How to Run a Successful Cultural Integration

Emerson Block, Cardinal Health, Broadcom Toast, Energizer Jam, Treehouse Food, Hora Main there's too many to list what do the best corporate development teams in the world have in common? They use Deal Room, add a crappy data room, and Excel trackers. In 2021, Emerson did an $11 billion acquisition on Deal Room. Then this year, a $14 billion platform divestiture to Blackstone. Even with every big bank name involved in the deal, they all had to use Deal Room. Learn why the best in MA combine diligence and integration into one workflow so they can get both diligence and integration done faster. To execute M and A like the Best, you have to know how to use Deal Room. See for yourself@dealroom.net Again, that's dealroom.net let's get to the interview. I'm Kisan Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during MA deals. Hello 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. If you want to keep up with us on the go, head to LinkedIn and follow M and A Science. I'm your host, Kisam Patel, CEO and Founder of M and A Science. Joining me today is Cort Crothers, President and CEO at Tricorbron. Tricorbron is one of the world's largest suppliers of glass and plastic containers, aluminum cans, closures, dispensers and tubes used by consumer packaged goods companies across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Today we're going to talk about how to run a successful cultural integration. How are you doing today?

Great to be here. Yeah. I really appreciate the chance to talk to you about this.

I'm at one of your headquarter offices here in Chicago. Live in person.

That's right.

In a beautiful conference room with all your packaging everywhere.

So, so many examples. There's literally hundreds of thousands of items out there. Different, unique items, but many great examples here in the room with us today for sure.

Could we kick things off a little bit about your background?

I'm an accountant by training, but really a commercial guy and a general manager by practice and experience. I've run a number of B2B primarily distribution, logistics, supply chain type companies around the world ranging as large as $10 billion. Tricor Bronze, a two and a half billion dollar global leader in the packaging space and have been here for the last seven years as we're going to talk about today. This company founded in 1902 and a lot of organic growth over that time. But we've also completed 44 acquisitions. And I think what's really interesting about the business is the fact that we acquire great companies and help them get even better. And so having fantastic cultural matches with those companies is really the name of the game for us.

That's the selling point when you acquire these companies.

What's the key thing? And it's also about fit. So if it's companies that are looking to retire or people that don't want to stay, those are often transactions that we can't do because this is a people business. And so it's about finding more great people to join the company.

Fair enough. Pretty strong operating background. Joined Tricorbron where it's historically a lot of acquisitions and you continue to drive that. In addition to your day job as a CEO, you recently completed your doctoral dissertation looking at cultural integration in M and A. Can you tell us more? Why the hell did you do that?

Yeah, exactly right. So that was always a bucket list item. I had a period where I was retired for a number of years, just doing board work. Had started my doctorate at that time, ended up coming to run Tricorbarana. I'd been a board member before. It was a great opportunity to help grow this company. So had to sort of put the doctorate on pause during COVID when I wasn't traveling for a year or two during COVID as much. It was a chance to kickstart it again and finish that up last year at Pepperdine. And so we really interestingly studied not just cultural integration, but we studied 12 private equity backed companies that are serial acquirers. So those 12 companies did 268acquisitions over the course of five years and really looked at how they thought about cultural integration and how important cultural similarity or differences were to the success of those acquisitions. And there's actually very little academic research on this topic within private equity backed companies. And we're. And obviously that's because of the privacy, the confidentiality of those companies. So yes, lots of practical operating experience. Probably involved in 100 plus acquisitions myself and then have done a lot of academic work studying this topic of cultural integration in the acquisition space as well.

From taking the Doctoral like really taking that academic sort of research. What were the big takeaways from that?

The obvious question is, does cultural fit matter? And the answer is it depends. And it depends on if you're buying a company for growth reasons. And the people are a big part of that growth, which is why we buy companies. It matters a ton. It might matter more than anything else. Some of the companies in the study were acquiring other businesses for scale benefits, for cost takeout, maybe to buy intellectual property. In those cases where maybe the people aren't all staying, the cultural fit maybe actually matters a little bit less. In the case of all of the growth companies in the study, it mattered a great deal. And the ones that were really good at it spent an immense amount of time on cultural integration. I think what was really interesting in the study, those 12 companies. And just to give some idea of the size and scope of the companies. Average ebitda was about 50 million. Average revenue size was about 500 million. The average company in the study over five years doubled revenue. And EBITDA, the average company, did 22 transactions during that period. And 11 of the 12 companies sold during that five year period. And all but one of them sold for more than three times cash on cash. What that says is M and A can be a great strategy to grow and. And when you're focused on doing it for growth reasons and getting the cultural integration, it can be incredibly successful.

Great takeaways. Sounds like the strategy is a big driver in how important Cultural integration, where more people focus more. You want to put an emphasis on.

Culture, which makes sense, right? Because if the people are going to stay, you want to make sure it's a place they want to come and then everyone can work well together. I mean, so many of these things, and I think this is true in business and in life, are actually common sense. But they're often hard to get right. And it takes a lot of discipline to do them on a continuous fashion and get better as you do them. And so lots of things we can talk about later in the interview, about what some of those really good acquirers did and how they got very good at doing acquisitions and cultural integration.

Culture comes up a lot on this podcast and I can sense some listeners are probably gonna be rolling their eyes. There we go again, talking about culture.

But it matters.

It's changed where it's not just the people, HR department and the integration leads talking about it. I'm sitting here, the CEO of the company, and we're talking about culture. And I think that's the Shift I've noticed in the past five years where now all of a sudden it's becoming a pretty big emphasis across the whole early as the deal thesis.

And I think it's so critical in our company, which is also why it's so important for our M and A. So we're really in the business of developing unique packaging solutions for many of the largest CPGs on Earth, but then also for new emerging brands that are trying to figure out their packaging, their brand position in the market. So the ability to develop a custom solution, that's a human capability. So this is less factories and inventory and buildings and it's really about people. And if a business wins on the caliber of its people, then culture is the way that you do that and build it. And so by definition, our culture is a massive part of our business strategy and our success for 120 plus years. So if we're adding to that, we've got to get it right. Goes back to strategy, goes back for the reasons for M and A. Goes back to the reasons your company wins in the marketplace. Important to us doesn't mean it's important for everybody. And in our study it was also very important for most of the companies.

