Build a Career in M&A: Lessons from Intel’s Todd Manley

Today's episode is sponsored by Dealroom, the M& A platform for teams running buyer led M and A. If you've ever spent a Friday chasing five people to complete diligence tasks or watched integration timelines slip while everyone blames someone else, this is for you. Deal Room helps you stop herding cats and start aligning your team. You get project management built into the Deal Room with features like real time tagging, stakeholder alerts, task dependencies, and custom reporting. That means everyone knows what they're responsible for, when it's due, and what's holding things up. On top of that Deal Room customers hit their integration timelines 90% of the time. When integration stays on track, cash flows unlock faster, CFO is happier. Learn more@dealroom.net or click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the episode I'm Kisan Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies, and what actually happened during MA deals. Hello and welcome to the M and A Science Podcast. This podcast is part of a mission to rethink how M and A is done. The old school Settle that approach. It's dead fire led. M and A is all about strategy, alignment and efficiency, putting value creation at the center of every deal. And let's be real, it's not just about closing the deal, it's about making it successful. We uncover what truly works in M and A by learning directly from the best. I'm your host, Kisan Patel, founder and CEO at Deal Room and Chief Scientist at M and A Science. Today I'm sitting down with Todd Manley, VP of Corporate Development Integration at Intel. If you're not familiar with intel, they're an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. They design, manufacture and sell computer components such as CPUs and related products for business and consumer markets traded on NASDAQ under intc. Todd's been in the M and A game for a long time, but what really stands out about him is how much he's learned and shared along the way. He didn't take the traditional path into corp dev. That's exactly what we're diving into today, how people from all kinds of backgrounds finance, legal ops, you name it can break into M and A and actually thrive. We'll also get into some tips for interviewing both as a candidate and hiring manager and how to build a strong network in the M and A world. Todd, how you doing?

I'm good man. We're finally doing this.

You know, that was the first thing I was going to make a point of. Probably the first lesson of this podcast is persistence trumps everything.

That's how you get good deals done. You persist. We first started talking, oh, it feels like five, six shots.

Five, six years ago.

Yeah. Over the years, like you've interviewed people in my network, people I know there was one point where Jim Buckley was talking and maybe it was more of a like a live webcast or something. And I'm getting on and I'm like chatting in, hey Jim, mention this or mention that and then next thing you know, like we got this three way tangential conversation happening on the side which might have lost a few people, but it was fun in the moment. Come up for a little air. Had a lot of work here at intel doing a divestiture and a spin out of our Altera business. It's one of Those stories where 10 years ago Altera came into the intel family and we strategically looked at what the portfolio was and made the choice, you know, divesting, that bringing in an outside investor to help it grow was going to be the right decision to make. So yeah, I didn't mean to be a bad friend for the last two years, but I was pretty heads down.

I understand. I forgive you. You know, after what, maybe 15, 20 requests to come on the podcast, we finally got you here live in the Bay Area at Intel. This is Global headquarters.

This is the Global Headquarters.

World headquarters for Intel.

Exactly.

Can we start with your background? How'd you find your way into M and A?

