How to Achieve Strategic Alignment From Top to Bottom

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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. Hello M and A Scientists. Welcome to the M and A Science Podcast where we learn from the best in M and A to uncover proven techniques for enterprise value creation. If you're interested in learning more about how to optimize your M and A practice, or want to get involved with our community of forward thinking M and a practitioners, visit mascience.com and subscribe to our free weekly newsletter for the latest in industry trends, insightful content and community events. If you want to keep up with us on the go, head over to LinkedIn and follow M and A Science. Hi, I'm your host, Kisam Patel, CEO and Founder of M and A Science. Joining me today is Camilo Franco, Director M and A Integration and Operations at jamf. JAMF is a software company best known for developing JAMF Pro and the only company in the world that provides a complete management security solution for for an Apple first environment that is Enterprise secure trade on NASDAQ under J M F. Today we're going to talk about how to achieve strategic alignment from top to bottom. Camilo, how you doing today?

Doing all right.

Well hey, thanks for making the trip. We're here recording live at KL Gates office in Charlotte. They're nice enough to give us some space to use today. You made thank you for coming down.

Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. It's not too far of a drive for me, so this is great. I'm glad to have the opportunity.

Can we kick things off with a little bit about your background?

When everybody asked me this question, I immediately think just to my family and where I've come from I come from an immigrant family. My father immigrated from Ecuador when he was 17 years old. My mother's parents came from Cuba in 1964. Really that is at the background and foundational to my career and really my life. Having that multicultural perspective. Growing up in an environment where people came from different places, spoke different language. English is my second language. Having that type of perspective has really informed not only who I am as a person but then how I show up and how my career really has gone. That's really a key piece to my background that I think is important. My older brother and I were the first individuals in our family to graduate with a four year degree. So we're breaking cycles in that way, which is cool. And moved through early career insurance agent moved into sales. My path to corporate development was unconventional. Started in the sales organization, did well. But realized I wanted to do something more strategic. Something that was more like guiding where the company was going to go. Received an opportunity to jump on our ERP team. We were changing out our ERP system at the time. They built a $2 billion company off of a DOS system, black screen, green dot kind of thing. Which is pretty cool to do. But eventually it's like we got it to change this so helped with some SAP implementations globally in starting in Europe, then North America, Latin America and then back to Europe. Because of some acquisitions we made throughout that time. And that was a four and a half year stint. I gathered a lot of experience that really helps me in my corporate development career today. The people side of things. Again dealing with people in different cultures and different settings with different mindsets and perspectives. That's helped me in my integration work today. Also different stages. We had companies that we were now integrating not just from an ERP perspective but they didn't have a system whatsoever. So we're doing organizational redesign. We're basically changing their entire business model as well. And so doing a lot of that type of work which was complex and hard to do. But then that people component where you're now trying to get them excited about this change and showing them that this is actually beneficial for them too and that they're integral to the process to make it successful. So those experiences then led to coming back to North America and helping with a sales organization redesign in our corporate headquarters in North America. Also implemented Salesforce at the time. A lot of changes in this organization in a very compressed period of time. So all of those changes led to a lot of fatigue. A lot of people management and change management that had to occur. And was able to hone those skills throughout that time, then moved into corporate strategy after that. That was kind of my first foray into corporate development. Was able to help lead efforts to actually carve out our European and Latin American operations and sell those companies to a PE firm and then also a strategic buyer. The biggest challenge throughout all of that was doing it through Covid. That was an interesting experience. And I feel so much of that experience now informs what and how I do the integration job that I have been at JAMF for almost two years now.

Gotta love immigrant parents. Yeah, you don't appreciate it when you're growing up, but hindsight, it's like one of the most valuable things that really prepare you for the world is the way they raise you.

Oh, absolutely.

And you got tons of operating experience that evolved through iterations to now adding up an integration function.

Yeah. And again, I think the more people we can get involved in this space who have a diverse experience like that, the better. We need new ideas, we need fresh perspective on how to do these things. And it's funny as I've been reading more about this type of role because again, I'm a learner. I want to know how to do these things. The more I'm like, the same themes show up in a lot of places. Like, oh man, these people have been doing this for 30 plus years and this is how they did it. Great. And I've learned a lot. But I also recognize that this whole space is ripe for disruption and for people like me to come in and say, what if we did it this way? What if we thought about this? So it's exciting, it's an exciting time, I think.

What do you think are the real skills that make an integration person successful?

There's so much of it that is really. Yes, that organizational function is important. I'm not going to minimize that in any way. Being organized, being able to move people and get things done is valuable. But I think there's a lot of soft skills that are absolutely required in order to navigate things that are very, in some ways, inconvenient for some people. You go into an acquisition, the acquired party, many of the people you're dealing with and trying to integrate into the company, they didn't have a choice in any of this. They're learning about it, they're figuring out how they feel about it, and you're trying to now embrace them, make them feel welcome, and then also try to get them gung ho about something that wasn't their choice. So I think having those soft skills of Being able to be empathetic to people and their situation, bring them in, make them feel warm and loved, is something that's huge and that we need more of in the integration space in order to be successful.

I'm so glad you mentioned that. I did this thing over the weekend where I reflected on over 250 podcast interviews we've done and tried to distill the key lessons learned. And the empathetic, I call it empathetic leadership fell in the top 10. So that's cool.