Makes a lot of sense. If I have like a magic smooth skin lotion formula and I want to work with the right company because I know the packaging is going to be a huge part of how we go to market, that relationship's going to be pretty critical.

And the development of something unique for your brand to help it stand out in the market, that's developing new intellectual property. So you need a very capable, very committed, very knowledgeable person to help you do that. And also a person who can work well across an internal team across with our supplier partners in the case of our company. And so again, someone who can work really well with a customer, but then also work really well internally across functions across a supply chain to build a custom solution that's a special kind of person.

What's your M and A strategy?

Yeah, so the M and A strategy for us I think is a little bit unique. And we're largely buying first, second, sometimes third generation family businesses, which is really important in all elements of the M and A, not just the cultural piece. Because so often the sellers that we're dealing with, this is the only time they will ever be involved in M and A. They likely haven't bought a company, they've never sold their company before. And so it's very unique in terms of that process. And we often are helping them through that process, also, the companies that we're buying, we want those people to stay. So, as I said, at tricorbron, we've acquired 44 companies. The vast majority of those sellers are still with our company. In many cases, their kids come and work at Tricorbron. We want them to stay. So we buy great companies that are doing well, and then we help them get better. That might be capital investment, it might be adding more salespeople to the company. It might be helping them with expanding their supply chain. But we want good companies, great people that we can help be even better and help grow even faster. And so because we want those people to stay, how they'll fit in our culture is a critical part of the assessment.

You're buying businesses, it sounds like you're buying these businesses. You want to continue the growth trajectory on those businesses. What does integration look like? Is there we bring this all in one portfolio of offerings, or there, like.

Light versus deep integration, it depends on the geography. So if it's a new geography we're entering, obviously the integration would be a little bit less because there's nothing to necessarily integrate it to. But at the same time, we very frequently have full integrations. One of the important things is one of the elements of our culture is we tend to be fairly decentralized. A number of decisions are made in a local market. And I also found this across my dissertation study, which is that the serial acquirers, the people that are doing a lot of deals, they're not only thoughtful about what they're buying, they've actually structured their company to be highly receptive to the companies that they acquire. And so the fact that we're decentralized allows us to bring someone on our system into the company, into our programs, but they can still run their local business in their local market the way that they see fit, obviously within some parameters. And as you might have been running your own family business before as your own boss, any parameters are new parameters. And so you have to get that level of kind of tension or that balance. Right. But I think we're really set up to bring these companies in a way that allows them to stay and thrive and be successful as part of this broader multibillion dollar company that we've become.

It sounds like you're pretty dynamic in your integration approach. And I'm curious of, like, what factors would change based on company from one to another.

So sometimes size. So we've done acquisitions that are 1 or 2 million of EBITDA, and we've done acquisitions that are well into eight figures of EBITDA. In some cases we've bought almost platforms in their own right in terms of their level of significance or scale in a given market, a geography and end market. So in some of those cases we have a small number of those that have been left largely standalone, still on our systems, still part of our culture, still absolutely part of the team. They might have another level of autonomy, they might keep their brand. And so we've had a number of those and then we've had smaller ones that are fully integrated. But in all those cases it's still about keeping the people, helping them win, helping them succeed over the long term as part of the bigger company. Our failure, when we view failure in this, is that the people leave and that's a failure for us. If the people we acquire leave, that's not a good scenario.

That's your success metric, right? Are most of your deals proprietary or they come through bankers?

Almost all are proprietary. And not to say 100%, because we certainly work with a number of bankers around the world and there will be occasions where things are brought to us that we might not have been aware of. We have a large corporate development team and then we also have responsibilities for each geographic leader around the world to also get to know the key players in their market. And because this cultural fit idea is so important, it's almost impossible to assess that in an auction process. It's really hard to assess that. The way you assess that is by getting to know someone personally over months, over years, in some cases literally over decades. In some of the acquisitions that we've done, getting to know each other and not just about us understanding their culture, but, but again, these entrepreneurs, these founders, they are transacting their life's work. Perhaps their parents life's work, perhaps their grandparents life's work, their name is on the business. Where it goes matters a lot to them. What happens to the team members from their side matters a lot to them. And so we're definitely interested in these long term relationships so that we can assess culture, assess fit. But it's equally important for the sellers to do the exact same thing with us so that they're comfortable with where they'll bring a business. And so our ask of those folks as we get to know people is we just want to be your first call. That's all we're ever looking to do is be the first call. And it has nothing to do with the price that we pay on a transaction because there's a market price that has to be paid. But it's are we comfortable with each other, that the fit is going to be very strong and that this will be a great home for that person's life's work.

Are you convincing people to sell or are you waiting for them to raise their hand that they want to sell?

Yeah, my view especially because the types of things that we're buying, again, these are family businesses that the reasons for those things are completely different, different situation to situation. We're definitely not trying to convince people to sell again. It might be today, it might be next month, it might be a year from now, it might be 10 years from now. We just want to get to know people, them to get to know us. And when it's time, we want to make sure that we get that call. But in my experience, like the reasons that someone sells are all completely different based on maybe kids interests in taking over the business, investment horizons or requirements in the business, changing competitive dynamics in a certain local geography, systems, investments, a whole bunch of things can cause people to be thinking about the right timing. We really leave that to the seller, but we maintain ongoing relationships with those sellers all the time.

What kind of terms do you structure that sets this deal up for that leadership to really stick around?

They're all different and everyone's needs are different. And we want to make sure that we're always listening to what's important to the seller. And so that's making sure it's a fair and full price and then that's making sure there's alignment of financial incentives going forward. And what that looks like can be very different based on what's important to that seller. But we always want to have people that are invested in the ongoing success of the larger enterprise again because we want them to be here for the long term. And this company, our parent company, Trek Corbron, we've sold the private equity six times over the last 30 years. I've been involved in two of those. But we have many people that have sold companies to Tricorbron and then have rolled with us three, four, five times and they now have kids working here. They're still invested in the business. In some cases, grandkids are working here. That's what it's all about for us. And that's actually quite unique in the market, in the model. But it's why we've been successful and it's why we've been here for 122 years.

They're happy with their options.

Yeah, that's right. But everybody who comes is a contributor to the success of the enterprise. So yes, happy with what we build, but we build it together. And they're a key part of building it together. And really the strategy is buy great companies, bring them in, help them grow even faster. By definition, the people that are coming here are great people that already had built a very successful business.