My journey in M and A was interesting. I came down to the Bay Area, grew up in the Northwest, came down this way and played basketball at Stanford. Can't tell how tall I am from sitting down, which is perfectly fine, but Kisan can share that. I banged my knees in the bottom of the table, which didn't feel very good, but came down here and it was just thoroughly entranced by tech. In my studies I did not have the computer science chops to be someone who's just going to dive straight into tech. But there was an aspect that really intrigued me. I actually was a sociology major with a focus on organizational studies and behavior. The interesting play on that was a lot of those professors actually taught at the business school and so I was like a way to get some aspect of a business flavored education. Even though Stanford was a and is continues to be a liberal arts school outside of like the technical stuff that they teach coming out of Stanford and playing basketball. Didn't try to go play professionally anywhere else. I reached my ceiling and I was happy about that, but wanted to go back up to the Northwest. I was from Portland, thought Nike would be a good fit. Happened that it didn't work out there, came back down this way, crashed on some couches, ended up taking my first opportunity with a IT consulting company. If anyone remembers the old name EDS Electronic Data Systems, funny enough, precursor, maybe some foreshadowing on M and A. They were acquired and became HP or what now is hpe became their service arm, their consulting arm came into their program and joked to the hiring manager, I said what about my background makes you think I'm going to be a good fit for your organization? And they said we've got the software engineer development program and we look to bring people in with diverse backgrounds and you've shown some proficiency in being tech curious. You've done some web programming, this is back in like 1995 and just some HTML, some JavaScript, what have you. And they're like we can teach you everything you need to know. What would you like to focus on? I knew I always wanted to go back to business school and the young 22 year old just said I'd like to focus on business applications and understand technology that actually helps businesses do their business. Promptly got put into doing ERP work. All things under the sun Oracle. So I got trained up on being a programmer, a dba, a sysadmin, an implementer, you name it. I started out in kind of the order management vertical and then spread my wings a little bit upstream into CRM, downstream into financials, a little bit to the left into HR and HR analytics, business reporting and all that. That was my first 10 years of my career was I was really deep into IT and business applications and at one point thought hey, maybe I'll be a cio. But what was interesting during that whole time I still had this closet passion around startups, VC community, private equity, M and A acquisitions, divestitures, you name that whole thing. But I was like I I don't have an immediate skillset that plugs into what would be the standard that everyone thought gets you into high flying startups. Or I'm the product guy that's got this great idea and I'm going to build it from zero to a billion. I knew I wasn't that guy. I always joked to my wife that I'm kind of like the Series C, Series D come in when they need to prop up the business and put a little more Structure and formality. And funny enough, I did find myself joining WebEx way back in the day. I joined them about four months before they went public. And it was right as the dot com crash was happening. We were one of the last companies that kind of got out the door. It was a fun ride helping to build that business. You could play Monday morning quarterback and go. We were doing things that were in the cloud before the cloud was the cloud. The product had moved from being a hosted kind of client server model that delivered web conferencing capabilities to a solution that was actually hosted in dedicated data centers where customers would go into their WebEx product just via the browser. It was pretty cutting edge back then and a precursor to a lot of things. And it's been really interesting that you hear about these different transformational startups that have spun off different founders or inventions or leaders or what have you. When people talk about PayPal mafia and the PayPal leaders that have moved on from their early beginnings there. I truly think that one of the underappreciated stories is some of the leaders that came out of WebEx. You had the subscription company Zora come out of that, they had gone public, they're now under private equity ownership. You had some strong engineering leadership with the folks that started Zoom, more of the common tools that we see now. There was a strong proliferation of talent, people that did some amazing things back then and have continued to do that going forward. And during that time I, I found an opportunity for my wife to join a different startup. I kind of used the extended reach of the family to be on the front lines of what was my closet passion. And I wasn't on the front lines of doing M and A. Enjoyed the time there, moved on to a different startup and then eventually landed at Cisco. It was when I was at Cisco, I'd been there for about a year, they actually went out and acquired WebEx. I remember the day that the deal happened. We were doing skip level leadership conversations. I was like a senior program manager and a bunch of my peers came in and there was a VP who was facilitating this leadership conversation. So we sit in a big room like this and he goes, hey, big news, we're acquiring WebEx. And at that point Cisco had been averaging, I don't know, eight to 10 deals a year, typically a little more tech talent, tuck in kind of stuff, nothing super big. This was actually a second largest transaction they had done in 2005. They did scientific Atlanta, which was some set top boxes for like cable technology, television, what have you and then WebEx was like 2006. So the second big one, you know, these big ones, everyone in the room's a little fired up, excited. And people had used WebEx. So this was one where it was like, we know what it is, we've used it. Okay? Now it's going to be ours. The VP goes around the table getting everyone's opinion. I'm the last person to give the opinion. I was still relatively new in the organization and no one really knew my background. I got on the proverbial soapbox and I said, it's a good acquisition. I should have been done probably nine to 12 months ago. It was unfortunate that Cisco bought the number. It was like the number three or the number four player in the market 12 months earlier. That was the wrong acquisition to go do. They should have gone after the market leader, which they finally did. But they probably had to pay a premium. Everyone's looking at me like, how does this guy know so much about the inner workings of WebEx? Now, no one knew that I'd worked there. As I'm talking, I'm figuring out, okay, what's my punchline? So I say my piece and I go, oh, and by the way, I worked there for four years. So then you see this kind of relief in the room go, oh, okay. But what got me into M and A was the conversation that happened after that leadership skip level meeting. I walk out of the room, VP pulls me aside and says, hey, sounds like you know a lot about WebEx. I go, yeah, I still have a lot of friends that are over there and still stay in touch. Small valley. He goes, look, we got our integration team going over there next week. If you're open to it, I can get you in touch with the IT director who runs the team. He might really be valuable in seeing if there's some percent of your time that you can carve off and just go work with them. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. In the moment. I was excited about just the opportunity to be part of it. I remember walking down the hallway going, oh, man, this could be like kind of the opportunity of my career to pivot out of doing just strictly IT work and taking that background and saying, how do I apply it into some aspect that is M and A related? I landed into doing IT integration work, and that's where I first cut my teeth over 20 years ago. It was interesting being part of a organization that was doing so many deals, had a vast number of experts across all parts of their business. And it was A well oiled machine. We can look back and play Monday morning quarterback on whether deals were successful, whether they hit the value that people, people were trying to do. And I'd say there was always learnings from every deal. Some of the bigger deals were a little more difficult because the organizations and the way that we worked really tuned to the small things and churning through them real quick. But it was an environment where I had a ton of growth. I saw a lot of different ways of how things were working. And it was there when I saw that there was probably an opportunity somewhere in my future to continue to grow, to try to bridge the divide or the gap. That was evident when I first started. That was around doing the deal and then the integration guys doing the integration work. And I'd say as a practice. And you've had other presenters talk about this and I'm excited to talk to you today. Cause we're going to talk on some topics that are different than when we first reached out and we were talking about, you know, how do we get an integration management office up and running? What are some of the things that need to be there? There's a lot of best practices that as practitioners we've been open with each other, we've shared. It's like there's no secret sauce. I get a lot of joy out of seeing other people do this work well, whether it's a friend at a competing chip company or someone at a software company, if they're going to do a deal, one, I commiserate because I know it's a lot of work and two, I really hope that they do it well. It's great when practitioners get together and we commiserate, we share what works, what didn't work. This was a thought that started to come together way back in like 2007, 2008 was there were some instances where deals would get done and the proverbial deal's done. Let's throw it over the fence to the integration guys. And we'd be on the other side of the fence, just okay, are we going to catch it? Where's it going to land? When you talk to people who are trying to hold themselves to best practice standards, they're really trying to narrow that gap. How the deal needs to get done, how the acquisition needs to be a natural kind of flow out of that deal and not having some sort of chasm in between where there's your ripe for delays or misinformation or just a lack of knowledge. Being on that continuum of progressing the work forward for Me, I actually then pivoted to a couple other roles. I left Cisco, got into consulting. My actual goal was to. I wanted to be a one man shop and be able to do both deals and integration. I applaud anyone who is doing both today. I did it for a while and I realize how hard it is. Not only are you burning the candle on both ends on the deal, you're also having to partition part of your brain to start thinking about, okay, how's this all going to come together integration wise and long term, how the business is going to run. If you are in that seat, people can reach out to me. I'm happy to commiserate on LinkedIn and share any insights that I have, but it feels like you've run a marathon just to get the deal done. And oh, by the way, it's a one way marathon. So you ran 26 miles in one direction. Now you signed the deal. Okay, the deal's closed. Now you got to run 26 miles back home, which is, let's get the integration done. It's just a large body of work. There's different skill sets that thrive in different areas. And I knew that there were blind spots or areas of weakness that I had in being a deal lead, not having investment banking background. And that's where I leaned more heavily on experts who had deeper expertise in certain areas than I did. I enjoyed it, but I also recognized that it probably would have taken some years off my life if I continue to do that. I've continued to focus on integration work and if there's spare time that I can apply my skillset to, I find myself getting pulled into a lot of broad, cross enterprise level kind of transformational programs. There's a lot of transferability of skillset of what we see in integration and some aspects of deal work that can be applied and show up real well. When you're looking at big, large programs that require cross functional coordination across a lot of different people and organizations, high criticality of you got to hit this and here's what we're trying to accomplish. And I've thoroughly enjoyed the career. I love doing it. There's aspects of acquisitions which are fun. There's aspects of divestitures which are a completely different beast. Anyone who says that they're the same as acquisitions, don't believe them. They definitely are harder. You're trying to extract a business, trying to have it land. If you're landing with a strategic, you've got certain aspects where there's a landing zone for it to go with People, the operations business process have you, if you're landing it with financial buyer, then you've got a different set of problems that you got to solve for which is standing up. Certain aspects of how the business is running, they are different, timelines are different, some of the headwinds that you hit are going to be different. But in totality, when you step back and you look at what do you get to do when you are doing M and A work, wouldn't change it for the world. Love it.