Yeah. At the end of the day, we're dealing with people as M and A professionals. We can really dive into the synergies and the KPIs and the numbers around everything that we're doing to measure success. But if everybody's unhappy and your people aren't taken care of, then were you really successful? So I think that's a component that is really important and valuable.

We're supposed to talk about strategic alignment.

Yeah.

Can we define what that means?

First of all, as a descriptor, I would say a scenario come into a new corporate environment. One of the first questions I'm going to ask is, okay, what's this corporate strategy? Can you explain where we're going? And then how does M and A then fit into that story? Throughout the last, I would say, 10 years with the rapid growth of technology and some of the spaces that we live in, pandemic played into that as well and kind of accelerated a lot of things that wouldn't have happened otherwise with remote workers and that kind of thing, which in the end helped companies like jamf. With the product sets that we have, we grew at just a hockey stick pace. And when that happens, it's really hard to develop processes to keep up with that type of growth. You're almost building the ship when you're already at sea. And that can be very challenging because you know where you want to go and you know where you're headed, but the vessel that you're in is just not well equipped to handle that yet. There's an intimate tie between M and A strategy and your corporate strategy. That M and A strategy needs to support that corporate strategy. But that corporate strategic piece is missing in a lot of companies because we grew so fast. Oh man. These muscles are things that we haven't really exercised. We didn't have to think five years ahead necessarily because we're in the now. We're just trying to stay afloat, really trying to develop those muscles and bring that M and A strategy in. Sync is, is vital and important and something that is a challenge that we have today as a fast growing company.

It's interesting because I talked to other peer CEOs and even some of them struggle with the strategic alignment around organic. And now you're introducing inorganic, namely M and A, as a strategy that aligns with a broader corporate strategy. Is there a difference there or is there like a reason why that gets overlooked? Even more so than a broader corporate strategy?

M and A is almost viewed as this cool thing that people do, but nobody really understands it within a company in that corporate context. If we went to JAMF today and we said, hey, what does the M and A team do? They would be like, they buy companies. But that's about the only description you would get. We're trying to change that in a lot of ways. We're coming in and saying, okay, how can we actually marry what the M and A strategy is, which has moved up into this corporate strategy? That corporate strategy should be flowing to the entire company. We should be sharing that message with anybody and everybody and see how they fit into that piece, how they play a part in that strategy. One of the things that we're doing, we are consistently having meetings with departmental function leads. And then their teams even come into their team meeting and say, hey, we just want to give you an overview of what the corporate development team here at JAMF does. This is how we do it. Here's the structure around our process, here's how we manage pipeline, or just different things that they don't take into necessarily into consideration because it's not their day job, and inform them. Then once an acquisition comes around and they're brought in on the integration side and we say, hey, we need your help in this particular function with an integration piece, they understand where we've been and what we've done and how we've gotten to this point and then how they play a part in moving things forward. From an integration perspective, I think those are some of the pieces where again, corporate strategy as a whole, we grew so fast. That piece was already a little nebulous. The M and A strategy is just another complex component to all of that. And the only way to really clear those muddied waters is to be overly communicative and distill that messaging appropriately to more people within the company.

Who are those people? Are you just talking to functional leads or.

Yeah, so we're talking to everybody. So we'll talk to the functional leads. Yes, with the value of what we're doing, why we're doing it, et Cetera. But like I said, we'll be brought into their team meetings. Their entire teams are in there for their monthly or quarterly review. There will be a small component of those types of meetings to kind of share. This is what we're doing. Obviously we can't share what we're working on most of the time, but we can at least tell them how we're doing things and what the process looks like.

That helps.

It gives them a better understanding of how and why we're doing what we're doing.

Do you relay the M and A strategy against the corporate strategy at that point?

Yeah, absolutely. That corporate strategy is corporate wide. They've seen it. They know here are four or five pillars or the big buckets of things that we're looking to grow. Here's our goals and objectives that come out of that corporate strategy. Cool. How does M and A play into that? How do we go in and inorganically aid and assist in achieving those goals and objectives? In some ways there might be goals and objectives that we can't actually reach unless there's inorganic growth and inorganic strategy to help support that. So delivering that message I think is really important and vital for people to really understand what we do with the strategy.

I was curious about this too is I guess when you work at M and A and there's alignment with your team members and it sounds like you're working with a good amount of fractional resources but getting that level of prioritization. I was curious if you sort of have dealt with that before where you didn't quite get as strong buy in and if some of those things like you mentioned putting that extra effort to have these meetings clarify Corp Dev's role and how do you guys think about M and A strategy makes a difference.

Yeah. So many corporate development teams. Unless you're in a behemoth of a company kind of thing. Most of us work on small teams and most of what we do is ends up being cross functional. We're inviting people into to our projects and by inviting it's forcing people along most of the time to say this is something we have to do in order to be successful and reach the corporate objectives that we have. That is a big challenge. If we are appropriately messaging the overall corporate strategy and then what that M and A strategy does to support that corporate strategy. It helps at least in people understanding why we're doing what we're doing. If they understand the why and then we can move into the how and how they fit into that cog and really help us along the way those cross functional resources, many times they're already doing their day job. We bring them in to another project that's just layered on top of everything they normally do. And if you're doing quite a few of these regularly, M and A fatigue is absolutely real and something that we've experienced. And so how do you combat that one? If they understand why we made the acquisition, why this particular acquisition is helping us along that corporate strategy journey and helping us get to where we want to be in five years, they're more apt to say, okay, I get it, I want to do my piece because I'm part of this company too and I care and I want to move this along in the right way. So having that type of buy in where they see the benefit and understand that strategic vision and why we're doing this is huge. Just gives a mental shift in how they participate in the process.