Use or notes?

Yep. Sometimes we'll rollovers equity, different structures in different situations. We are truly global. So we operate all around the world. Obviously tax situations, legal situations, all of those are different, depending on jurisdiction, depending on the seller's needs. And so we try and be flexible to meet those needs.

Let's talk cultural diligence. Yeah. What's your approach like, what's your thinking on it? Is it first meeting? Do I get a gut feel like play it out for me.

You know, I think it's interesting. And everybody here is responsible for cultural diligence. And one of the things I found in the dissertation is that people that are really good at M and A have dedicated teams. Not just the corp dev team, not just the integration team within hr, within finance, within it. People that are used to doing diligence, that are used to doing integration. And one of the things that's happening as we're doing diligence, as we're having any conversations is you're always assessing cultural fit and the seller's always assessing cultural fit with you as well. Oftentimes because it's in a family business when it's being sold, you may not have access to a broad swath of the team members of that company. You're somewhat limited in some of those diligence interactions to assess in the time before, the time after the dinner, walking around the office and just seeing interactions of always being assessing the culture of that company. And again, just as the seller is doing with us. I think though, if that's all been left to just the point of an auction process where you haven't met the company before, it may already be too late to be doing that cultural assessment. Because what we really want to do is be doing that for years over dinners and breakfasts and lunches and coffees and trade shows and text messages and just having relationships, just good human relationships with people and getting to know each other. I don't want it to sound like this is our assessment. This is a mutual assessment of fit.

That's a good point. If you look at our own industry, I could easily. You need drop a name. I'll tell you right away, if this is a good culture fit, I'd love to go work with them versus not that makes sense. And then if you're in that auction process, you may not know that company. All of a sudden that makes it pretty difficult. How do you weigh in on that if you're in that situation? Sounds like not too many of your deals go down that path, but you sort of just try to do as much as you can.

You do everything you can. And I think a lot of it happens in the in between times. Waiting on a teams call, there's some chit chat before, after, during, watching people interact with others, maybe watching how they interact with their advisors. If you're walking around a facility, how do they interact with the other team members? That's huge in our company that we're all on team together. Every job in our company is super critical. Anyone here would help anybody else with something they have to do. And so you're watching it. Is this the same way in the person that you're talking to and that you're walking around the shop floor with and you can pick those things up. A lot of it's non verbal. If you're really attentive, a lot of those things become fairly obvious fairly quickly. Harder in an auction type of process. I also think again getting lots of people to be thinking about this from lots of angles and comparing notes on the different diligence discussions on the different interactions. And then as you're going through a process, there's always a tough time in a process. Everyone knows and everyone that listens to this pod and I listen to this pod and everyone's an expert practitioner, everyone knows there's always that tough point in the spa negotiation in Q of E in something where there's maybe an item that doesn't make sense or a difficult item that has to be negotiated. And so how does that get handled? How does everyone work together in the difficult times? Because when you're working together in the business you've got to solve problems together. And so what's that interaction like? But the best thing is to be early doing it and spend time getting to know the people before the time.

Comes, long game on the relationship and then be collaborative. You mentioned having your HR finance it leads that are collaborative in doing this.

Assessment and experienced and will be involved in the integration. And then we've got a phenomenal integration leader who's involved from day one who's probably worked on 100 integrations over his career and has been a general manager and has great experience and also so involved in. Because they'll be the people that are doing the integration so very early understanding how's everyone going to work together, and talking through a bunch of the integration topics, which also gives you a flavor for how are these things going to fit together. One thing I didn't mention that I think is really important, when you think about this cultural assessment piece, the fit being two way is absolutely critical because again, for us, we want people to come here, thrive here, grow here. So if we spun some idea of what the company is or how things are going to work, and it wasn't actually that way when we got here and they're unhappy, we have failed even if we acquired the company, because we want people to come here and like being here. So we spend a lot of time talking about our operating principles, our culture, our decision making, how we run the business, and to see how do they react to that and how do they feel about that. Because again, if you're an owner in a smaller business, which is mostly what we buy, you're king in that business or queen in that business today, regardless of the fact that we're fairly decentralized and very flexible and a lot of empowerment in the decision decision making, there is still a boss, there is still a bigger company that you're part of. How will they interact with that, how will they deal with that? And I think that's a big change that any entrepreneur needs to make and think about when they're selling their company.

It's interesting. I got an opportunity to do some preliminary diligence on a company earlier this year and it was an interesting challenge to really focus on culture in those conversations. And it felt a little awkward. Let's talk about values. What's the leadership style like over there? And you start waking up to it, like, this company really operates a lot different than we do. What does that look like for you? Like, do you have key questions? Because you mentioned the operations of the company, like management style, decision making, like, what are those things that you're trying to dig into to surface some of that through conversation?

For sure. I think it all comes down to what's the relationship with team members, how are decisions made and what's the customer orientation? If you think about the key elements of culture, they're really focused on decision making, empowerment, and is the orientation of the company external, I. E. Taking care of customers or internal? We're very externally oriented, which is we would do anything for a customer in our company. And that's the DNA of the company long ahead of me and my time in the business. It's a great DNA to have. Not every company has that. Some may be focused on operational excellence and spreadsheets and other things internally. And there's nothing wrong with that. And the key thing about culture, I don't believe there's good or bad culture at all. There's cultural fit with strategy and there's cultural fit between two companies. We're not assessing if someone has a good culture or a bad culture. We're trying to understand how do they treat team members, how are decisions made, how important are customers? And if you can figure those things out that we can then match up, how will that be in the trichrobron culture? So we're not using a cultural assessment tool. We're not in asking 20 culture questions. We're assessing it as part of everything that we do. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. It was interesting in this study, again, the 12 companies did an average of 22 acquisitions over five years. For 10 or 11 of those companies, culture was at least a medium importance. And for many, it was a very high importance because they were acquiring for growth reasons. None of them used a cultural assessment tool. And you might say that doesn't work. Except that culture was the thing they were assessing across every question and every interaction they had with every person in the business all the time. And that's, to me, a better way to assess it as opposed to a handful of questions.

It's not quantified on a complicated matrix.