Just on the career. You mentioned going from Cisco Consulting. Not to just drop some logos and names here, but I know you've had run at Symantec, Marvel Intel. Am I missing anybody else?

The interesting one was from consulting. I went to a small cybersecurity company that was private equity owned. It was Bluecoat Systems. And what was interesting with Bluecoat was we were acquired by Symantec. And as a practitioner, you, when you're doing acquisitions, if you've got that rapport with people you're acquiring, you'll hear the inside baseball of some of the headwinds and the difficulties that they had as they came on board. It was really informative for me to sit in that seat and myself being acquired. And this was after doing this kind of work for 10 years. I was like, okay, now the tables have been churned. I'm actually going through an experience where I'm being acquired. I did not make the choice of who acquired me. What's this change journey feel like? It was interesting to almost feel like I had the in body experience of being, being present in the moment of how that was happening and then that kind of out of body of what might have been a misstep or something that bothered me. Oh my, I've done that to people. Okay, I'm learning from that. That was really important to go through that so I can with authenticity be able to talk with people. I remember I joined Marvell. The week I joined, we were actually closing a deal and I remember we closed the deal and I was up front of probably 50 engineers. I said, I'm on the same journey as you for a couple of reasons. One, I just joined Marvell and you just joined Marvell. Two, I've been acquired and I know what you're going through. And I wanted to let them know that I had empathy for what was going on. And it was one of those situations where it was kind of like when I said it, you could just see this reaction in the room, like a, ah, I get it. He's been through this too. That was important for that audience to understand that I'd gone through an experience like this before.

This is quite the story. Starting off from Stanford basketball sociology, going to consulting, ending up in a whole series of IT roles at Oracle.

Well, it wasn't at Oracle doing Oracle work for different companies. So I was doing Oracle ERP implementations at when I was doing consulting Hitachi Data Systems, then when I was full time over at WebEx, then another small startup, then also doing Oracle work at Cisco. So it was very IT focused the first 10 years.

Bunch of IT roles related to Oracle. And then you start a bug and you ended up at WebEx. And then from WebEx you went to Cisco where you got first exposure to M and aquiring, acquiring WebEx.

Yeah.

