Career Development in M&A

Hello M and A Friends. This podcast is brought to you by Deal Room, an M and A Science company. M and A deals are more competitive than ever. Your teams need to be collaborative and aligned to act fast and win deals. An M and A lifecycle management platform allows your team to spend less time coordinating and more time executing so you can win more deals. Check out why the best in the industry use Deal room. Go to dealroom.net to learn more. Again, that's dealroom.net I'm Kisam 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 M and A Deals. Before we kick things off, I'd like to send a big thank you to you all, the listeners of the M and A Science podcast. I was just reading some of our recent Apple podcast reviews and feedback emails. I'm truly flattered and grateful we have listeners that are getting real value out of our podcast. Also wanted to point out that between mascience.com and dealroom.net we now have over 1500 pages of content online. It's the largest publicly available collection of MA content on the Internet. Anyways, thank you. Now onto the interview. Welcome to M and A Science where leading M and A practitioners share lessons learned from their experience. If you're interested in keeping up with the latest from M and a science, visit mascience.com and subscribe to our free newsletter. Every Monday we share highlights from our interviews and invitations to events as we build the greatest community of forward thinking M and A practitioners. Again, that's mascience.com I'm your host Kisan Patel, CEO and founder of Mascience. This podcast is a little different. Normally I get the senior M and A folks that have been doing this for decades. Today's a little different. I'm interviewing Caleb, who's pretty new on the block when it comes to M and A, but I got to meet him when he was interning in a corporate development role. I was extremely impressed by his thinking and capabilities and kept in touch with him. It's been a few years, thought it'd be worth just to see if we can learn some things from the new guys in the industry. So with that hey Caleb, how are things going?

Let's go. Great. Keystone. Doing what I can to enjoy a cloudy day here in Fort Worth, Texas. Thanks for having me.

I'm actually excited to interview you. Normally I get to talk to these hotshots that got decades of M and A experience. I want to make a point to our listeners today that you can learn a lot from someone that's new in the industry. In a lot of ways. I think the folks that are newer in the industry are actually more qualified to teach others. Maybe we can just kick things off with a brief on your background.

Yeah, you're exactly right. I'm the new guy on the block. I'm Caleb Schaefer. I'm just 26 years old, recent graduate of Texas A and M University. I got a degree in Industrial distribution. So it's a 6040 mix of engineering and business. Graduated last year. Started out in an IMO role and now I'm corporate development associate.

What got you interested in M and A?

I've always loved the idea of M and A. I had never really practiced it though until I engaged in the sale of a landscaping company I started. Obviously very different scale that I work at now, but it gave me a little bit of a sense of what the sell side is like. I guess what actually got me into it, what actually got me funneled into this career path, was some additional initiative I took during an internship I had in 2020.

Yeah, I think that's what's interesting about your background. I talked to a lot of folks, they come from a strong finance background, they come through banking and they get an M and A. You caught my attention is you actually got an internship opportunity which you don't see too often. That gave you exposure to corporate development. Maybe you can walk through a little bit about that. What are some of the things that you've learned or how you moved into full time role.

So my internship actually didn't start out as an M and a focused internship. I was essentially a developer of value added solutions for the company that I work for. Part of our investment plan that we submitted was doing a voice of customer project. I was essentially asked to crunch some customer data to produce X Insight. But I realized that same data could be used to produce additional insight which would tell us what customer verticals we should we should be developing new value added solutions for and which customer verticals would be most impactful to our top line if we were to make an acquisition benefiting those customers. I produced that insight, that additional insight that came to mind and the director liked it. He passed it up to his VP of Corp Dev and then the VP of Corp Dev reached out directly to me. Cameron Ward, he works at Itron now and said, hey, I like your work. You want to start sourcing some M and A targets for Me definitely a backdoor way into M and a Qsan, but I've loved it ever since.

That's actually really interesting as well because not a lot of folks would actually start on the sourcing side. You tend to be the red sheet monkeys. I don't know if that's the appropriate term to use, but you're focused on the modeling aspects and it's typically much later in your career you start understanding the sourcing aspects of it.

Oh, is it? I didn't know that. I think starting out with sourcing gave me a different view into the strategy that's considered when you build up your pipeline. And that I think was imperative to understand first because if I'm imagining a situation where I started in running spreadsheets, doing some modeling and financial valuations, sure, you develop the technical skills first, which is really important. Of course, now that I've started with sourcing and now that I'm actually getting into the nitty gritty technical valuations and modeling and stuff, now I know what I'm looking at. Now I know how to digest a P and L and understand the strategic rationale behind why we're doing any sort of data crunching on these companies we're looking at.