We do not put it in a complicated matrix, but everyone would weigh in on an opinion. As we're talking about the deal, and at any time we're working on multiple deals around the world with sometimes different teams, sometimes the same teams, depending on geography. But we're always talking about how this fit. How would they work here? Would they enjoy it here? Would we enjoy working with them? Could we solve problems together? Can they make that transition from that owner, founder, operator, to being part of the bigger company and really talking through all of that. And internally we talk about that. And with that owner, founder, we're also talking about different scenarios of like, how will life be? How will life be similar to what you do today, which is you have a lot of autonomy in our system, but also how will life be different? Because now you do have a boss, you have to report out on financials, you have to do some things you probably don't do today.

When do you run away from a deal because of cultural differences?

Yeah. And so this can be tough because sometimes you look at a deal and you say, this is a great company. The financial model's really Good. There's a lot of synergies. Can we all work together? Those are the toughest ones, right?

Tell me about a time when you had to run away. We don't name anybody.

Well, my experience is when you make that decision to try and fit, it will be okay. I know it's not perfect. We'll make it work. It generally doesn't work. You know, again, lots of M and A experience beyond Tricorbron as well.

So now we got a hard lesson.

Yeah, well. And interesting. In the dissertation study, and these are incredibly successful companies. Almost everybody sold again for three times plus cash on cash. The average company doubled revenue and EBITDA over five years. Amazingly successful companies. We interviewed 30 people across those 12 companies that included the CEOs of every company. Every one of them had at least one fairly major mistake. What's interesting and I think is really important about M and A, most of the deals that serial acquirers do are small deals. And so you get a lot of at bats at lower risk situations. When people talk about M and A doesn't work, or 70% failure rate of M and A, which was in the press a lot in 2010-2020, those were big public deals, massive swings, teams that didn't have a ton of M and A experience, super high risk. When you've got dedicated teams with multiple at bats doing multiple deals every year, you get really good at assessing this. And you still make mistakes. And you got to learn from those mistakes. But those mistakes aren't catastrophic. And so, yes, absolutely, those are the tough ones. When those happen, the acquired team comes in, they're not happy. It's tough for the acquiring team to be happy. And it's hard to collaborate on solving problems because the deal is hard. Integration's even harder. It is very hard, even if you're exceptionally good at doing it. And so the ability to collaborate, the ability to get along, the ability to just trust each other and assume good intent on the other side and work through problems is absolutely critical to get through a really strong integration over 12 or 24 months where you're really working kind of simpatico at the other end of it. So those are the tough ones. But boy, we spent a lot of time thinking through that and we will walk away from those.

Have you ever experienced a situation where it's between loi and close and there's like acknowledgement, bad cultural differences, and let's exit the deal?

I have. Oftentimes though, you can come to some mutual understanding of that. We've had them where we sort of both agree because you're trying to work through issues between LOI and closers. Always every time there's issues. I haven't had a deal where there aren't issues, both sides and you find a way to collaborate and work through them. But both sides may come to find that, hey, this might not like, if we're struggling this much to find solutions. And I find, like, we're very good at finding solutions to get deals closed. Both sides might say, if we're struggling this much now, how are we really going to work together? And again, the key thing for us on culture, it's not good or bad. It's not that the other company's good or bad, the other people are good or bad. It's just fit. Are these things going to fit together? Where that assessment also comes in is, as you said earlier, what level of integration are we talking about? So if these are situations where that business is going to be fully integrated into what we do, maybe with another business already in that market, we will think about that. With an even higher bar on the cultural fit, then let's say it's a new country, a new geography, a new end market, and they're really not being closely integrated with something else. You may have the bar, it still can't be low, but you may lessen it a little bit based on some other reasons to do the deal. I would say in those situations, it's still buyer beware, though.

Yes. Yeah, that's interesting. I was always curious. I always felt like if you got an LOI sign, that even though you got little indicators, you'd still push through to get the yield done because you're invested in so much.

That's sort of the sunk cost. Right. Of where you are. You never want to do a deal that's not going to work for both parties. Right. For both parties. Where those people are going to be happy for us coming in as well. And we absolutely have seen that. Not just here, but in other places that I've been. And that's been the right decision.

Tough one, but yeah, right one. How do you ensure a successful cultural integration?

I don't know that you can insure anything in M and A. I think you have best practices, you have great people, you have very detailed plans that you follow every single time you do a great postmortem. You learn from every deal that you do. These are some of the things that we found in the study. But even if you do all that, you're not going to get it right every time because it is just so complicated. It might be the most complicated thing that there is in business. But again, we go back to mostly proprietary deals. We're probably 95 plus percent proprietary. We have a large list of people that we maintain relationships with. Get to know those people, make sure they get to know you just as well as you're getting to know them. Get to know their teams, think way in advance about what the integration strategy will be and be incredibly open with them about it. You're not trying to sell them, you're not trying to spin them. Be very open about what will happen, good and bad after. Make sure they have a chance to talk to other companies that have been acquired. And this is something we pride ourselves with. We will give that whole list of 44 people that we've acquired, companies that we've acquired, to potentially sellers. Most companies have their list of kind of three or four references that we'll give people. We'll say, look, you can talk to anybody that we've ever acquired. We keep our word in terms of what we're going to do. Something that we've learned over time is that the cardinal sin I think, in integration is saying that nothing will change because absolutely something will change. From our perspective, it's easy to say nothing will change because there's still a lot of local autonomy, local decision making, local P and L locally driven bonus structure. So there's lots of stuff that still looks like and you are truly still running your own local business. But at the end of the day, you now have a boss, you now have financial report outs, you now need approvals for capital investment. And so those are changes being very sympathetic to the owner, founder, seller's view of how those things will change. And so we now spend a lot of time going through those things in incredible detail. We probably still don't get it 100%, but making sure people understand this is what things will look like after. And you might say that might be to the detriment of getting a deal done. But again, if the success metric is people get here and are glad they came, the only way you can do that is if you're very clear upfront about what will and won't change. Right? And there's a ton of good stuff here and a ton of benefits that we bring to the companies that we acquire. But as a founder, you now have a boss and you're part of a bigger company and that is just simply different. And so earlier, days earlier in my M and a career, sincerely, authentically would say there's not very much that will change. I now spend more time saying, here is all of the stuff that will change and maybe exhaustively so. But that's been a big lesson that I've had in doing this for a long time.

You didn't give me the magic bullet answer.

I did not. Yes. I don't have that.