And then from there moving into consulting. That got you to Bluecoat, another startup and being on the receiving side, then to Symantec and then Marvell and then now Intel.

The one thing I didn't mention was I had a brief stint at HP as it was going through the split. I remember coming into the organization and plans had been announced that they were going to split the company into HP Enterprise and HP Inc. And that was interesting to land into, partly just because of the sheer magnitude of the size of the company and the amount of change it was going to go through and splitting itself apart and then trying to come in and do integrations and deals knowing that there was just so much change in the air. It was unique to see how that played out. I wasn't there to see it get to the finish line. It was super informative to give me some points of view that have informed me in how I look at certain aspects of divestitures, just the amount of change that people in the business go through and just some aspects of how difficult that can be.

What in your background, even starting from basketball till now, that you really felt has attributed to your success and just the skills that you apply today?

I'm a big team player. I really grew out of playing a lot of basketball. I look back on my career and what I think highly most it's those teams that I was part of that were like tackling hard problems there for each other. Different people showed leadership at different times. You had expertise around the room that each knew how to contribute, knowing how to come together as a team. Like those instances that I look back, whether it was something athletically or something in the business world, that I can go back and I can recall certain areas of adversity that we overcame or things that we accomplished that we never thought we could and really like to fall into creating a safe environment for the teams that I create and the people that I bring into my teams. I remember there was a program that I had that had multiple big four consultancies contributing to our end goal. And I pulled in the consultants and I had the partners there. And it was an interesting conversation because typically you don't have competing big four people in the room working on the same thing. I was very clear on the vision that I wanted this program to have the goals. And I looked at each of them and I was like, you are part of my team and we are going to successfully come together and accomplish a lot. I need you to leave your allegiances to your own firms outside the room. Because when you come in the room, you're my team and my team needs to work well together. And if I find that there's infighting, there's only one thing we're going to do. You're going to get called into the principal's office. That is, you're called coming in with me. We're going to have this conversation once. And if behaviors don't change, there's consequences. It was good to kind of set the tone, but I also wanted these people to know, like there was something that we were trying to go and accomplish together and our collective success was more important than one group saying, I did this and they didn't do that. It's the sum of all the parts.

If you look now through your journey, you've worked with folks from all different disciplines, backgrounds coming from different functions. Do you see any other themes? Obviously the teamwork component, being collaborative that make folks successful in M and A.

There's a couple interesting components that make people successful. Coming into it without any prior business experience or an area of knowledge can be maybe a little overwhelming or difficult. If we focus specifically on integration and integration related roles coming through consulting, you get exposure to a lot of different clients. And there's great frameworks for bringing in younger talent, younger hires, having them learn. That's one avenue. Another avenue is joining companies that are actually doing M and A. And you may not be part of the M and A ecosystem, but you're working in an organization, in a company that does it. So you're getting exposed to it. And at a certain point it's valuable that if you're interested in it, you can find ways to get closer to the gravitational pull of the work and you can express interest in. I'm curious about doing this. I'd like to learn More like to get into it. And at that point you've probably had some experience within your own organization and business and built up hopefully some internal expertise that can contribute to what that deal is looking to accomplish. I just think it's really hard to just show up and knock on someone's door and say I want to do M and A and not have some aspect of what do you bring to the table that helps us do this well and build upon it.

I like that point of view on how to break into the industry. Just look for companies that are generally acquisitive, get into the company and then migrate your way towards where the M and A activity is happening. If you're looking at that profile going back to what really makes someone successful, because I feel like I get a bunch of people reaching out, they're trying to break into the industry. Hopefully I can tell them, just listen to this podcast from here on out. One is like, can you qualify yourself? This is the thing I found really interesting working with corporates is that sheer diversity of backgrounds. You meet folks, whether they're corporate integration, they come up through any function, it doesn't really matter. There's no consistent theme versus private equity is nearly everybody's coming through an investment bank. A little bit of that in some of the corporate roles as well. But there's a certain profile that you see with somebody like, hey, being really type A makes you really suitable for an integration role. Or is it just purely adversity counts as part of assembling a team together.