Started with a research project that moved you to contributing to the strategy and M and A. That got you still an internship role to work with corporate development. What happened next?

So when I was nearing the end of my internship, thanks to some internal networking and honestly just being in a company with wonderful culture where there's just the mix of the right people, some new strategic initiatives where we're being started and hire prioritized, one of the VPs of corp dev at the group level reached out and said, hey, I'm standing up an IMO team and I'm looking for for people to add to that. So again, thanks to that internal networking, I had met this individual before. Her name's Joe Faulkner. She leads our integration management office and she extended the role to me. It looks great on paper and I was super excited. I was. This is the thing I was looking forward to Keyson. I wanted to get into some higher level strategic perspective roles. Out of all the other roles that I interviewed for this, checked all the boxes for me.

Now you're moving into a full time role as part of the imo.

Yeah. When I started in this IMO role, it felt like the treadmill was on its max setting and I just jumped on and I tried to keep up with a sprint from like a dead stop. That's what it Felt like I came out of college at a very different pace, very different working environment. I was used to taking ownership of projects and becoming the leader in whatever sort of group setting I was in. Having to understand this cross functional nature of these projects and then trying to apply that to, to a, to a corporate level was just drastically different. I can't even say apples to oranges.

I want to unpack this a little bit because integration is tough. It is one of the hardest pieces of M and A stages of M and A that you'll go through. But it's ultimately where the value gets created or destroyed. So it's interesting to hear your experience around it because a lot of IT people don't recognize that are involved in other parts of the deal, that ultimately the integration part is really tough to execute. I like to hear what went well, what didn't go well.

A lot of things went well. Well, I scaled up extremely quickly. I began to interface with executives on a totally different level than I was used to before. I had done presentations, I had done these interviews where I'd understand needs and then tailor my presentations or my findings or analysis accordingly. But then to actually work with them on a daily basis executing on these tasks, it created a different dynamic that I wasn't used to before. So I had to learn very quickly what executive presence and executive communication really is. And I think today I'm still improving with that. Learned how important confidence is, especially as a junior associate, a junior sort of contributor to the IMO team and corporate development as a whole. I had to become very comfortable with keeping senior executives accountable to what the MIP says, this master integration plan, that was a huge transition for me. That was something I think I'm just now starting to get used to.

What was hard about it were they like, go away kid. We're not getting this stuff done.

From my perspective, Kisan, I was 25 years old, I've just graduated college and I'm talking with people that have worked longer for one company than I've been alive. Okay. So when you understand that dynamic and I was keenly aware, maybe they weren't, maybe I was overthinking it. I'll, I'll give credence to that. But at the end of the day, I think I became too hyper aware of this difference there. I became hesitant to reach out and say, like, I know that we both agreed to this deadline and it's coming up, can it be delivered on time? Hey, the deadline's been passed. This is very important information. I really need this Report back. All right. Hey, group level CFO really needs this information. I need it now. That sort of assertiveness from 26 year old to someone who's working, worked for the Same company for 26 years or longer, you have to be okay with that because at the end of the day you're all on the same team and you all want the same thing. So it's not you versus them. It's crucial to understand that you're on the same team working towards the same goal. And that's what can give junior contributors, people new to corporate development, that confidence to be able to stand up and say we need to stick to the plan and if we can't, then let's understand why and communicate how those interdependencies affect other people.

Yeah, that's a unique challenge, career challenge that I think goes a long ways. It could turn into a whole other conversation.

Yeah, I think just at the end of the day, corporate development is about having a strategic view of where you are today and where you want to go, identifying what those gaps are and being proactive about it. And I think that applies both to the personal level as well as like the corporate level or even a business functional level seeking to gain a competitive advantage and do better than the competitors rather than just keeping up.

How do you look at M and A roles? Like how's M and A different from your other roles?