Do you ever come across the anti m and A culture at a company before?

100%, absolutely.

You have to deal with it. How do you turn that around?

That's very difficult. And again, you're always going to have pockets of that in some ways. There's certain individuals who you've already identified and you know, this is a challenge. This person was a challenge on the last one we did. There'll be a challenge on this one as well because they're not necessarily understanding the vision. Their mind might just not work that way. They might live in their pocket of the one thing they do every day. So this overall big picture thing is just too much for them to consume and they're not going to get it. But you absolutely need their buy in for a specific piece of your integration, whether that's a financial piece or a legal piece or whatever that is. They take a little more handholding, a little more time, a little more, have a lot more meetings with those individuals to one, prep them for where we're going and then two on the back end to help them along the way and make sure things get done. It just takes more time. Unfortunately, that's really the only way I've been able to handle it so far. If anybody holds that golden bullet, I would love to know it. This is also where I think that empathy piece comes in when I'm delivering that messaging around why we're doing something. When somebody doesn't understand it and I do, that's challenging. It's ah, how do you not get this? I get this. Why don't you get this? Living into that empathy piece, being like, okay, they don't do this day in and day out, recognize where they are, meet them at that level and try to work through that with them, you'll be a little bit more successful. It's going to be a challenge, but it helps.

Give me an example. How does that play out?

So there's specific functions that as a whole will be more challenging. In some of these things, you go through financial reporting. We'll just throw that one out there. Oh, yeah. We have to now build out all these financial reports for this new thing. They'll need to understand how we're going to market with it, try to understand the pieces that are now going to play into the products that we have. How do we build those out appropriately? If they don't understand the overall business case for why we did this, it's just grunt work and it's something that is on top of everything they're already doing. Again, how do I relate to you in a way that's going to be able to get this done? It's a vital piece to what we do and how we're going to appropriately measure our success, at least from a mathematical perspective. How do I guide that person along? I'm going to have meetings with them. I'm going to say, hey, I just want you to know this is what we need you to do. But then also this is how it affects where we're going and how we're going to measure success. For this particular deal, this is so important. So stressing that importance and why and then thanking them a lot. So I've found that too. If you're meeting people where they are understanding the struggle that they have through this process, but then also just being really grateful for everything they are doing and the amount of effort that they have to put in, that's on top of what they normally do. That also goes a long way. And just building that, that kind of relational equity in order to get things.

Done, hear from their lens, understand how they feel and why they feel that way.

Yeah. And again, it's people. How do we relate to people? How can we efficiently work with people to kind of reach those common goals that we have?

Why don't they teach us this in high school or undergrad? Because it goes back to this so many times in series of these podcasts. Let's talk about strategies for effectively communicating M and A plans and goals across an entire organization.

This will vary by the type of organization you have, so I think this will look different in every company in a lot of ways. So it's hard to build out this rote. Okay, if you do this, you're going to be great. But it starts at the top. Your corporate leaders need to be communicating effectively to everybody what that corporate strategy and vision is. And then as that makes its way down, the project manager should know how what they do day in and day out affects those goals and how we're going to get where we're going. Simultaneously that M and A piece, how that fits in, how we're now going to reach whatever goals that we have by 2025, 2026. These are the steps we're taking. This is the puzzle piece that fits right in here and this is how it works. And here's the overall picture. Again, I think it's just overly communicating that and doing it regularly. I think one of the things you'll see if you're part of our process, you'll see the business case for this particular M and A. At the beginning of every single slide deck that we have here is the quick one slide business thesis for this deal. And that's just going to come up over and over again because we continuously have to remind ourselves why we're doing this. And that's not just pre close, that's post close. All the post close integration decks that I build, even updates for our board, et cetera. There's going to be a slide in there of why we chose to do what we did so that we can continuously remind ourselves of why we're here, why we're doing this thing.

Just like an investment thesis statement.

Yeah. So try to distill that down in a way that's really easily digestible. So normally we'll have just one slide with the three big reasons why we're doing this. Usually that's one of our first slides on every single deck we create.

Got to give you a specific example, like a rough idea. Is it, hey, we're trying to get X revenue growth out of this. Is it just like strategic drivers of doing the deal? What does that look like?

Yeah, normally I don't even delve into the numbers of things. First slide will most likely be that overall corporate separate strategy slide. Here's the themes that we've been going over for the past year, whatnot, that executive leadership's been talking us through. Here's our strategic pillars and where we're going highlight. Okay, here's the two or three that this particular acquisition helps us in. That next slide is going to say, here's how it helps us achieve what we're looking at in those strategic pillars. That's the rhythm we take larger scope for the entire company. This is how this deal now affects those particular pieces.

Fair enough. The integration role, like when you look at it, you kind of have big strategic vision and starts from the top. They're communicating it. And this would be at that area too. This is head of corporate executive CEO. Like who? When we say the top, are we.