There'S a couple key components. One, it helps just to be naturally inquisitive because at least coming from the integration side of the house, you have a general baseline of I know what my company does, how does the target do it, how do they process payroll, how do they work with customers, how do they strategize and think about their business? It helps to just have an inquisitive nature and just this thirst of wanting to learn. I remember when I was doing some consultant work, I had worked with a client. After my period of time with him, we had done four deals in one year. We took some of our lessons from the first two deals and said, okay, let's approach deal number three a little differently. What was interesting was we did an off site with some of their key leadership, some of their operational folks. And I remember pulling aside my client and saying, we're going to structure this differently. And it was a two day event. Instead of us doing all the talking on day one, we're going to do all the listening and we're going to have the target tell us how they run their business and we'll have structure, we'll have an agenda, we'll make it valuable to people in the room and we'll give them some guidance there. Day two, instead of us coming in and us telling them this is how we do it, you're going to listen to what they say on day one and you're going to come back and say, here's all the things that were super similar and it makes integration super easy, but here's like two or three big rocks that we got to go solve for. And that was really interesting to see that play out when we flipped the script because you saw some really attentive listening by the acquirer. You actually had the target company taking a lot of initiative and really opening up about what they did, how they did it, the problems they had, they actually were already starting to think about. We've dealt with this problem, but if you guys have solved for it, we're happy to change. We'll do whatever. In hearing that openness on that day one and then having the acquirer come back and is almost like active listening. I heard what you said and I'm playing back to you what you said, but I'm playing it back now through my filter of additional information that I know and I can apply to the problem at hand. It was pretty cool to see how we were able to accelerate and move things a bit more forward to how they worked. And that actually hits like the second point I made here was some new ways of working and thinking. And that's one reason I'm like our M and A community. Regardless of whether you're upfront, sourcing deals, working in diligence, doing integration, you name it. I put a big net around the whole community. I just love learning from other experts and I thoroughly enjoy going to conferences. I love hearing about M and A that happens in other industries. I got fascinated a couple years ago. Someone from oil and gas was talking about M and A. They mentioned something integration related that was like it was going to take years. And I was like, that's interesting because in the time it might take for years, like I didn't know enough to understand the context of why it would take that long. So I was curious to learn more juxtaposed against maybe some of the speed that you can do a quick little 50 person engineering team, tuck in, boom, boom, boom. They're integrated within, you know, four months. Interesting to just pick up that expertise from other practitioners it's cliche. Everyone says it. I'll say it. Every deal is different. Every person who does M and A work should have that tattooed on their wrist. That and maybe I don't comment on rumor and speculation. Those might be two. Two good tattoos to have. And then some other common traits. You've got to be comfortable with ambiguity at your core. You got to be able to walk into a room and leave at the door sometimes your expertise, some sense of I know how this is going to go. You need to be really open. And you also need to know that ambiguity in many people, that creates a sense of maybe anxiety or discomfort. If you can recognize that's going to be there and be understanding and thoughtful, that that's just part of it. How do I deal with it? Do I deal with it through having the right kind of conversations to flush out more information and narrow down that ambiguity or put some frameworks around the way I think about it or how I need to put a body of work together to deliver X or Y. You can't be afraid of that. I put it that way because you'll get people who are very maybe oriented to like, my job is I put this box on this shelf and then I go do this and I do that. Like they're comfortable with the process. I come in, I do my job and I go home. Back to like, every deal is different. You're not going to be the expert on everything. You're going to come into these situations where ambiguity is the biggest elephant in the room. But you got to be comfortable with working through that. And at the end of the day, sometimes it could be just as basic as saying, look, here's our guiding principles for what we're trying to accomplish. Let's anchor back to those and not get overwhelmed by fraught and anxiousness. And I also think the ability to lead is really important. I like to see leadership across every level of the deal. And the integration leading shows up many different ways. It doesn't mean you're the person at the top of the governance chart leading the deal and accountable for it. It spans the whole. The breadth of. You may be organized around functions and that's how you integrate. You're showing leadership within your function, or you may be a subject matter expertise deep in the organization, but your knowledge shows up as leadership when you're able to step into a room and really convey some aspects of how the business needs to run or operate or get integrated. I don't think leadership is just something that people at certain levels in the Organization need to show. It needs to show up everywhere. One of the hard dynamics, and this actually goes back to something I learned back in my sociology days, was the difference between formal and informal authority. Formal authority, I'm your manager, I'm your boss, I'm whatever, okay, formal org chart kind of stuff versus the informal of, I'm the expert in the room, but I have no association with you. And how do I somehow show up and lead or attempt to lead based on my ability to contribute to problem at hand and helping to develop a solution to get us where we need to go? Leadership shows up a lot of different ways. That's always something that with younger people who I either talk with or mentor or been part of my teams, it's something that I try to instill and really say, look, you're always going to learn to be better leaders. I'm always on a journey to be a better leader. But it's something that you shouldn't shy away from. And in fact, it's something that in many cases people are going to be like, hey, thank you for stepping up, or thank you for saying that, or thank you for leading. It's sometimes it's just the little things. I remember telling a junior person a long time ago. I was like, look, if you just raise your hand and say, hey, I've got that action item, I'll take that. That's a step in the right direction.

Absolutely.