This is what I picked up the postmortems that are important to reflect back on your deal. Having a detailed plan leadership is going to be a big part of driving success in cultural integration. Transparency and along transparency I got a sense of like reverse diligence, like helping that company really learn about your organization when you introduce them, for sure. Team members you acquired in the past and then being sympathetic with the changes and how they're going to impact that company.

Yeah, well. And I also think having a structure and whether that's org it compensation, P and L structure that is very hospitable and welcoming to incoming acquired business. I mean, this company is organized to acquire companies and make it a hospitable, welcoming place for people to come bring their life's work and build on that life's work here. And so we are structured to do this in a way that allows for good cultural integration. Again, you can only have good cultural integration if you're acquiring a company that's a good cultural fit because you cannot change culture. It's like DNA. It is a company's DNA. And so you have to get the assessment. Provided you get that right, then all of the things you listed, plus being a hospitable place to bring a company can make it work. And we've made it work.

There's a lot of things I want to unpack, but you're hitting on an interesting one here about your organization being set up to acquire and be welcoming to bring these new acquired team members on board. I'm building a company right now. We are about like 50 people in the company and we're still working and getting the bearings in order for scaling organically, which I'm realizing that's a lot. It's a lot to build that infrastructure to do that. And then you start thinking about doing acquisition, which is like tough when you're still in the early stage, but you've already seen what that looks like. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What does that organization look like in contrast to an organization that's already doing organic growth? Maybe they're just like really early and doing or saying, hey, they've got aspiration to acquisition. But here you've seen more of the mature machine that is set up for doing it on scale. Walk me through what those differences are.

Yeah. And I think the benefit is that you're also involved in M and A assessment for a living and around all of the deal transaction stuff. So you're a lot farther ahead than anybody else.

I'm trying to be really good at this. This is what my goal is.

The key thing across all the companies that are good at this is that this is a functional professional expertise. No different than accounting, it, sales, marketing, running a manufacturing plant. And I think the biggest mistake and people talked about this in the study is where, oh, this is a cool thing we're going to try and do as a one off and we'll do some M and A who wants to be involved in a special project. NAT is doomed to fail. So the companies that are good at this treat it as something that requires expertise. If they don't have that expertise, they get it through either a consultant or through hiring people. And then how do you have dedicated teams that do multiple at bats on small deals? And then you build your very detailed target profile of the types of things you're and we're very disciplined in. These are the types of things that we buy and why. One of the great quotes that came up in the study is the problem with M and A is if you squint hard enough, everything looks like a great deal. I thought that was a tremendous quote from one of the CEOs.

I love that quote.

So if you don't have that detailed target profile beforehand that you can throw it up against and say does this match? Like how well does this really match before you fall in love with it? That target profile is critical. And then a detailed process that you build, you can have a consultant help you build it for the first one that you build and follow for how you do diligence, how you do integration, then as you said, the postmortem of how that first deal goes, what do we get right? What's the long list of stuff we got wrong? Update our process next at bat, rinse and repeat. Every one of them is different. I've been involved in more than a hundred the 44 we've done here, so many of them, the vast majority have gone so incredibly well. It's why we've built such a great company. But even on the best ones, we have made a bunch of mistakes. Like you learn every single time we post mortem, every single deal, regardless of size, we're constantly updating our diligence. And integration playbook just to try and get better every single time. And that builds a great loop in terms of how you get good at M and A. I think the one off M and A is just incredibly dangerous. And maybe you have to. It's a merger. There's some competitive reason, there's some technology you need to acquire, get help, get outside help. It is no different than you were deciding to do your taxes without an accountant.

When you think of this function muscle that you're building, you have a corp dev team, but they're really integrated in all these functions to make the deal work. So how do you think of that? Because it seems like a hub and spoke that.

And also just to build on that, think about where the handoff is. Because you've got this corp dev person who's maybe been building a relationship with a founder owner for literally in some cases 10 years building those relationships. And our exec chairman's been in the business 42 years. He has relationships that span that amount of time. And sometimes with people's parents and grandparents and others that have been in the industry over multiple generations. The corp dev person's building that relationship. And in a lot of cases, and we always tell people, get outside legal advice, get outside banking advice, we'll help you. But get outside advice that makes a deal go better. We're trying to get a very fair deal and a good deal for everybody that they're happy with. You're hand in glove with that person. They may talk to that corp dev person more than they talk to their spouse. For the time you're going through the deal and you work through the loi and you work through the Q of you and you work through diligence and you work through the sba and then the deal closes. And where does the corp dev person go onto the next deal?

They're gone.

Right? And you're like, this is literally the person you just spent the most time with on the most important thing you will likely ever do in your life outside of your family, which is transacting your family business. And they're gone. And so that's where we're really thoughtful about integration. Leads are in right from the start. So you get to know all the integration folks, not just corp dev. The business owner of a geography or a line of business where this will become part of is involved very early. So your new family, the people that you'll be working with every day after the deal are very involved over time. So heavy heavy corp dev upfront integration. As soon as we Start the diligence process. And a lot of that's taught building that integration plan together within the framework and the constructs that we have in our integration plan. And then during that time, the business leader that you'll be working with also getting engaged when it comes time for that handoff Corp dev to integration to the business leader. It all overlaps. Everyone knows everybody and you don't feel as bad that Corp dev person's onto the next thing. And I think that's a massive thing that people miss. And the people that were really good acquirers in the study, which was the vast majority of companies heavily successful with their M and A programs, we're very, very thoughtful about those handoffs.

Plan integration early, plan it early and.

Plan the relationships almost the life cycle of the deal, the integration. Two years into the time they'll be in the company who are going to own those key relationships. Because after a year or two, the integration leaders onto other deals. In some years we've bought 8, 9, 10 companies. They're working on other things. And so at some point in time it's going to be that business leader is the key person. And so how do you ensure smooth handoffs? And it's not even handoffs, it's significant, overlapping chunks of time of these teams working with the founder owner to get them from what is really can be a stressful and a life altering in a positive way event, get them through that and transitioned in a way that they feel really good about. We've significantly developed that muscle over 44 deals.

You do anything special to keep the executives at comfort when they're going through this transition.

