regulated space we were in. Often young businesses that we acquired, so it was often a lot to do on regulatory. So during the due diligence, you would do your regulatory plan, you would put all the contingencies in place, you would make sure that you requested the type of budget that you would need to make it happen.

52:45And then after the transaction was done, you were also in charge of doing it together with the target company and getting them on board with your thinking and presenting to them why it was important to do it like that and then making sure that it actually happened. So that was for the first 100 days after the transaction for everyone who was involved in the pre-deal work. It goes back to holding them accountable. You created this plan during diligence. You're responsible to execute it close-close. Yeah. You use this term smart collaboration in the future. What does that mean? We did not want to do a hard integration of the businesses that we acquired.

53:24We didn't just acquire brands, we acquired businesses and we acquired their business models. So we wanted them to continue to have them. That means you can't do a hard integration into Unilever as a whole. On the other hand, we also said we're not a financial owner. So we're not going to be the best owner if we just hold the companies and give them financial targets, for example. In order to create value, we actually need to capture some synergies. What we did was that we saw that the best platform that we built was actually out of companies that were sharing some base and fundamental characteristics, but they also had their own unique strengths.

54:03That meant that the businesses we took on board, you look at them, it's Oli, Smarty Pants, it's Nutrafol, it's Onnit, it's Liquid IV, it's Welly. They were all very unique, but they had touch points. For example, Ollie and Smarty Pants are both gummy brands. So it makes a lot of sense for them to collaborate around gummies. Whereas Liquid IV and Smarty Pants, they were selling a lot through Costco. It makes sense to collaborate on the customer side there. Like that, we found areas that gave opportunity for a lot of synergy capture, but they did not cover all the businesses. So instead of trying to find the least common denominator or force fit everyone into a cookie cutter approach, we basically said, let the companies collaborate on the areas that make sense for them.

54:55Of course, we're going to moderate it, but we're not going to force anyone into synergy capture in an area where there are no synergies. And that's basically what we labeled as smart collaboration for the future. How much of that do you figure out pre-close versus post-close? Most of it pre-close. Okay. You're really getting in the weeds and thinking through how these companies would potentially collaborate together. Yes. And then you hope that it's going to work out. And I would say 90 % of the cases, it actually did. So you get a lot of value on this end-to-end, having the folks do the diligence because they're getting all this information.

55:31They're really thinking through collaboration opportunities, how they're going to integrate, what they're going to integrate, all those things while they're doing diligence. And then they're accountable to go execute on it. Does that happen naturally? Like you just put the people in there early and they just automatically figure this out? Or are there things that you're really paying attention to make sure certain things happen to give that assurance that integration is going to go well? If you look at M &A and you include the end-to-end process, it is a fairly complex capability. So I actually took a leaf out of McKinsey's book from my time there, how you teach people complex capabilities.

56:06This one is not just a skill and it's not something you can learn in a book. It's a lot about behaviors and mindsets and leadership, as well as skills. We built a whole on-the-job program where we had a train-the-trainer approach. And you start by supporting in a work stream and you end up being the guru who is training new project leaders. We did that sort of from a capability building point of view, but we also did a lot of knowledge sharing. So after every project, whether it was a deal coming out of it or not, and I would say 100 % of the time, that was actually the team's decision. If there was a company we wanted to acquire, we acquired actually 100 % of them.

56:51Everything we didn't acquire, the team stopped. Nobody else. All the projects that ended, they were seen as heroes. They would present to everybody else who had been involved the learnings from this project, the rationale for why we didn't go ahead. What were the learnings, not just insights and skill-wise and knowledge-wise, but also methodology-wise. We had a lot of feedback loops throughout the entire process to make sure that we didn't have to reinvent the wheel. we also made sure that we celebrated everything that people did that were in line with our strategy. If you decided not to pursue a company, we celebrated that.

57:32If you decided that we should pursue a company, we would celebrate that. If you delivered on the value creation plan that you had put in place, that was a big celebration. We really wanted to showcase everything that people did well all the time. And that was a very powerful feedback loop, actually. I actually like that a lot. There's always a deal retrospectives. But you're even going beyond that because you're taking deals that you didn't do, saying whatever the lessons learned and really emphasizing that. Building this model of continuous learning sounds like it became part of that DNA. Yeah, it did.

58:09It did, actually. Celebrating the losses, too. I wouldn't say losses. You walk away from a bad deal is probably the best decision. Exactly. Exactly. No deal is better than a bad deal. Good way to put it. Brigitte, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? I've seen a lot of fantastic entrepreneurs that have surprised me. But I think the funniest thing was probably something that happened inside our company. So we had an intern on the team. We were pretty creative with getting people on board, especially before we had a formal team. So we had an intern, a guy who was from university. This was his first experience of the corporate world.

58:43We asked him to put together some bios. So founders of companies that we were in the process of shortlisting and gave him a format. And he sat down and he worked away. And after that, we had a team meeting and everybody was going to present their findings. And when it came to his turn, he just looked at us and he was like, I don't know how to tell you this, guys, but these founders, they've made questionable animal experiments. They've been caught by the police. They were involved with this very, very weird organization. there were some question marks about the death of a relative to one of them so he had all these really like red flags in terms of this obviously a company we could not pursue because imagine what would happen to trying to explain this to the investors why you bought a company from people who were clearly not displaying the same type of values that we wanted to represent but he had made such a beautiful presentation out of it you know you'd really used to format the template and He had made a beautiful PowerPoints.

59:45All the data were there. All the sources were there. It was so nice. So in the next meeting with the CFO, we actually brought these and we said, this is one of the companies that is very high on our agenda. And he started reading it and we presented it. And it was quite a while until we didn't manage to keep a straight face anymore. But we had a really, really good time going through that list together with him. He had a good sense of humor. That's funny. That's the best part of the day. You got to keep a sense of humor. and kudos to the intern for digging all that up. He did a fantastic job, yeah.

1:00:18Very funny. I love it. This has been great. Thank you so much for the conversation with me today. I learned a lot. You've helped me become a better M &A scientist and we're going to go skiing. Yes, we will. It's fantastic weather on the slopes so looking forward to that and thank you for coming all the way to chat about M &A. I really enjoyed it. Those of you still with us, thank you for sticking through. Till next time, Here's to the deal.

1:01:11And 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. Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

1:01:53Views 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.