Talking about C level executives, senior leadership teams? Your higher executives in the company are going to be, especially on that corporate strategy. Piece like that should have a framework in place that people work through. And it's usually those C level executives that are setting the tone for all of that.

And then the integration person, they say it's one of the most thankless jobs. You think that's true?

I think it depends. Different corporate cultures will treat the integration person differently.

I talked to your head of corporate, he loves you. So I think you're in a good situation.

Yeah. And JAMF is known for its corporate culture where everybody's working together and it's a very people first type of culture. I've been involved in companies where they're making acquisitions without necessarily a strategy. You have these companies that they're buying and three or four years later they're just still sitting out there doing their thing. Nobody's measuring success, nobody's measuring anything that's being done there. It's just like we just did that because we thought that was cool or whatever. Somebody had an idea. And then I've been tasked with the responsibility of trying to integrate them. That was incredibly challenging and that was absolutely 100% a thankless job. Again, you have people that are existing in a space on their own island for an extended period of time and you have a company that doesn't necessarily want to embrace them either. So you almost have two hostile entities that you're now trying to bring together and nobody on either side really wants to do any of that work. So you're doing this push pull activity and nobody likes you in that scenario.

You see how I got to that. I want to make the point of the strategic alignment actually makes more purpose in your role.

There's really nothing worse than M. And a strategy that doesn't roll up into a corporate overall strategy. If you have people that are just really good at doing deals, that's great. That's a good muscle to have. But if that's not feeding up into the overall corporate strategy, then yeah, you're going to be left with a lot of integration headaches.

When you look at your role and how it fits into this how do you fit in and maintain alignment with the strategy?

Depending on how your company is structured, you may have an actual corporate strategy team. And if you do, that connection has to be tied at the hip. My boss, he's intimately tied with our executive leadership team. They're having conversations left and right. They're always talking about where we're headed, where we're going. That strategic vision and those different pillars and how we're going to achieve them is a constant for him. So as he works through those, I think that informs then what our team is going to do, where we're going to focus, and the types of deals we're going to bring in.

These things like the integration charter, steering co, are those stuff that you utilize.

Again as part of our initial business case. And this bears itself out the more we delve into the process. But that business case usually does have at least an integration component from the beginning that then expands out as we go through due diligence and see more things, which again, I'm very thankful to be involved up front. I think it's vital for the integration lead to at least be part of that process, to be able to help identify these are the challenges that we're going to have down the road. Part of that process. I already start building out that integration deck, so to speak, as we're going through that process and I'm identifying risks. Here's the things that are going to be challenging. Oh, here's the things that are really good about this sync and the synergies that we can potentially realize from an integration perspective during that time too. So I think getting involved in that space, but it just kind of expands out similarly, you'll see in most deals as you progress through that process, as the people start to expand. So does your integration planning and your integration story really starts to expand as well.

Do you have your own document then that you just lay out? Here's your integration plan and how you communicate it to the leadership.

So that term integration chart, usually it's our integration thesis. And so we'll come in and say, here's the pieces where we think we should integrate. Here's the pieces that we think need to be siloed and separate or have that whole body of work, we build that out pretty close to after post dd and we present that to our steerco, our investment committee.

So you'll create this and this is why it's important to be involved earlier the better so you can get some insights. And there's a specific driver in why you're Doing the deal and that probably has a lot of impact in how your integration plan is going to pan out.

This may be one of the challenges too. Just from a personnel perspective, you might be making an acquisition that deals with a very specific. Let's just take product for example. It's going to fill this technological void that you have and you're like, oh, we need this piece. Not everybody's going to be impacted by that. Not everybody really is going to understand that potentially. So how do you get them and bring them along to be part of this process? The other thing is you may need very specific people involved in the process that maybe weren't involved in or haven't been involved in any process before. So again, that cross functional piece comes back into play. Whereas, oh man, I'm going to have to train new people, I'm going to have to inform them of our process, figure out how to work with them, train them along to now execute this integration piece. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, the thesis is informed by that overall business thesis too is we're going to integrate this in a way that is compatible with the overall goals that we have as a company.

It's only pretty clear to everybody what's going to happen. The steering committee, what do they do?

The vast majority of the time we're presenting updates on where we are. And then if there's any really critical decisions that are needed to be made that may be above my pay grade, this is something that's impactful to the entire project or to the company in a way that's really meaningful. That steerco will definitely make decisions on that level.

Who's on the steering co?

We'll have our C level executives, so our CEO, our cto, our CIO and our CFO all be on that Steerco. We'll probably meet once a month kind of thing or once every two months, depending on the length of that project to update them on how that goes.

What's that flow of that meeting like?

Normally it's here's there are slides and our updates and one thing I do encourage is templates are great but you do want to, especially with those level executives, you want to make it as easily digestible as possible. Fewer words, fewer of everything. Here's the big picture, here's a status. Again, we get really colorful with some of that stuff so that they know, okay, yeah, this is good, this is bad. We should probably talk about this. So organizing in a way that's really easily digestible for them is important. But normally it's going through that and then let's hear what you have and how we should handle these things. And if there are any decisions that should be made, usually keep those two right at the end, say, all right, we've had this discussion. What's the decision that we're coming to? We need to document that and then move forward.

Is there any special approach when you do make an important decision to communicate with the broader organization and track those decisions?