So it depends on the deal size and where it is because again, we've done deals that are a million of EBITDA and deals that are way into eight figures of ebitda. So my level of interaction with those will differ from deal to deal and based on geography. But the right people are spending a huge amount of time not just with executives. We want all the team members to stay. It's about getting in and talking to everybody. Super, super detailed day one process, which absolutely everybody that does any amount of M and A does and make sure everyone understands day one, what is the integration plan, what's going to change, what's not going to change, and what everyone's interested in is what's the change in my pay, title, reporting relationship, benefits program, what do I tell my significant other about our medical benefits, our pension benefits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We spend a massive amount of time Talking about all that stuff and getting people comfortable very early. And so that could be me doing it, depending on the deal. But it could be the geographic presidents that we have, it could be the regional presidents that we have. We've got a phenomenal leadership team and we get the right level of folks into the transaction.

This ties back to the takeaways on having a detailed plan that you're able to answer those questions. And it seems like that really is integrated with that leadership.

When I think anybody good at M and A, their day one plan is meticulous. We actually have a minute mapper for day one of what happens every single minute of the first day. And you have to have it. And it takes multiple people. I mean, we may have 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 people on the ground for that day one. Cause you wanna have a one on one conversation with every single person on those topics I talked about on day one.

I get my hands on it.

Well, like, screw it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be so cool. Just to be like, hey, this is how you execute day one.

Yeah, we have an amazing integration leader and a great team who's got a lot of experience.

I like that one. So detail plan, the leadership team, you really sync up with them, you're briefing them out the company and it's still hard.

Even if you get all of that great cultural fit, great people coming in very clear about what will be the same and what won't be the same. You share all of that as transparently as you possibly can. But until that person is now working for someone for the first time in their life, and maybe they grew up in that family business that their parents had started, they don't really understand how they're going to respond in that until they're in it. And when we said, hey, there's a financial review every month, that was something that they intellectually understood. And then when they're doing the first one, they say, boy, this is a lot more detail about the business than I'm used to going into. And so even when you get it all right with amazing partners on the other side of the table, it is still incredibly hard in the early days. So you just gotta keep working with people and get people to the right spot.

We're jumping ahead. I have it on my list of questions. The biggest challenge when dealing with culture.

We're again buying mostly founder, not 100%. We've had some public company take privates. We've done some carve outs. Like we've done some other things, but most of what we do is a founder led business. The culture is going to be set by the founder and a founder, owner, operator type of business. So having great fit there. But it also means that someone's going to go from being an entrepreneur to being part of a larger multi billion dollar global company. And that's a tough transition. And so smoothing that out as much as you possibly can is absolutely critical to success. And for us, again, we want those people to come and stay and we want the people they're bringing with them to come and stay. And so you got to make sure that goes well. We've done very well at doing that, but it is incredibly hard.

What's the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge is just getting people through that first three to six months of life is different. Decision making is different. Now there's a ton of good stuff. Normally what happens, my benefits program is a lot better. My supply chain opportunities are way better. I'm able to buy from a much different host of suppliers at a different price. My freight program's better. I've got access to this building we're sitting in today's world class design and engineering center that has hundreds and hundreds of patents to its name. I never had access to anything like that before. So I get all this stuff that's going to allow me to be more successful, but decision making changes a little bit. Maybe I have to do a more detailed expense report than I used to have to do. Just normal company stuff. And we try and keep it as light as we can. But you're still becoming part of a big global company now. Big global in the sense of I've run much larger companies than this as well and so it's all relative. But if you're coming from a small family business, this seems like a very large company. We're still at the size where we're 2,100 team members around the world. I personally know the vast majority of those team members. You can actually get to meet a company at that size when it's 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, it's much harder to do. But when you're used to working in an office with five or 10 people, even 20, 100 seems like a lot. And so just getting people comfortable, understanding meeting their new team members, understanding how to use all the resources at their disposal, just getting them through that period is really important. And focusing on all the benefits of the things that they're getting with that and more than the changes that come with it as well.

All right, now teach me the hacks.

I don't know that there are hacks.

I've taken them out from the conversation we're having. One, you remind people the benefits of why the companies are coming together and bigger, better together. You're charismatic, like you're just really natural. Having a conversation with you. So I can see you creating a lot of value just having that FaceTime and given the new incoming team members assurance that, hey, we're going in something better. Yeah, what else? Those are good hacks. Those are hacks.

I don't know if I would call it a hack because I go back to our track record is you can look at the 44 acquisitions. Those people are here, their kids are here. Like you can talk to them. We buy good companies, we add people. It's not about cost cutting or we actually generally add to the companies that we buy. We invest in them and we bring all these tools. We spend a lot of time talking about all those things. To me, that's not a hack, that's just explaining this is what the plan is and this is what we're doing.

Common sense isn't so common as you think.

Well, it's hard to do though. We spend a lot of time talking about this and thinking about it. These things are not complex things. Get to know the companies that you want to partner with. Be clear with them of how things will stay the same and or change. Build great relationships with them. Have multiple layers of relationships. Who has corp dev rolls off? There's still other people that they're super comfortable with. Build the integration plan together. Focus on all the true real benefits that everyone's getting. There's no brain surgery, there's no rocket science in anything I just said. But the disciplined execution and application of those things every single time is absolutely essential. If that's a hack, then maybe that's a hack. But it's the disciplined execution of those.

Things, it gets forgotten. The transparency, being sympathetic to the changes from the target company or how they're getting impacted, those things all get forgotten. The early planning, thinking of the life cycle of the deal and how it should really come together, those all get forgotten.

And the second challenge that happens, because that's challenge one. The second challenge is when you do the systems integration, which we've got state of the art systems for everything that we do. All cloud based, just absolute state of the art, best of breed for everything that we do. You're generally going from a situation where someone's coming from QuickBooks or some fairly simple package type system. So you're going to get a lot More capability, but it can also be more complicated, more work. All of those things. Being very transparent with people to get them through that hump of the systems piece, which is hard and challenging and a ton of work. We're good at doing it, but that's the next challenge. When you get on the other side of that. If you can get those two pieces right, that first three months, that systems piece, 6 12, 15 months down the road, you hopefully have a team member for life after that.

We forgot. That's like the real painful part.

It's hard. Even a perfect systems integration is incredibly painful.

Have you seen these new vendors popping up that are like integration platforms as a service?

We've looked at some things. There's nothing specific that we're using right now.

Yeah, I think it's like still early and emerging.