So understanding first what my other roles were, I did a lot of sales roles. I've been in a number of leadership roles, but primarily dealing with sales management. So some things that were similar, I was able to use that sales management perspective and apply it to our M and A processes which has actually led into this lean six Sigma Yellow belt project that I'm doing. And we're driving efficiencies forming KPIs that haven't been formulated since. And this is where I think gray zone leadership comes into play. But what I think was very different was the scale and impact of what I'm doing. I've been dealing with a lot of startups, whether they be my own or those that I'm interning for. I was in the talent incubator program at Texas A and M. So it's this cohort of just 30 students out of 1100 in our major that we are selected to do some business case consulting type projects for. At the end of the day, yes, they those companies are paying a deliverable, but you're in this cocoon where if you fail, it's okay, you're a student and now you don't really have that backdrop anymore. You don't have that backstop. So it's those things scale and impact. I'm getting to travel now, which is pretty cool. I was growing up and I saw these executive looking people at the airport with their little carry on, dressed in business casual, seemingly on the way, busy about something, having something to do, somewhere to be. And I thought that's what I want to do. Now that I've started traveling Keystone, I don't know that the hype is all it's made out to be. I actually don't really want to pack. Hotels aren't all that pleasant. You're working long hours, you probably get a lunch, but later than you usually do it, or maybe a dinner's later and you get back to the hotel at 8 or 9. And where do you wind down? Travel's good. Intermittently, I think.

Well, we had the IMO role that wasn't quite a fit. What happened after that? Cause you ended up in corporate development. What did that look like?

I'm a very creative person. I think, Khsan, I need a sandbox to play with, so to speak. And I didn't feel I was getting that. With imo, that's nothing against the organization or the team. I think it's just purely a reflection of what the function is. I felt it was very convergent. It was all about execution. Felt like whack a mole. I was like a task chopper. I needed more room to be creative. I'll admit I did have some opportunities to do that where some line items on the integration plan had some interdependencies with some other line items on a different integration plan. And I know, Mr. CEO, creator, founder of Deal Room, you're probably scratching your head like why are you managing integration on multiple different Excel sheets? But that's just where we were at the time. So I got my area of creativity there. Keystone was understanding these interdependencies and then formulating an automated flow which would automatically update and reduce waste and time on my part. So at the end of the day, my manager Joe, she noticed it probably before I did. Honestly, she gave me a few opportunities to present what it's like to how to source targets, what it's like to make a profile, what are you looking for? And things like that. She saw how I came alive during this team presentation that I gave and asked very insightful and thought provoking questions that helped me to recognize that I wasn't a good fit for imo. And IMO wasn't really a good fit for me either. I was in a secondment at the time. I had never heard of the term before. I think it's primarily used in Europe. But a secondment is essentially an internal temporary reassignment. So my temporary reassignment after I graduated, since I was already working within the company, wasn't the IMO team because of the nature of this contract, they were able to just essentially change my secondment into the pre close side of corp Dev after realizing that we weren't a good fit for one another. It was really just a matter of. All right, well I've talked with who your align manager would be on the pre close side. This, this is what your roles and responsibilities would be. How does that sound? I thought, yeah, that sounds great. Let me switch. So I switched over to a corporate development analyst at that point.

That's where you're at today.

Associate Now I got my first little promotion at the beginning of this month, the beginning of the fiscal year. So it's excited about that.

Now that you're in the industry, what do you think are the skills that people need in order to get into M and A even without going through that traditional route?

Keystone? I think it comes down to gray zone leadership. This is an article I found on LinkedIn a while I don't know the author's name off the top of my head, but I'll give them credit. Gray zone leadership to me is becoming aware of the people, processes and systems that at play with whatever you're doing at work. Because when you become more aware of those things, you gain an advantage in detecting what the underlying problems within any of those three things may be. Or alternatively, you're able to answer questions you anticipate stakeholders having. So there's a bit of empathy involved there. But in reality, Kisan, I would encourage gray zone leadership. For those people who want to get started in M and A or Excel in M and A. I wouldn't tell them. I'm expecting you to be a mind reader and here's why. So for example, let's say we're dealing with an analyst here who's been asked to make a profile on a target. I would suggest that person also do a competitive analysis as part of that target profile while you're at it, and then make a profile on a competitor that you think is actually better than the target that you were asked to make a profile on. Does that make sense?

Yeah, you're expanding the scope and doing a little extra legwork to benchmark what you're Doing.

Yeah, exactly. So if you're asked to make a profile on a target, you find out that a similar target is actually more competitive, more attractive, better fit within your matrix. What you're looking to do, strategically make a profile on them too. Produce both with your thoughts. Hey, I know you asked me to make a profile on this target. I've done that. But while making this profile, I found this other company that I think is actually much more competitive, much more attractive. So I went ahead, made a profile for them to let me know what you think. Should we progress both. My suggestion is that we insert whatever your thoughts are, advancing the conversation, moving the actions forward. And so that's why I think it just comes down to anticipating needs and then taking initiative when you recognize what those needs are. To me, that's what gray zone leadership.