That's been challenging for us in a lot of ways in the past. We've used a lot of different tools to communicate with project leads and then there's something else to communicate with project execution oriented individuals. Having a decision log is something that is vital and important and have that stored somewhere. But even in that is challenging in some ways, especially when you have that cross function functional piece where finance uses this tool to manage their project pieces, even pre close and other people use other things. So you have all these different and disparate ways of handling those types of things. So having one centralized repository for decision making for really for everything, for all the documentation that you've built out throughout the entire process, as you're bringing more and more people into the process post close for integration execution, how are we going to update them? How are they going to get up to speed? So having one place with all of that kind of laid out is vital and important and one of the reasons why we love Deal Room.

I want to finish on this part because you're giving a lot of good examples of where having this integration team fits in well. It creates a lot of value. It's sort of a nice pivotal role between all the different departments going on the leadership team, making sure things are going the right direction, connecting with the incoming employees and making sure they're having a good experience. I get it. Very important. What do you do when you don't have that? If you're an organization that doesn't have a dedicated integration team, how do you keep up with all this stuff? How do you make it happen?

I'm not sure anybody has this figured out perfectly in any way. I know I don't. So this is a constant learning curve for me. Listening to people that have more experience than you and have done this multiple times and in other spaces is vital. That's how I've been able to build what we have so far. We have a long way to go, but I think having that type of learner's mentality and I'm willing to learn and we're on this ship together. Let's figure out how we can make this a good trip. So that's one thing, just continuously learning from others, but then two, really figuring out what works for your corporate environment and the way people work there. So JAMF is very much a people first approach to almost everything we do. They also love to give people choices so people have a say and so they'll have a choice in what they're doing and how they're doing it. So you have to be very flexible in that regard. Be open to different ways of getting to point B. It might not be the way I would normally get to point B, but that's how they get to point B. And at the end of the day all we need is for them to get to point B. So being open to that kind of perspective has been key and something that I've been learning through at JAMF as well. Coming from more stringent environments and coming into a space where oh no, people have choice. Okay, that's different for me. So how do I engage with that has been one challenging but also in a lot of ways refreshing. I've been able to ingest a lot of different ways and perspectives to get to where we want to go. That makes life interesting. So there's also leaning into that fun side of things too.

Got an interesting point around culture's impact of integration Overall. Some organizations culture just lend to them being naturally better at integrating companies. Especially when they're just welcoming towards new people joining their organization, welcoming the changes and very adapting versus not. Then all of a sudden you got a lot of points of friction when you're trying to do a deal and they're not as welcoming. So that's kind of an interesting take I got out of that.

Yeah, I don't think corporate culture can necessarily be understated in all of those things. It affects everything and integration is about people most of the time, whether it's on the receiving side or the other side of the deal. Corporate culture is pretty important.

I want to get into this prep for an acquisition. I'm always curious about how do you make sure you got the right resources and know where you're going to have some issues before all this stuff happens. I feel like it's a lot and M and A comes in also. You got all these new people joining, got all these initiatives that you're trying to tie together. There's just so many different changes happening. How do you just prepare for that and saying, hey, is our organization ready for this, that we're ready to go bring on this other organization.

Our investment committee meetings are tailored towards that. We're presenting a lot of different things from a market perspective where we're saying, okay, yeah, we think this is a market we need to go play in and here are the different players and here's who might be we're having conversations with already or greasing wheels. Those types of conversations with those level of executives are important, but they also know all of the other projects going on. Oh, we have this over here that's happening and we have this over here that's happening might be something that the corporate development team doesn't even have insight into necessarily. Having those type of regular cadence meetings with executives that have a full view of everything going on at the company is vital. We've definitely walked away from opportunities that may have been a good opportunity, but our company wasn't ready for it or our people aren't ready for it. We wouldn't have the right resources to allocate to that particular project. And so we said, you know what, this is not the right time for that. And I will say there's deals out there that look very enticing, but there's nothing better than walking away from a deal that you're not ready to take on.

That makes a lot of sense. So there's a level of scoping just to really have some assurance that you have the resources to do the deal.

Yeah, that comes down to communication. As a corporate development team, you're not just communicating to all of the other resources that you're using within your process, but you're also having have regular meetings and communication with your executive leadership team, making sure that you're all aligned and that they're apprised of everything you're doing. And then you hear okay, yeah, this is why we're going to say no to that or no, those cross functional leads, they know all of these things that might be challenges. They can bubble those up and we can determine, okay yeah, that risk is acceptable or no, we should pass.

If you were to click down into it and saying where would things be likely the bottleneck or go wrong? Is it a HR can't onboard all these people? Is it the it? There's way too many different tech stack then that's not going to integrate. Well, like where do you see that resource constraint being? And I'm just trying to get a sense of like when do you actually, as an even earlier stage company like ours, know when you're really M and A ready?

It's going to be different for every company and Whatever stage they're in. I know for us particularly, we're in this stage where, again, we've had that hockey stick growth. We're working heavily on a lot of really cool things. But as we work on those cool things, bringing in other tech stacks is challenging and creates a lot of stress on our R and D and product teams. So working through that and making sure that roadmaps are aligned and that we're all heading in the same direction, but that we can also properly resource all of those things appropriately is a challenge. So we're actually considering a lot of really creative ways of managing that, whether that's through certain pieces of, oh, maybe some outsourced components, or how are we going to bring in other people to help us because we don't have those internal resources, things like that. At least thinking through them, evaluating them, figuring out what works and what doesn't work is important. And those are the conversations we're having.