Yeah, some of it is scale as well. We do so much M and A that we're able to build a lot of that capability and platform in house. So some of the data transition tools and other things we've actually created in house to do that. And trial and error, we've gotten a lot of stuff. Every ERP integration, it's just like M and A, we get something wrong. And how do you improve it? How do you make it better?

You got bought out in 2021.

That's right, yep.

And you stuck around. I'm just curious. Private equity model, they transition, new firm takes over. How do they. They incentivize you to really stick around. And then curious just about the relationship and working with a PE firm.

Yeah. So we've sold six times. Really sort of over 30 years. So every 5ish years. It of course doesn't work like that. One was a couple years, one was 10 years, but they averaged sort of five years. We look at those different types of situations as being having a great financial and business partner for that leg of the journey. But this company is 122 years old. We think a lot about how's it here for the next 122 years. I'm a steward for some period of time that we'll have multiple owners. During that time we've been very blessed to have phenomenal owners. In this case we have some co ownership of Ares investors in California, the Ontario Teachers Pension plan in Toronto, Canada, and then AEA investors from New York who rolled from the last investment and have actually owned this company a couple of times. All super knowledgeable about packaging. Great partners working with each other. Because sometimes a club type deal can be difficult. But those three parties have Actually worked on multiple deals together and feel really blessed about the partners that we have. But again, those partners will to change at some point. Again, that's the private equity model and we'll have another set of financial partners down the road. And I think it's a great company. It's made fantastic returns for everyone who's ever invested in it. And so we'll have great interest the next time that we go to find the next partner. And I'm sure we'll have a phenomenal partner for the next round. My view as a board member and we are also heavily invested as management across a large number of people in the company. We have multiple seats on the board, each of the owners has multiple seats on the board. And we're all sitting around the boardroom table like it's a kitchen table. How do we make this company better for the long term? And when we're selecting that partner, it's about who has the vision, who shares the vision with us of how we want to grow a global packaging leader. That was mission critical in who we selected last time. It's the shared vision of what this company can be not for next year, not for five years from now, but for a hundred years from now. And that's what everybody's focused on and I'll be here for some period of time and then we'll have a great steward whenever that is, both the financial sponsor and the next leadership team 20, 30, 40 years down the road.

Just want to make sure I understand the mechanics on this court that here you had the exit, there's another P firm bought it, which means options get exercise. So that's a good win. And then basically everything gets reset and here's our new growth path and goals and what we're targeting for and realignment with more incentives, more options. Okay, that sounds pretty straightforward. What's your experience with bad PE firms? We're no names. I don't want to get any of us in trouble. What does a bad PE firm look like?

Yeah, and as I said, I was retired for a number of years. Worked both public, large public company boards, smaller public companies, every size of private equity backed family owned companies, a lot of board and director and advisory work. And so I've worked with a lot of different private equity firms. And the advice I give people is that when you're talking to folks, everyone always says we're collegial, we're team oriented, we're all those things which everyone is when the numbers are good. But there's always a bump in the road in every hold period. What are they like in that situation? And the only way to find that out is talk to people that had bumps in the road. And so it's my advice to people is you do the homework. You use your network, you talk to the references they don't give you. Right. Other holdings that aren't on the reference list and how did those relationships go and what were the problems? And give me the straight goods. And there are very different types of private equity firms out there. I think given all the things that we've talked about, how important people are here, how important customers are here, how important team members are here, our vision being over a very long period of time, we tend to attract the types of sponsors that are interested in that type of company. Because it is so obvious when you spend time with all of our team, anyone in our company, that those things are really important, that this isn't a do it quick and cut cost and financially engineer and flip it to the next person. That's not what this is about. By definition, we tend to attract very high quality sponsors that shows up in everything that we do in terms of how we run the business.

Doesn't sound like you'd put up with otherwise.

Well, I just don't think this is the right investment. Again, it's not good or bad. Some of those firms make a ton, a ton of money. And I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's not the right fit for what we're doing.

Is it fair to say my best source of reference on a PE firm would be the CEOs of their port Coast?

Yeah. The management teams from those Portco's. And how was it when it got challenging?

Cool.

That's the only question that matters because everybody's great when business is good.

That's where I'm going to spend time on my backdoor references for sure. Key firms that reach out every month.

Well, I go back to. That's what we tell people is you can talk 44 acquisitions. Talk to any of them. Like we'll give you the whole list if you want. I mean no one wants to talk to 44, but pick some at random. Not all of them went well. Not everybody's still here. Nothing is perfect. We didn't get everything right in everyone. But always honest, high integrity of our word. That's all you can do. I always question if someone's only giving you three references. Like you don't want to talk to those three, you want to talk to the other ones.

Yeah, very Cool. So I got a lot of corp def people that listen to this podcast. Yeah, it's always interesting, that relationship between being the corp dev team and the CEO of the company. It's like everything rolls up to what's like advice you'd give to corp dev practitioners in terms of getting on your good side, impressing you, and what really impresses you. From the corp dev team, we're blessed.

With a phenomenal team corp dev integration. The integration teams within each of the functional groups, it all comes back down to this is a professional function, no different than accounting, finance, hr, it, sales, marketing, operations, which is so a high degree of professionalism. How does every deal align to our target profile, to our strategy? What's the cultural fit? What's the business reason? I think the easiest thing to get bogged down with in corp dev is the financial modeling. You get the spreadsheet. All you know about the spreadsheet is it is wrong. All of the estimates are wrong. It's an estimate on an estimate on an estimate multiplied by an estimate to 3 decimals of precision. And then we talk about it like it's accurate. All you know is that it's incorrect. Do it as accurately as you possibly can with as many scenarios as you possibly can. But often we spend so much time on the model. What about the people? What about the fit? What about the strategy? Does it hit the target profile? I think those are the key things.

People fit strategy and target profile.

Again, that detailed target profile, because it's so many interesting things come up and you just think, we're good at this. We can make this fit. This isn't right down the fairway. Maybe this could be good and maybe we could make it fit. When you start talking like that, you're probably down the wrong path. So that detailed target profile, which is still pretty expansive for us in terms of the types of things that we're interested in buying, always be matching it back up against that.

Beyond the financial model, this is what corp dev team members should focus on when they're pitching a deal to CEO.