Is, figuring out the next steps.

Exactly. Moving it forward and starting with empathy and then taking initiative.

What goes into that? I've seen some of these young guys like you that sort of scale up and by the time they're 40, their senior level role, executive partner, whatever. When I talk to those folks, try to understand what drove that success. The common theme, I concluded, was that they would align themselves with the challenges of the leader they reported to or even the leader that person reported to and they understand what problems that they had and would help them solve the bigger problems. That seemed to be the common theme. There's a little bit of that where it sounds like you're talking about, can you drive towards some of these next steps that broaden that thinking?

Mm.

That align with what somebody else is going to be trying to solve for anyways?

A hundred percent. Kissan definitely agree with you. You've got to understand who your key stakeholders are as well as what their needs are. What are their pain points? What do they wish they didn't have to do every day? Aligning your interest with theirs then enables you to know what to execute on first, how to prioritize your time. What's absolutely imperative, Kisan is coming out, whatever this need you're anticipating with enthusiasm and excitement. Volunteer yourself. Hey, I noticed you keep talking about this. Let's do something about this. I'll go ahead. I'll champion the. I'll recruit together who these people are. Let me understand the scope from you and I'll put together some findings, put together a plan, see what you think. How does that sound? And when you volunteer yourself like that, it's hard for people to say no. If at the end of the day you're making a material Difference, moving a KPI in the right direction. People value that. They appreciate that, and they want to reward that behavior if you're working for the right company. Some of the feedback that I've gotten is how influential my enthusiasm has been, and that's just who I am. People have different personality traits. Enthusiasm is one that I exhibit a lot. So whenever I come at things with that enthusiasm, they find that energy recharging and invigorating. I try to add that. Everyone has different strengths, though. So recognize what your strengths are and find ways to add your strengths to whatever this gray area of tasks are. That gray area being that space that exists between people's boundaries, between people's ownership and divisions and such. That stuff that no one owns, no man's land. You see that something's creating an inefficiency. Something needs to be optimized. There's a communication breakdown. There's not enough collaboration. Two people are working on strategic initiatives, but they're not coordinating together. Recognizing that and then pulling them together to formulate something cohesive and aligned and then bring your own creativity, whatever your strengths are. And then I think lastly, whatever your strengths are, you need to be decisive and you need to take initiative on those decisions that you think need to be made.

Problem solving. A lot of problem solving, where you're identifying problems, you're solving them without being told to. Ties back to figuring out the next steps. Yeah, the motivation piece, that's the one thing I found you can't teach. It's one of the biggest things I look for when I interview candidates for our company is how motivated they are, how much prep they actually did for the interview. What indicators do I have in this person? Just having that drive to figure out what they need to figure out. And then the tougher part is figuring out potential from there. What's their ability to really figure out the next steps and take initiatives? What do you think? Am I off? Is that something. Can you actually get people motivated? How does that work? Have you found that within your role?

I think motivation is something that's learned. And I would also argue that it can be taught.

I disagree with you. I want to hear your argument on that.

Okay, I respect that. I think it can be learned. So that part of my argument is I learned motivation when I started my first landscaping company. I started at 15. I was too young to have a real job. I lost all my friends because I was making bad decisions and had to make better ones. And then none of my other friends really wanted to make those better decisions with Me. And so I wanted to make good use of my time. I started a company. Long story short, I passed out 250 flyers. I only got one call, but that call resulted in a lot of referrals. And then I had too much demand that I could supply. So I hired some friends to make up the difference and just charge more than I paid them. That was really at the end of the day. But that experience and understanding that the scale of the company, the reach, the success of that company was limited to my ambition and my strategic thinking, my plans and such, while at a very small scale. Yes. Is this single city landscaping company. I was 16 years old, starting out with my grandpa's equipment. I realized that I could create my own opportunities. And that's why I think entrepreneurship is a very impactful component for someone to have in their background. So understand that first, anything is possible. Okay? Anything is possible. Shoot your shot. Create your own opportunities. That's what I think it comes down to, at least for me, when I learn motivation. And then the reason why I think you can teach motivation is because you can do. You can transform a culture into being a performance driven culture. Some people just don't think like that. They don't know to use data, to use metrics, to use to make business decisions. But you certainly can do that when you understand how to manipulate financial statements, for example. So if you can teach someone, hey, your margin's down, why is that? Teach them how to dig into that. Find out what that switch was that caused the margin to drop. Then find out how to switch it back or switch it to the entire other direction and actually improve margin. Once they find out that can be done. And then they experience the result and the reward that comes from driving true change. I think that's what creates a business culture. And so in that way, when you're performance driven, I think that's what really motivation is.