Makes sense. It ties back to the driver of doing the deal. And then you're prioritizing your activities around that. Do we have the right resources? So the emphasis is on the tech. Then let's make sure this aligns and we're not overly disrupting the tech team and their roadmaps. We go past that. We got the resources, we got the deal, we're executing on it. We're going through diligence. You're planning integration, folks are doing that. And then you close and actually got to integrate the thing. It goes back to the resources thing. Right? Because most of the time, most companies, there's a few mega, huge companies that'll have tons of dedicated folks in every department. But most cases, it's all shared resources. And you're competing with the day job, what we hired you to do. Now you got some extra homework for M and A. And then people get burnt out. What does burnout look like?

Usually for me, it looks like, hey, it's Camilo. How are you? With no response, people just starting, people aren't responding.

What else do we get from burnout?

Like, oh, we're going to avoid that guy. So that's part of it, I think too. Just the level of effort put into the process is minimized. Oh, yeah, I need to get that thing done. We'll just hodgepodge something together to say, we got it done. But did we really put the effort forth that we needed to actually appropriately execute that particular integration task? No, it wasn't done appropriately, Things like that. And then you will get the very forthright individuals who are like, why are we doing this again? Why do I need to do this again? And you know what? That's not a priority. And that's actually come up a couple times where we've had to pivot and change approach in some ways because it hasn't been a priority for certain individuals or certain functions. We have other things going on that take precedence. Obviously. We either have to get senior leadership involved and say, hey, we need to evaluate this prioritization, or we need to pivot and say, how can we execute on this in a different way through a different avenue or through a different function.

If I would generally ask you, how do you prevent burnout from happening?

I'm not sure there's a way to prevent it, especially in the environment. If you're in a high acquisitive environment, really not a way to prevent that. It's going to happen in cross functional teams. So you have to learn how to manage it. And that's the challenging part.

We'll have a pizza party when this is all done.

I love pizza, but pizza only goes so far.

What about defining the end? Do you do that when you do these integrations? Hey, we here, we're done, guys, let's move forward.

Yeah. Obviously you have your integration plans and there's a lot of very execution oriented tasks within that plan. A lot of people think that once those plans are done and all my tasks are ticked off, we're done with integration. And that's not necessarily the case. How are we continuing to report and measure progress and are we actually receiving the value that we said we would from this particular deal? That may continue to happen and continue to evolve past your 180 day plan that you might have created or whatnot? Is there an end? I think there is an end eventually. Is there like a clean line in the sand that says, okay, this is over? Usually not like that. It's usually a little bit more nebulous than that. We're still tracking things that were done two years ago and we're still talking about it, figuring out if there's something we need to do. I think having that pulse on where we are continues for a while.

Do you communicate that with everybody in terms of stakeholders involved?

So stakeholders involved, you balloon post close and all the people that are involved in the integration piece and execution of that integration piece kind of balloons for a while and then that begins to dwindle over time as well. There's less and less people involved in that piece. Especially as you move to normal business process. We're no longer managing this from an integration perspective, it's already moved into whatever normal process we've already built around, say, financial reporting or whatever. So now it's just part of that normal cadence. I feel like once it moves into that normal cadence, yeah, that integration piece is over. But again, you're still tracking the overall piece of the integration for a while. Yeah, I think people move in and move out of this process pretty organically in a lot of ways.

I wanted to talk to you about how you maintain alignment around priorities with the team. This is where technology comes in play. We're just going to put a disclaimer out there. Camilo is a customer of Deal Room. JAMF is a customer. I haven't paid him to say any of this stuff. So feel free to be honest and unfiltered. It's always interesting for me to learn and improve from customers feedback. Tell me about that. Tell me about the tools you use, because I think this is the other key piece is keeping all these individuals aligned in the highest priority tasks throughout the whole process.

When I initially came to the process at jamf, one of the first things I identified as a high risk for us and our process in general was the fact that we used so many tools to use different things. And again, it goes back to that corporate culture of everybody has a choice, oh yeah, you want to use this tool or that tool, whatever makes you feel most comfortable. That feels good in a lot of ways, but it presents its own challenges from a process perspective. Having to now bring all of those plans into one place was a key objective of mine within the first year of working at jamf. And we were able to do that by using Deal Room, which was great for us. Essentially it's our source of truth for what's been done or what has not been done with any part of the process. That's one of the things I love about it so much, is that it's not just an integration tool. We first used it just as an integration tool, but the more we got into it, the more we realized, yeah, we do so much more with this and now have used it from beginning of the process when it's just documenting the conversations we're having in early discussions with potential targets, all the way to post close integration reporting, building out reports to send to executive leadership on a regular basis so that they know exactly what's going on with the acquisitions we've made. Having that end to end piece was vital. But then too, it's just so easy to navigate and use and so bringing people in again There's M and A fatigue. There's also tool fatigue. Oh, another tool that we have to use. That was definitely something that was a challenge at the beginning, but people realized that, okay, I'm actually able to do so much in this that I was doing in five other tools before. Why don't I just use this now to manage this particular process? That's been really helpful. So now we have people that are in there building out playbooks so that the next time we do something, they have a template that they've created. So we already have people working in that way and making it their own, which is fun. The other thing we're looking at too is just down the road, how can different technologies really aid in how we manage our process in general? Can we use AI? Is that something that would be help us whether it's due diligence or it's integration, tracking or down the line to. One of the biggest challenges for us is interdependencies. So you have different departments who have built their integration plans, but pieces of their integration plan is completely dependent on another department's activities and where they are in the process. Being able to link those appropriately is challenging. How can we leverage technology to help make those connections in a way that's meaningful and honest, but then also help keep us accountable to timelines and making sure that everybody's moving along the same path at the same pace that we want.

