Rhythm Blog | Mergers & Acquisitions

An acquaintance of mine has recently undergone a merger at her corporation. As a mid-level employee, she knew it was coming; her company had announced a few months ago, but she hadn't heard any specific details other than it was going to happen.

When the time came for the companies to merge, there was confusion, misalignment, and miscommunication. Unfortunately when merging companies, often preparing employees for coming change has been left off the agenda or is an afterthought.  Trust me that it is just as important, if not more so, to make the teams are prepared for the merger as it is to worry about day to day operations.

You just completed an acquisition in business, time to celebrate and break out the champagne. For some companies, acquiring businesses is their top growth strategy. Unfortunately for most companies, acquisitions fail to meet their objectives in the first year if at all. This can also be one of the most difficult ways to grow your business. That said, failure is not imminent if you do the right things to make the acquisition a success. One of these things is to focus on integrating the culture of the new company with the mothership. It sounds easy and straightforward, although integrating cultures is one of the biggest challenges and failure points after an acquisition. It takes a lot of time and effort to do it right. This is one reason that you should do your best to acquire companies that have good alignment with your Core Purpose and Core Values already to make the merger integration of the target company happen more smoothly.

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From a leadership perspective, there’s a real thirst for increasing leadership accountability. Executives have recently asked me various questions that linger over the concept of building team accountability to help them achieve their strategic plans while creating high performing teams:

“How do I build accountability in teams?”

“What else can I do to get people to do what we need them to do?”

“How can I hold a team member to be held accountable and still be seen as a good leader?”

"How do I balance leadership accountability and personal accountability when building a team?"

Building team accountability requires that we understand a few dynamics because it’s more complicated than we might recognize.  It goes above and beyond the responsibility for the outcomes, which is obviously important, but effective leaders know that they need a culture of accountability in their teams that provide the inputs needed to achieve the expected team performance.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are not for the faint of heart. Any CEO who has navigated those waters will tell you it is a tremendous challenge to blend cultures, systems, processes and teams successfully. The statistic is 70-90% of M&A's fail -- that's a scary number! Instead of focusing on that metric, let's talk about numbers we should be measuring around M&A.

Every acquisition deal starts with an incredible amount of due diligence. Are the cultures and values compatible? Do the product lines and customer bases support each other? Do the numbers work and take us down a path of growth? Ultimately, if the deal goes through, benefits have been seen by both parties. Now, it's up to the newly-merged company to both preserve the current value of the organization and meet growth projections. It's a delicate balance.  

In working with many leading mid-market CEOs and their executive leadership teams on their growth strategies, I often ask these leaders what keeps them up at night. It turns out the answer is less varied and simpler than you might think. While they all say it a little differently, the answer almost always boils down to a variation of “How can I execute my strategic plan?” Turns out CEOs know that making plans is easy while executing them is hard. I’ve included the most common four questions I hear.

Most Companies Fail Due to Poor Strategy Execution

As a fan of Blue Ocean strategy, you already know how important it is to have the right strategy. But, a great strategy executed poorly produces lackluster results and missed targets. Unfortunately, most companies and top executives focus their efforts on developing a strong strategy but spend very little time converting those strategies into “execution ready” plans that clearly define the actual work team members need to do to bring the 3-5 year strategic plan to fruition.

Here at Rhythm Systems, we are very blessed to have almost 10,000 blog subscribers, 10+ regular contributors, and many amazing readers who comment on our posts (both online and in-person when we are lucky enough to see them). We started blogging back in 2011 before it seemed like everyone and their mother had a blog, and we’ve learned an awful lot and put a ton of time into delivering great content to you, our readers, over the last seven years. In fact, we recently tallied up the hours our team spends on creating, editing, optimizing, and publishing content for this blog, and it was about 385 hours in 2018. We appreciate all of you who read and enjoy the fruits of our hard work.

At our annual Rhythm Systems Breakthrough Conference in Charlotte this year, we had the opportunity to survey our audience of over 150 mid-market executives and ask the question, “What are the top 8 business challenges for mid-market companies?” The term “mid-market” refers to the size of a company based on its annual revenue, usually between $10 - $500 million. It may seem like a big swing to go from $10 million to $500 million, but not so big when you consider that only 3% of all companies ever make it past the $10 million mark.

So many Rhythm companies start off as what we consider “simple” companies. They are experiencing steady, but not explosive growth. They might only have the executive team using Rhythm. Some have a relatively flat structure with few locations and departments.