You know, dude, and you can build upon that. You have to be a strong communicator. Communications also, when I say communications that highly leverage on listening, I like to joke that we were born with two ears and one mouth and let's use them in that proportion. There's a lot of power in being able to listen, to understand and think through what are the difficulties of deal work and integration work and then playing that back and being able to synthesize what you heard versus what you know and how does that come together and some of those interpersonal skills that come along with that. I learned a lot about myself over the years taking like Myers Briggs tests at different companies. And it's been an interesting journey because at one point I actually tested out as pretty strong introvert. And now if I test out, I wouldn't say a full extrovert, but I've crossed the line. And it was interesting because I remember it was probably about 15 years ago, I remember feeling like, okay, the pendulum's switching a little bit from being an introvert to getting an extrovert. And it was interesting because I read some Materials. There was a book that Susan Cain wrote. It was something, it might have been like the Power of Quiet. And she was an introvert. And I remember watching a TED Talk and she starts her TED talk off articulating that as a youth her family would go on vacation and they'd all get to their location, bust out a book and that's what they did. They just went full introvert reading and they all enjoyed that. And her research and writings actually were very interesting to me because it highlighted some dynamics of how do you take what is perceived as maybe weaknesses of an introvert, but really are strengths. You flip that on its head and benefit from that. So that was really interesting for me, understanding a little bit of the introvert side of me. And then more lately it's been okay, how does the extrovert side of me grow and continue on that journey? I like to think I can take an introvert and make them feel comfortable, pull them aside, have a one on one conversation. Because introverts are really good at making personal connections and diving deep in the topics versus the extrovert who wants to be in the room full of energy and is just soaking all that up. Some of those interpersonal skills and dynamics are really important because you're going to come across people doing deal work that are across the whole gamut. Especially coming into this work, you have to understand that there is an intersection of strategic and tactical views that come together at different points in time over different aspects of where the deal is. And being able to think about strategy, how does that maybe play out three or four steps down the line that might land in integration? Or is there something in integration that you know of that is going to go upstream and impact the strategy. Being aware that you can't just come into this kind of work and be like, it's highly strategic and it's this, and it's this. There's a bit of rolling your sleeves up and you've got to really understand how the business works. If you don't have that appreciation for both different lenses that get applied, you'll find yourself tripping up on things that in hindsight you're like, ah, we see that we should have done that, or oh, we didn't see that. I sometimes use the analogy of you got to be a helicopter pilot. You gotta be able to fly up to, I don't know if a helicopter can get up to 10,000ft, maybe I'm exaggerating, but it's gotta be able to get, you know, high, right? But then you gotta like, hey, I'm gonna go be a crop duster. I'm getting in the weeds.

Yeah, yeah, zoom in, zoom out. We got being inquisitive. Big part of that is listening highly agree with and then identifying new ways to do things, being comfortable with ambiguity.

Let me poke on something. New ways to do things. The reason I poke on this is I routinely see new people coming into this and almost coming in. It was so fresh of an eye, which I' I don't mind but saying, what's the new metric? Or what's the new this and what's new that? And maybe Jim Buckley and I had a deep conversation on this once or twice, but it's kind of like, look like there's some basic metrics that are just routine to running a business. There's no new analytic. Like, I'm thinking about. I don't know baseball real well and I don't know, like the. Maybe you're a bigger baseball fan than me. No, there's some acronym. Maybe it's WAR or opa. I know there's something out there that, that is synonymous with success. Might be like combination of how many times did you strike versus hit the ball versus take a walk? More or less an algorithm to give you a metric batting average even more complex than that. Oh, okay, batting average on steroids. Batting average is good enough. We don't need to go boil the ocean on something else. But I do pay attention to, okay, but is there someone else who's maybe looking at it a little differently? And usually when they're looking at it a little differently, it's maybe something specific to their industry, something specific to their peers, but nothing that I walk away going, oh, my dear, I have to write an Excel macro or do some database scripting to actually gain insights. It's pretty basic business fundamentals.

I agree. That's like a good way to look at it. Caveat that just don't just throw new ways on everything.

The wheel is a wheel for a good reason. It's round and it works.

We talked about leadership. We talked about having good communication skills, which I think is a big part of leadership. I liked how you mentioned essentially taking like strategy through execution and sort of that gap in between being able to zoom in, zoom out, and there's no.

Wrong way and approaching it. And I say that because if one has this thirst for learning and really loving getting into the weeds of M and A, they're going to come at it probably with some sort of disposition that either puts them more so on the side of strategy and strategic on ramps into the work or they're going to come up very tactical. I came through a very tactical mechanism of business applications and understanding data and how it all came together. My area of growth was more pointed towards I need to understand more aspects of go to market product strategy, product customer fit, things like that. It was fun to go explore those. Wasn't fun when maybe I thought I knew too much and I espoused to be an expert in something and quickly got my hand slapped and realized, okay, there's still more learning you need to go do. There's a good mix to have being able to kind of look at the body of work through multiple lenses.

We talked about breaking into the industry you mentioned. Just start off by getting into organizations that are generally acquisitive and then make your way into where the M and A happens or anything else around breaking into the industry. This one comes up a lot from folks, especially if you're not coming up through investment banking.