Interesting view, not quite sold yet. Your early example with you and your friends, it's just something you had from the beginning. You were driven because you wanted to do something bigger and better. I think there is some truth to that. You can enable more. You can expand on what people have if you can get teams aligned on the right mission. Yeah, but there is this. That's a bit of a inertia that has to be there. Otherwise it's just hard to get something that's not in motion to actually get there.

I think what you just mentioned, inertia is extremely important when you make the distinguishment between hiring someone that's not performance Driven and acquiring a company that's not performance driven. Because if you're acquiring a company, this is in my limited experience. Okay. I'm 26 years old. The way Caleb sees the world is that if you're acquiring a company that doesn't have a performance driven culture, some key strategic hires for perhaps pulling them from other parts of the business and putting them in the right place can influence the culture to become more performance driven. But you definitely can't start from scratch there. You've got to have some key stakeholders. Again, it's understanding those key stakeholders who are the most influential people in that business that can drive change and joining up with them to expand, whatever that result is that you're trying to drive.

What's advice you'd give to because you've been in the seat as a junior person in the company. So taking the audience here of some folks that are on the senior side, we got some VPs of corp dev and what would you tell them to best enable your junior level talent?

I think to enable your junior talent to drive change to be more effective than whatever the job description says. You've got to break down barriers for them. You've got to help them understand and integrate the fact that it's okay to pass feedback back to you bottom up. I think it's important that these senior leaders who have a junior person on their team also help those junior leaders understand that they have the capability that they have. Let's call it the leash. They have enough leash to play with to drive some change. If they want to use that leash, work with that junior leader to understand what's going on in their head. Where they, they see pitfalls. If they're facing obstacles, work with them to break those obstacles down. Those can be communication. Sometimes information is siloed. Sometimes it's just getting the okay from them. Hey, I'm seeing that we need some KPIs in our M and A process because we don't have any. Can I start that project? And if you're going to say no to that, then you should be looking at the mirror. When you wonder why your junior members.

Aren'T going above and beyond two themes out of it. One is freedom to create and the other is to build a feedback loop.

Yeah. And enable those junior members.

Like if you encourage that, where people are comfortable trying new things, bringing ideas to the table, taking a risk on things like that. If you can really encourage that, lead it by example. That's defining that culture of freedom to create and then making sure you're getting a feedback loop so you know where people are having challenges, what's working, what's not working, but making sure that it's an iterative process that we continuously learn and evolve from it.

Yeah, 100%. I think a key differentiating factor in what my company has done to enable me to drive change and go above and beyond is how prevalent continuous improvement is throughout the entire company and the fact that there are stakeholders, there are stakeholders who own driving continuous improvement initiatives down even through the most junior members. So across the entire company, the various companies within our group level, we've got someone who owns continuous improvement initiatives and then they have some people that they report that report to them and then they can then assist those people like me who are junior level people who notice an inefficiency in a process and then enable them to not only learn to think in a continuous improvement way, but also then to actually help them execute through that and make that up just a part of the way we work. Because continuous improvement, true continuous improvement like Lean Six Sigma, this is just agile. That's sort of like body of knowledge. That should be the way you work. If it's something additional you do, then it's not effective. There's. This is all just to say, Kisan, that having a continuous improvement person heading up these initiatives enables me to know how to execute on these continuous improvement measures to drive change.

I'm going to do a new thing this next month. I got a cohort of about three folks joining our company.

Okay.

I remember it was probably eight, 10 years ago. I learned about, I read the book Lean Management and that was a cool book because you got old TPS system, learned where a lot of the agile concepts originate from. A lot of the Kaizen continuous improvement. What was interesting was when they brought in a new manager, all they had them do initially was observe and document ways to improve.

Yeah.

And they would come back and say that's not good enough, come up with more. And they just kept doing that. They kept doing that, but they were wiring them for that continuous improvement mindset.