But for you, Deal Room has helped centralize the data, become the single source of truth. So anytime you want to know what's going on, the deal, who's doing what, you know where to go find that information. Yeah, for some folks, there's a little bit of an adoption hurdle, but once they get over it, they realize, hey, at the end of the day, I'm not using all these different tools. It ultimately simplifies the workflow.

Absolutely.

I want to bring this point up because I have a strong view and I even wrote a whole book about this called Agile M and A, which is obviously about moving fast and having a very iterative collaborative process. But the main thesis was all about connecting your diligence and integration process together. The better you did that, the better continuity, you have better integration plan, you're going to end up with better execution. I want to talk to you about that because that's one of the core designs when we build Deal Room was to be able to do that to. One, I wanted to see your thoughts around that. Two, there's an industry, old school thinking of the seller controls the whole process. And there's a challenge to it because now we're saying, hey, listen, the buyer is the one with everything at stake. They're putting the money up. They're the ones taking the big bet on this. They have more people involved in the deal and they're the ones that ultimately are accountable for everything that's going to be happening post close. So for them to be able to drive a process in a way that allows them to best plan for integration and work with the incoming team on that plan is probably the best way to go. But anyways, I just want to hear your take. That's it. That's my big pitch and position on it.

And having been on both sides of that table, I completely agree with you. It is a challenge because again, people are set in their ways and they're like, this is the way we've always done it. You talk to us, we agree to something and then we provide the data room. And I get it, there are concerns, concerns around all of their data and where it's housed and all of that. Totally understand the risk potential. But one of the things that we've said from the beginning and upfront is we're going to see this stuff anyway. We can tell you this is secure. Here's how we can provide the documentation to prove that there's obvious benefits, not just to us, but to you as the seller to be able to use our platform. We're not going to push on that. That's not going to be a deal breaker for us. If they want to use another system to house their stuff or whatnot and we want to use that, that's fine. We'll go along with that. At the end of the day, it's still going to make its way into deal room in some way, shape or form. Whether it's at the beginning of that process or at the end of that process. Because for us, it is our source of truth. So people are going to come back and if we have questions about anything, they're going to want to see it in the system that we use. So eventually it'll make its way in there some way or another. It should be a non issue, but it is for a lot of people.

So do you run both your diligence process and your integration in the same room?

Yes. And I'll take it back to the beginning. We were in the middle of a deal when we first brought on deal room and so we did not use it for any due diligence or anything like that. So we just used it for the Integration piece, which was great. We loved the product. We're like, oh, this is valuable. What we saw was that we left a lot sitting on the table by just using it for integration. There was a lot of pieces we couldn't connect. We couldn't appropriately pull information to inform those integration plans. It wasn't easy and seamless. And next deal that came around, we were able to use it for the entire process and the target was amiable to using our platform. The other thing is it saves them a lot of money too. Should be a win. And so they took it that way. We were able to do that process from end to end within Deal Room. And you can tell the difference. People know where to go, people know where things are very easy to find within the data room that we've set up. And then to correlate that to then specific tasks within the integration plan potentially has been really cool to see. I've been also interested to see how people are making it their own again. We all think differently. We all have different perspectives on how to manage things. So to see different functions go in there and say, oh, I can use this way and we're going to figure this out. And being able to leverage the tool to do that for them has been really neat. Whereas another function doesn't necessarily use it that way because they don't need to. So finding those different value pockets within different departmental functions has been interesting too.

That's pretty cool. You'll create a work stream for doing diligence in Deal Room and you'll create a work stream for your integration plan. But do you update it that way? Where stuff's coming in and progressing in diligence and you're patching stuff and just iteratively updating your integration plan? Or is it more. Here's the template we typically use.

I don't think we're at that point yet and I think that would be great. Obviously, the more we can get out early on, the better. We haven't reached that point yet, but that's the way I envision the future. As we're going through DD and those outputs and reports are being generated. Now all of a sudden our integration plans are being updated based on those particular either risks that are identified or opportunities that are identified within those outputs.

So now let's go back to talking about AI because this is why I'm like reinvigorated all my product interest. I feel like I was involved with Deal Room back when we inception in 2012. Yeah, it's fun. You get the business and Then you get to the point where it's about market fits there, you're scaling it and then you're building team to go all your functions. Yeah, but now with all the AI emerging, it's like a whole different view. There's this whole next generation and it creates a further divide between folks that think that they can keep doing it in Excel versus you're going to be missing out on so much capability. And the one I was really interested in is integration planning. Yeah, there's so much you can start populating. I brought that up because there's something that you're currently not doing manual something that AI can actually start doing for you. As soon as you start getting that diligence information, it can start thinking about what does that integration plan look like. And then as it gets appended to from your team members, you can identify those dependencies and start raising them up and saying, hey, what are these potential conflicts going to be? So that's why I thought, pretty interesting to see that as a use case. I think the other thing I've noticed is M and A is a series of templates. When you really look at it, you have your investment memo that you're signing up to the board, you have all your functions writing some kind of findings report, you're updating around progress of integration by function broadly. But everybody's completing a template. Is that an opportunity to start pre populating those templates with draft content so they can get put together faster?