There was a point where I remember I'd have been like a sophomore junior in college and I thought I wanted to be an investment banker. I did a summer internship with Smith Barney and it was the farthest thing from investment banking. They actually threw me the white pages and said start cold calling because you're selling PG&E preferred bonds. I wasn't even registered to go sell. I was just like finding warm leads. I know that's not investment banking. Investment banking has a lot of great skill sets that come to bear. What's interesting about getting into this body of work is from the outside it looks interesting, it's dynamic, it's different. There's a bit of sexiness to it, there's a bit of intrigue. I can't tell you what I'm working on, but I'm working on something big. That kind of mystique. People break in and they're going to know within one or two deals whether it's for them or not. I agree. Hey, you're going to be pulling 80 hour work weeks on the work days and oh, by the way, you're going to be doing another 20 hours on the weekend. You want to sign up for that? Some of us know that there's the peaks and valleys and my first manager doing IT integration work said, look Todd, there's peaks and valleys. When we're climbing the mountain going to the peak, you gotta be all in. But when we're coming down into the valley, I know you need to recharge your batteries. I may not want to see you in the office for a week, you got to do that. He was also the same person who said, rip the band aid off, let the healing begin. He had a few sayings that stuck with me. But sometimes the hardest thing is just getting your foot in the door. There's a lot of competition to doing that. That's why getting exposure consulting is a great way to check it out. If you can get into a consulting firm that has a practice that you can learn. A lot of firms have done a lot of different work, but you got a lot of corporations that maybe don't want to make the investment in having a full time corporate dev organization and they're looking to consultancies to come in and help when a deal needs to be done. Bring them in. Okay, thank you for your service. Deal's done, let's move on. But there's other companies who've made the investment into having full time corporate development teams. And interestingly enough, you'll see a couple different structures in how those teams are set up. So some will have a dedicated corp dev organization and then have dedicated corp dev and M and A integration folks in functions around the table. And that's pretty formal. You'll have other organizations that are a bit more dynamic who might just say, hey, look, we're going to do the National Guard model. When a deal is about to happen, we're going to blow the horn and pull everyone together because you're kind of informally part of the deal team. Those are some dynamics to think about as you're looking at what kind of organization might give you the best entry point into being affiliated or adjacent to the work that's being done. I would say in larger organizations where perhaps there's more formal alignment of a finance team and within finance they've got their M and A integration team, two or three people, what have you. But they've got some sort of formality in those larger organizations. If you're interested in M and A, and if you're coming at it, let's say from the integration side and you've got some sort of expertise in some part of the business, you could probably within a couple phone calls or connections within your own network of your company, probably identify, hey, who does that? Now, it may not be always obvious because there may not be a deal in flight and maybe the company hasn't done a deal in a year, but when the call is made, someone's probably going to be there. So it's just a little bit of hunting and pecking and going to have coffee Getting to know people, asking around, and you'll find that displaying a desire to get into it, it's always helpful. There's obvious external signs where it's like, I'm applying to this job and it's M and A related. But if, let's say you're on that journey to you in a large organization, you don't know if that capability is there or not. But just exploring it and having those conversations, someone's going to be like, wow, you know what? We actually have someone who is showing some interest in this and they might be the right person that we pull in the next time we do a deal. I would rather have someone who is excited and passionate and wants to learn and do this kind of stuff versus someone who's just another do another deal. There's a bit of mindset around that I think is also super helpful.

Let's rip apart networking because I feel like it is such an important thing. We talked about it before. This has been pretty instrumental to your success. And I, time after time, just see kids coming out of undergrad, even grad programs that just lack this skill. And I, for me, can credit a lot of my success from it. So I got to know you.

We networked.

Exactly. I feel like, let's talk through maybe a playbook for those that maybe aren't strong in this area. Because I think first and foremost, you got to get good at this. Especially, like, getting into M and A. I always joke around and it's probably not that much of a joke, but, like, in the Bay Area, none of the jobs get posted in M and A. It's all who you know. That's how it is. I get texts from people I know, and it's just, hey, I got this roll open. Do you know anybody?

It is, like, interesting. I would say the M and A community is pretty tight in that regard. Once you start networking, you're like, I've networked with some people. I've got a bit of peer group. And then you realize there's like, even more out there. I was at a an event earlier this week where I recognized some names of folks at companies where I was like, wait. I thought, like, I had known people who'd been there before. There was turnover and such. And I was like, oh, there's a new name I have not met. I made the effort to go introduce myself and we were there for a common topic about some AI tools, and it just led to some natural conversations. And I'm going to go have coffee with these people and learn A little bit more about what they do. Networking in and of itself needs to be bidirectional. It can't be, hey, Kisan, I'm going to network with you because I want something from you.

Okay, this is good. How not to network.

Yeah, this is how not to network.

Reminds me of the person that in conference you always see at least one person that will go around, give you an elevator pitch, hand your business card and go to the next person. And they're literally just trying to work the whole.

Oh, my dear. I remember seeing those people and you could see them coming from a mile away.

Oh, yeah.

And you're just like, oh, my dear, here they come. You're like, let's watch this train wreck. And you just see how they elbow into a conversation where, like, where'd you come from? And then they're doing their pitch, leaving their business card, and then just hightailing it to the next person. And you can see it because they walk into a conversation like this and the reason they're doing that is they're trying to read your name. And in smaller letters they're trying to read the name of your company or qualifying you. Yeah. Which is funny because sometimes, like, I'll go to an event and they'll give you like a name card. It's a little magnet and such. I'll just slip it in my pocket, try to be as inconspicuous as I can best.

So that's how not to network.