Yeah.

And that's what I'm going to do with this new cohort is one take the same approach, think, hey, as we go through this, I want you to document every area that you think we can improve as a company, whatever it is. And I'm going to go back to the existing team with that same challenge saying hey, this is what I want everybody to do and I'm going to supplement it with that same ways to improve for the CEO.

Oh yeah. That's powerful stuff. I think top down leadership does have its place. There's some things where there's some initiatives, some key drivers of change that the top leaders do need to own, they do need to champion and then proliferate throughout whoever reports to them and whoever reports to them. But there is an element of bottom up leadership that I think is actually crucial because let's say someone, some VP says hey, we need to increase our services offering. How do we do that? I've got this idea of how we do that. So I'm going to hand that down to my managers and certainly they can then tell their junior contributors to execute on this process that they've been given. But it's those junior contribut who are living and breathing that process, provide the space for those junior contributors to pass the feedback back up. And hey, this is, this process is going great, but here were some missteps, here's some inefficiencies that I've discovered by using this process. So let's like tune this in a little bit. Maybe you can actually cut out a step there. If senior leaders collaborate with those junior contributors on them delivering the vision and then the junior contributor sort of brainstorming with that leader on how to actually execute that may actually take out a step there and eliminate some waste.

That's what it comes down to is creating that communication platform where you have those ideas, ideas for even pointing out where the cracks are appearing coming up. What kind of format do you think works well to create that for us? It's always been about stand up meeting, like really trying to do those things, but then having these informal meetings where that's what you're encouraging. We're really trying to encourage that opportunity for everybody to be able to speak up and share those ideas. And I've always got great stories and examples. I have one. Whereas the most junior developer on the team shared an idea for product feature that today became one of the leading things that we've actually created. But it was the fact that we enabled that to give them the opportunity to speak up. Because it's always our town halls are, hey, not only ask questions, but what are some ideas that you can bring that we can, can improve? I don't know. Have you seen anything like that format or some approach that could help enable that?

Yeah, so I think working remotely, working from home is extremely value added that it usually provides people with more time to actually execute, to live out the process and then to make collaboration at some times more efficient. Because at any moment you can say, hey, I'm working through this process. I've got a couple ideas. Can I grab you for five minutes? So, touching on your point about informal meetings, that's been key for me is knowing that I can reach out to the VP of Corp Dev, maybe a manager, whomever it may be. Really, at the end of the day, it's just roping in whoever those key stakeholders are into an informal meeting and say, hey, I'm working on this project. Realize that this kind of affects you in this way, or here's an interdependency that affects your division. I want to present what my findings are and get some feedback and let's improve this. Then when it's time to present, then let's open up the scope just a little bit on who's involved and ensure that there's alignment across the team. So when it comes to format, I think it's. I think there does need to be a mix of online meetings as well as in person. Some of the most effective meetings and some of the meetings I would add where I actually learned the most were those meetings that I had in person. You just get so much more out of it. That just slips through the cracks when you're talking online. So if you have the opportunity to come together, bounce some ideas off of one another with a whiteboard on the wall, then I think you're going to maximize the impact that you can get from whatever it is you're discussing.

That's a good point. The one on one component of it encouraged that and then. Sounds like the transparency piece made me think of. For us, we use Slack and we create these channels. Even last night I got my creative hour around 9pm and I threw two ideas out in the marketing channel. But it goes across to everybody and then they get to chime in of they love it, hate it.

Ah, cool.

Yeah, no, that's really good. Tell me about your current role. What are you doing now? Like, how are you involved with deals today?

So today I'm primarily responsible for the management of our Americas M and A pipeline. I speak Spanish as a second language. I'm quite fluent in it. So I'm able to leverage that where I need to, depending on any target or region we're looking at. And there's a part of managing this, America's M and A pipeline involved the industrialization of the process whereby we can actually get targets to move down our funnel. And then secondarily I participate and contribute to active and closing DD both in person and remote.

You're managing the diligence process?