And look, we work. Corp dev reports directly to me. I talk to the corp dev leader all the time. The corp dev team, a big chunk of them are based in this office. We talk constantly. I'm involved in diligence, I'm out in deals. We're talking about deals all the time. Deals are an iterative process. We learn through iteration, we learn through dialogue, we learn through conversation. I certainly do. We challenge each other, we test each other, we question each other. So this Isn't come give me some big pitch or the board some big pitch and we'll stamp it or not stamp it. This is all of us together. Best idea wins. Let's debate the heck out of this thing. One of the things I like to do sometimes with Corp Dev, and we might do it with our executive team, is you take the biggest proponent of a deal and you say, hey, you got the con case. You're gonna argue in five minutes why this is the worst deal. We should never do it. And the most pessimistic person on a deal, you've got the pro case and you're gonna take five minutes and argue why this is the best deal we've ever looked at. And that gets every issue out on the table, opens up thinking again, best idea wins. We're blessed with a team that does that. We've got differing levels of experience on the team, which is great. Cause we're bringing along some great younger folks, younger professionals on the team. But this is a profession, and this profession is not based on how good you are at modeling.

I love that. It's like a reverse debate. Totally argue the other view.

Oh, and it makes people mad because they hate the deal. And I'm like, do you got to tell me why this deal's phenomenal and show me why you're a good debater? And then that starts to expand people's mind because no deal's perfect. No deal's all good, no deal's all bad.

That's great. I'm going to go home and try with my kids.

Does not work with kids. In my experience. I love my kids dearly, but that has not worked.

All right, I got a good disclaimer on that.

I have teenagers, though you have younger.

Kids, it's still probably not going to work. What's your best advice to practitioners who don't believe in the importance of culture in M and A?

First off, does it matter for what you're doing? Again, if it's cost out, if it's you're buying ip, if you're buying something and closing it down, maybe it doesn't matter. There's certain situations where it doesn't matter. In my case, in the case of most of the companies we studied, where it's for growth, where that growth is based on people, their knowledge, their relationships, their ability to come into your company and stay and thrive and grow, then there's probably nothing that matters more than that cultural piece.

Good point is really assess it.

And there's no good or bad. I'm A firm believer there is no good or bad culture. There is what is the fit for a company's culture and their strategy? And what is the fit between the cultures of two different companies?

Or learn it the hard way.

Yeah. Which I think every M and A practitioner has done.

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

Maybe two things. And it's funny because I was doing a town hall yesterday with our sales operations inside sales folks and we were talking about some of these things. I've seen so many M and A deals. The question everyone asks me and practitioners always get you've got someone on a team who's maybe new at M and A. Do you think this deal is going to close? And my answer is always, I have absolutely no idea. I have two situations where deals fell apart in the middle of the night the day before they were being announced. So you go to bed that a deal is done. Money is in position. The newly acquired leaders have been informed. Everyone's in the physical locations to do the day one stuff. And I wake up at 5 o' clock in the morning and the deal has fallen apart. For in the two cases I can think of very bizarre reasons and so which I won't get into because confidentiality reasons. But neither of those were here. They were in prior lives. And so you never know that the deal is going to happen until the money has changed hands.

It's like past the 12th hour.

This is the, oh, this is middle of the night stuff. Yeah. And the reasons were unique and so I won't go into them. But you just never know.

Okay. We won't get the reasons. But like, how do you amend or sort of.

Nothing you can do. You can't. I mean, I think the key thing on M and A is you are not really in control. If you're so focused on getting the deal done at all costs you will do bad deals. So you do your best. You always try and find a way to solve a problem in an spa or some closing situation. These weren't any of those things. These were changes of mind and other interesting things that happened. No one did anything wrong. Everyone parted friends. Nothing untoward happened. You can never be so committed to doing something. Yes. You've maybe spent six months on it. There is nothing worse than you buy it for that reason. And you spend the next three years trying to repair a deal you should have never done. The worst deal is the one that you do that you should not have done. We are disciplined all the way to the End now, I haven't walked away from something the last day or the middle of the night or anything like that. I was not in control of any of these situations. But I think the key thing in M and A, we are truly not in control. Someone is selling us, in many cases their life's work. It is again, outside of their family, immediate family, the most important and emotional decision they will ever make in their entire life. Things will change, things will go wrong. It is what it is. You move on to the next one. So that can happen. The second thing, and this came up a lot in the study and I've seen this and I think it's a danger is that we went back to should you do a deal when the financials look good but the cultural fit is not good? There is a very specific danger in private equity backed M and A, again, what I studied academically, that at the end of the hold period there is an incentive for the selling private equity firm to acquire Ebitda at whatever multiple it is, sell it at the higher multiple that the whole platform is getting. Whether or not it's a good deal, whether or not there's good cultural fit, it will not be their problem. It will be the next owner's problem. I have never seen that. As a practitioner myself, I haven't had a firm that does that because again, we're trying to build over a very long period of time, largely proprietary, largely people we know. But it did come up interestingly in the study and I've talked to a number of other CEO peers about this risk, which is at the end of the hold period. Sometimes I do know people have been almost forced to buy something that the financials might have been good, great arbitrage spread opportunity, but maybe not a good cultural fit and it caused problems later. And so I also think there's some buyer beware when you're looking at those types of deals in a sim. Oh, by the way, we have two other deals under LOI and they're fantastic. Are they really dig into those and really understand the cultural elements of those? I think that's really important and I have definitely seen that go wrong. And again that's not earth shattering. That's common sense. As I say it's. But a lot of times people don't really think about that and might not poke into that when they're buying the next platform, when they're buying the next company.

Great advice. Interesting. Yeah Cor, this has been awesome.

It's been fun. Great conversation. Thanks so much for making the time appreciate it.

Thank you for helping me become a better M and A scientist.

Thanks so much.

Those of you still with us. Salute to you. You're also a fellow M and A scientist. Love to get feedback on these conversations, topic ideas, speaker suggestions. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You need to pitch a deal to Court. Let me know. I'll figure out how to help with that.

Also on LinkedIn. Yeah, easily found.

And then go straight to court on LinkedIn. There we go. Till next time. Here's to the deal. Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M and A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an M and A function or optimizing one that you already have, we're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email Kisan K I S o n a science.com or you can text me directly at 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 mascience.com here's to the deal. Views and opinions expressed on MNA 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.