That's how not to network. Good networking, you need to know a little bit about who you want to network and why you want to network with them. You don't want to come across as being too salesy and not genuine. A lot of one's own success can be attributed to how genuine are they to who they are. You know, of people who you're just like, they're one version of themselves in one setting and a different version in a different setting. And I've always tried to live by, look, I just want to be as genuine to who I am. That gives me peace, removes anxiety from my life. It feels authentic. And sure, maybe it doesn't click with certain people, and that's okay. It allows me to network and talk with different people and feel good about what I'm saying and how I'm talking, how I'm representing things, my interest in these people. You can't show up and network and think, okay, I need to memorize where they went to school, what they did, the deals they did, all these things. Ask some good inquisitive questions and do a lot of listening. I always enjoy asking questions where I barely have to say anything and I just learn a lot about people. And you do a good job of this in your interviews. You're writing down notes, I'm saying things and you're like, hey, you mentioned this, let's come back to that. The ratio of me talking versus you is about 98% me, 2% you. But the 2% that you're contributing is really diving into hearing more about my background and experiences. So I'm going to start asking you more questions.

Well, I think that that's the thing is like coming with that intention of just really listening and learning, being inquisitive.

Sometimes when you, when maybe you put it in the frame of mentoring. Sometimes mentoring gets a bad knack because people think of it as like just a one way exchange and I think the two way exchange of understanding how you can network is really valuable. I have a large network on LinkedIn. I like staying in touch with people who are out there. I like seeing their successes. I like helping them if they're putting their hand out and I need some help with this or that. But what I don't appreciate is just those blind requests that show up in your inbox and you're like, who is this person and why are they reaching out to me? I have a couple sentences that I've saved on my phone and I just cut and paste it into some of these because there's some outreaches that make sense. You're like, oh, I can see a fit. They might know 10 other people that I know. Okay, there might be some sort of fit there. Usually in those cases I'll say, hey, thanks for the outreach, good to get introduced to you. It looks like we might have some common people that we know love to learn a little bit more about how we could learn a bit more about each other and see if it's worth connecting. I've fallen into wanting to have a conversation with somebody before blindly accepting an invite. Sometimes I send those emails out and I'll get a response and someone will say, oh, sorry, didn't mean to send it to you, or oh, I accidentally clicked on your name and sent an invite. Sometimes those actually do churn out to be very interesting. But yeah, more often than not, it's interesting to just see the human nature reaction to some of these invite requests that come over from time to time.

Yeah, that's so true. Well, the best practices, we got a good point about just being genuine about connecting with people, learning from them. That's always a good point of view. Just hey, I want to interested in your background. Yeah, I want to learn from your experience. I actually have one a funny story I'll hijack in front of you hijacking.

And I'll start asking the questions. Tables.

I had this intern and how did.

That make you feel?

I didn't plan to have the intern. It was reporting up to another leader in the organization. But they were like, hey, this person's just super excited. And I thought it'd be good just for him to work with you a little bit or just for you to spend some time with them. And I'm like, sure. I didn't have a plan in place. It wasn't at a time when I'm working on something and I have an intern for specific reasons. So I wasn't really sure what to do with him, but I said, hey, super green, super motivated. And said this is what I want you to do. I want you to go on LinkedIn and I want you to have five conversations with people in our space. Just go network. And I gave him the playbook. I said go connect with people. Tell them how you're interested in whatever career path they are. Because he was interested in finance. Think about where you want to be 5, 10 years out. Find people.

And I like the old E trade ad where I want to be in middle management.

Find those people, reach out, connect with them. Say, hey, really interested in getting a career path that you're in. Thought it'd be great to learn from your experience. I told them you'd be surprised by a third of the people will connect with you and say nothing. That's when you follow up. And was something tailored that thanks for connecting. Thought it'd be great to grab an intro call and learn from your experience. Open a 15 minute something like that.

Yeah.

And you'd be surprised. Then you get a really high response rate. They already connected with you and then you're following up and you're just generally trying to learn. And it was so interesting. It came back to me the next week as I had those fine conversations. He was so excited. He was like, oh my God. I talked to this person. This person told me to stay in touch, he'll give me a job when I graduate this. And he's just had all these great insights and it was just so much of an eye opener for him. I'm like, that's the one thing I want you to learn that I don't think your school is teaching you. And it's just that was it. I was like done. I felt like accomplished. I served the value for the internship here.

It's interesting you mentioned how perhaps that wasn't being taught in school. I taught a course at Santa Clara University for a long number of years, and it was interesting because it was a leadership curriculum that gave you like a little asterisk on your degree when you graduated. But it was noted there. But the curriculum was interesting because the first class, or the first two classes were deep into some leadership practices. At that point. Barry Posner was the dean. He had written the book with his research partners, the leadership Practice. Things like inspire a shared vision, model away, challenge the process, those kind of things. The students had a little bit of a framework around leadership. And then as I came in, what I taught were more of like, how do you actually take some of those principles, put them into practice? We talked about things like networking, how to work in teams, how to have difficult conversations and such. And so there's aspects of how do you take some of these nuggets that excite kids and interns and younger people in the workplace? And if they're still on their undergraduate journey, how do you plug that in and highlight that this is really important to you? You can learn from it and sounds like the story you just said. This guy was just completely jazzed up, excited about every conversation he had and just where things went.

That's where we'll pause the conversation for now. We covered a lot of ground in the next episode. We'll pick it up right where we left off and keep digging in. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in Part two. Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M and 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 and 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 a science.com or you can text me directly at 312857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own PA, 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. Views and opinions expressed on M and 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 and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.