Mergers and Acquisitions

The challenge...

There are many reasons why Mergers and Acquisitions are challenging for your business. The challenges change if you are selling or buying a business but no-one wants to make a mistake when making a purchase, so M&A projects can be stressful for businesses even if they have been through the process before.

Reasons why M&A projects fail

There are numerous reasons why an M&A project can fail (all of them avoidable with the right experience), they often fall into one of the following categories:

  • Lack of strategic alignment and planning, including:
    • Mismatch in culture
    • Over estimating synergies
    • Following a competitor's approach
    • Misunderstanding the purchase
  • Lack of accurate data and information, including:
    • Inaccurate cost/saving estimates
    • Inaccurate cost of implementation
  • Inability to implement required changes, including:
    • Lack of IT/Business alignment
    • Lack of integration project expertise or experience
    • Lack of data migration strategy and/or knowledge
  • Lack of communication, including:
    • Misunderstanding of M&A purpose/strategy
    • Loss of key staff
    • Ineffecient implementation process

Fifth Step resources

How Fifth Step helps

At Fifth Step we have been helping clients prepare for sale or get ready to buy another business for over 10 years, with many of our management and consultants having been involved in this aspect of business prior to joining Fifth Step.

The importance of a structured approach

Communication is one of the key reasons that M&A projects fail, one of the major contributing factors to this breakdown in communication is the inability for different parts of the team to understand their part in the process and how the part they play interacts with the parts that other department and people are playing.

Our M&A Framework provides not only a structured approach to mergers and acquisitions, it provides a common vocabulary allowing teams to communicate progress and issues in a clear way, using a risk-based approach and language where needed and appropriate. Our framework has been used and tested in many different situations, by large companies making a significant financial investment to the smaller companies making their first move into strategic growth.

Working together

Combining your passion with our experience and expertise is a winning combination allowing the seemingly impossible to become a reality.

Getting in contact

Speak with one of our executive consultants now about how we can start working together - Click here for contact details