Not quite. Not yet. So I'll be honest with you, Kisan. I've only really been involved in two different DD processes and because of that, a lot of my time spent in those meetings is just spent learning and absorbing. I'm taking notes. I'm able to sit back as a fly on the wall and listen to the comments being made. I make notes where something is talked about that I don't understand if it's net debt and debt like items or working capital and how that affects valuation or whatever the case may be. We had a recent meeting with a legal due diligence team on site and we were talking through the terms and I realized I sort of made the connection back to a prior meeting that we had with our tech DD team on site where they mentioned some potential pitfalls with some of the technology that they were evaluating. So one way that I contributed to this DD process was that I connected that dot from the tech side to the legal side and said, hey, we're seeing a lot of red flags here. Can we add some clauses into our spa which address some of those red flags to a reasonable degree? We looked around and said, yeah, that sounds good. I think that's a reasonable ask and that's something that will actually shore up some or hedge the risk that's inherent with this deal. So I felt really good being able to contribute in that way. It's kind of small but you know, I'm still a junior level contributor and I'm doing what I can to make a difference where I'm able to.

Got it. So you're moving towards that area of actually getting involved to manage diligence.

Yeah.

What are some lessons learned? What are things you've learned around the front end pipeline sourcing?

You've got to be intimately aware with the people, processes and systems at play. I find that the lean six Sigma approach really helps to refine those three things pretty well. In addition to that, whatever your target databases, you need to get intimately aware with that too. Privco for private company financials. Orbis for those international targets. Companies that are internationally listed. Makes it a lot easier to find all the relevant information deal room, if you're lucky enough to get that involved in your organization, ask for demos from those account execs and look for ways to fully leverage that subscription you're paying for. Then lastly, continue to think divergently wherever you can and create choices and find ways to optimize whatever that choice you have to make will be.

Great tips. How about advice for people aspiring to get into M and A.

We've talked about it before, but it's that gray zone leadership. We mentioned what some of the common issues were earlier, but some tips on being a gray zone leader. Seek to strengthen the organization and not grandstanding for your own personal gain. To me that means making heroes out of the individuals around you and growing the influence of those other people in the process, giving them a hand in a project that you've started. A rising tide lifts all boats and that's what you want to do when you're part of an organization, when you're part of a team, it's not us versus them, everyone's on the same team. You want to focus on understanding and supporting the priorities of your line managers, whomever those may be. And try to again, align your interests, your priorities. Choose opportunities that will make a material difference. Be empathic with who the stakehold managers are and tune in to strategic executive initiatives and see how you can use your strengths to become a leader and an owner. Become accountable for those things that nothing's happening with gray zone issues. These are things that no one owns, but they're obvious issues. They're concerns, inefficiencies, lack of collaboration, coordination, things like that. Find out what those are, take ownership of them and see what you can do to add your strengths to maximize the benefit that comes from that project. That I think is gray zone leadership. We've talked about it earlier, so going back to your question advice for people aspiring to get into the industry, be a gray zone leader. Know that anything is possible. So create your own opportunities and then just shoot your shot. Any question is going to be a no as long as you haven't asked it. It could end up being a no still. But if you at least ask it, if you at least shoot your shot, it's only then that you give yourself a chance of showing how much value you can add to an organization.

Be forward and get out of your comfort zone.

Yeah, exactly.

Caleb, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M and A?

Keystone? I kind of think that that me being here is one of the craziest things I've seen in M and A. I've only been here for two years because I haven't seen everything, but I remember the first due diligence process I was involved in. We traveled on site, we met with the leaders of the company. They had a very different of the post integration model. The ideal operating model is very different than the one that we came up with. Basically it just came down to go to market approach. What stood out to me was that those five plus days of meeting started with our leadership. So our leadership started the very first meeting with understanding where the leaders heads were, what their vision was, understanding their pain points and just starting with empathy, seeking to understand before being understood later on when we started to understand where this difference was, I think it was that starting with empathy that facilitated the openness of the leadership of the other target to really give some serious consideration to what our vision was. And so while our vision didn't change, nor did their vision change, it was because we started with empathy that we were able to collaborate on what a unified go to market approach would be. Tson it was so cool. I heard the back and forth, the back and forth and then someone's oh what if we did this? And then it was like a volley. It was like a perfect tennis match, hitting back and forth, brainstorming these ideas back and forth until we came up with people were coming out of their seats, they were walking around the room and I just, I was sitting there again as a fly on the wall taking notes and I'm just like hammering away at the keyboard as I'm seeing these leaders come together on what their unified go to market approach would be and it was just as exhilarating. It was so cool for me. Ksan I grew a lot from that experience.

You are ahead of your time my friend. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me, learn some things and enjoyed this conversation.

Thanks Kisan. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Cheers. Here's to the deal.

Cheers to the deal. Kisan.

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