If you think about it, much of what we talked about today, even from a people perspective, is M and A fatigue under resourcing. This is additive, this isn't their full time job. All of those things, those are challenges that everything you're talking about helps to solve because it takes the burden away of having to generate content. And let's be honest, people don't like to create content, they like to change content. Right. So if you ask somebody, here's a blank slate, do something. Oh man, that's way more of a challenge than if you give them something that's already pre populated and they're like, oh yeah I can, I'll figure this out. To me, that's powerful, that's time saving. Not only from a time perspective, but then just from that fatigue perspective, they're not going to get nearly as fatigued if I give them something already to start with than telling them, oh, blank slate. Here's an Excel spreadsheet that you need to figure out what your tasks are and what your plan should be based on these reports that you now have to go read. If I can take that burden away from them, that's huge. That's huge for our process.

It's groundwork. At the end of the day, the tactical crap we can say and focus more on the real strategic thinking involved and understand the information making the appropriate edits and move forward.

Yeah. And then execute.

I'm excited about it. I've talked to a lot of customers. We've had conversations about it. And there's so many of these use cases and I think I'm even more fired up. I just looked at our first prototype of what we're taking to the market. I was literally looking forward to rolling that stuff out and just seeing the changes it can make in the industry.

Yeah, it's exciting.

I don't know what we're going to do with legal fees, consulting fees and banking fees.

Yeah. And then eventually you won't need a person like me. You'll just have this for you.

Somebody's got to go and listen to people and empathize with them.

That's true.

Until we figure that out, you can.

Make learning models empathetic. I guess you can figure that out.

You're going to have the empathy robot going around. How are you feeling today?

Here's a slice of pizza.

Okay. I think we're done with the deal room commercial. We try not to. I feel like I'm pretty good about this not being so everything's a driven commercial plug. But it is. The one thing I'm like super proud about is like contributing to build the greatest platform to manage M and A.

It's such an important part of our process now. So I almost can't talk about our process without speaking about it in some way. It's pretty integrated at this point.

The first time practitioners we have. Any advice for folks that are going to be coming in your role integration.

Lead one, you'll get through it. It will feel daunting and complex because it is, but it's incredibly rewarding too. So I would say just push through, move forward. And like I said earlier, listen, there's a lot of good content out there. A lot of good practitioners who've been doing this forever listen and learn from them. But then two, don't be scared to bring new ideas to the table. We need that. I think we've talked a little bit about that already. Having people with different experiences, different perspectives on how to get things done is not a bad thing. That can be a very good thing and can actually lead to a process that's just Better than it used to be. Don't be afraid to bring things to the table that, oh, well, we didn't used to do it that way. That's okay. Maybe we try it this way and it might not work. Probably my third thing would be don't be afraid to fail. You may fail. There may be things where it's like aspects of this deal were complicated and it didn't really work out. That's really the only way you learn in some ways. So don't be afraid to fail. Move through that and then learn and iterate for the next time. One of the things that people think about M and A process as a whole is that it's just very linear process. And it's not every single deal is different and complex in its own ways, but you kind of shift through all of those things. So experience and time, you're going to learn a lot. Just keep bringing that to the table at every deal and you'll be okay.

Challenge the status quo.

Yeah, I love it.

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

I wish I could come to the table with this story of, oh, man, this one thing happened and it was absolutely insane. I don't think I have anything like that. I would say being part of a process during COVID again, it just upended everything. We had to do everything differently from management meetings that we couldn't do in person. So now we're evaluating things from afar. You're not getting that people piece where I'm sitting across the table from you and really seeing how things are and listening to your pitch. But then I'm going to grab a drink with you afterwards and we're spending three or four hours continuing to talk about it over drinks like those things weren't happening. So you're now operating in a space that's a lot more limited. On top of that, you're having to update executives on. Here's what the COVID strategy is, and here's how we're managing that from a business perspective. Here's how it's affecting our process. Here's what we're having to inform all of the potential buyers about and giving them updates on how we're handling Covid, too. Just a whole subset of muscles that we had to exercise that weren't normal to the process. That was a crazy time. It was a wild ride and was interesting to be a part of.

Yeah, I feel like any of the transactions, but especially doing something like that during COVID would have been pretty crazy.

And then different time zones too. You had Europe and Latin America and we were doing them simultaneously too, so wow. Super fun.

Camille, thank you so much for taking the time with me. I enjoy this conversation. You helped me become a better M and a scientist.

Oh, I'm glad to hear it. It was a pleasure to be here and love this community, so I'm looking forward to hearing more and learning more from all of you too.

Those of you still with us, thank you for sticking through. Until next time, here's to the deal.

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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 Kison K I s o n mascience.com or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's Masscience.com here's to the deal.

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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.