Successful End-to-End M&A

Hello M and A Friends. If you're looking to improve your in house training, we have corporate training plans provided through the M and A Science Academy. Give your team members access to the best in class courses, templates and networking opportunities in the industry. Our Academy was designed to lead practitioners with the how to of M and A practices. If you're interested in learning more about individual or team plans, go to mascience.com academy. It's also a great way to show your support for M and A science. Again, that's mascience.comacademy onto 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 M and A deals. Welcome to MNA Science where leading M and A practitioners share lessons learned from their experience. If you're interested in keeping up with the latest from M and a science, visit mascience.com and subscribe to our free newsletter. Every week we share highlights from our interviews and invitations to events as we build the greatest community of forward thinking M and A practitioners. Again, that's mascience.com I'm your host Kisan Patel, CEO and Founder of M and A Science. Joining me today is Hannah Alsaker, Vice President, Corporate Development, M and A Integration at Adobe. Adobe is a software company specializing in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, media, video, motion pictures and print trading on NASDAQ under adbe. Today we're going to talk about successful end to end M and A. Hannah, how are you doing today?

Doing great Kisan. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for coming to hang out with me. Can we kick off with a little bit about your background?

I describe my background and journey to M and A as nonlinear. I didn't come from a lot of means growing up. My dad immigrated to this country, worked on his own as a teenager and educated himself. As we were growing up in Queens, New York, we worked three jobs to make sure we had all kinds of opportunity to pursue interests whether they were educational or theater or music. I really appreciate that work ethic and giving me that example of sacrifice and hard work. So my early training was really in Applied Math and Software Engineer at Software Engineering and I think I like to use the idea of logic and decision trees in creating multiple paths and optionality and that's really guided my career. I think the same applies to your personal career approach. I sometimes use the words like think of it as a mosaic. So just adding skills your toolkit and I really look for different learning situations. So I've been an operator, run PNLs. I've been a COO. I've been in strategy. I've worked in different parts of the globe. All those things added to my toolkit. And more recently about a year and a half ago I was already running the M and A post merger integration team at Adobe and our top leadership team asked me to take on corporate development too. That was a real pleasure. I think they were looking for somebody to be very strategic in that seat versus necessarily a longtime banker or a longtime corporate development expert. That's how I got to this role.

Curious about developing your own professional skills? I like how you referenced the mosaic and having that diversity of what you picked up along the way. Is there a strategy behind that? Do you proactively seek these opportunities? Do you wait for stuff to fall in your lap? How do you make that happen?

I'm going to sound not so logical. It's a head and a heart decision. I think Kisan some of it you seek out I always raise my hand. I think people should strike the word risk from their vocabulary when it comes to career and just think of things as opportunities. Sometimes you don't know going in where it's going to add up. But I think in hindsight a lot of that mosaic, if you will or connecting of the dots is really important. I have a mental framework which is just it's okay to lean into situations that are uncomfortable from a growth mindset. People have apprenticed me. I've gone to countries where I don't speak the language. I've been in roles that I was not the deepest is expert in. But I think just being okay with seeking out learning opportunities does a lot for your career and I think that's important actually in the M and A context to be a really successful practitioner in my point of view is you have to understand the end to end. You can't just be great at deal mechanics or drafting language or negotiation. If you want to do the right deal for the company that you're a steward of, I think you really have to understand all the way up funnel into the strategy of the company all the way down into post close. How do you extract value for the shareholder and quickly that kind of plays into what are we fiduciaries at the company to do as corporate development leaders.

Right. We got a great theme for this podcast right there. We got this capability of getting comfortable doing these things. You're uncomfortable Doing essentially you're challenging yourself and it seems to be rooted with your journey and professional development. And then this key to M and A is having this end to end view and how things are happening and getting done that ultimately leads to the best results. With that, let's talk through M and A, end to end. Maybe it makes sense to start with the front end of M and A. How do you build alignment there?

Yeah, I think that's really important, right. Adobe is a leader in digital experiences and creating digital experiences for a consumer. And it always starts that. We call it top of Funnel. You got to think of the top of funnel and then everything flows from there. Same thing for M and A. Top of Funnel for me and for the company is really strategy. We have a lot of opportunity. We have three clouds with a Creative Cloud, a Document cloud and Experience cloud. As a practitioner, as a leader, my number one thing is one, understand the strategy behind each of those clouds. And where our C suite is really focused on accelerating, first and foremost is always going to be organic growth. That's what we do. But how can we accelerate, how can we add? How can we transform within organic opportunities, either acquisitions or investments, we have both tools in our toolkit and in the mix. Somewhere there is partnership. One thing is just really taking the time to understand what the strategies are. Which is why I think this gets back to the idea of putting yourself into uncomfortable learning situations. If you're too narrow in your focus as a corp dev leader, it's going to be hard for you to relate and really understand what business leaders on the front line are thinking about from a trajectory. So I encourage folks like take a tour of duty through some other places, spend time in product management if you can. If I was an engineer, you don't have to be an engineer growing up. It helps if you're cross trained in some other areas. Maybe you were a COO where you are an operations person. It just gives you a real insight into what matters. M and A is not just a spreadsheet exercise, if you will, or lines in a definitive. It's really about making it happen. And that happens in the strategic front end. And then you and I have talked about this before also in the back end, the post merger innovation as well.

You got a unique background in that you came up through the integration side and then moved into corporate development, which you rarely see. If I go around and survey all the corporate development leaders of publicly traded companies and did integration and LED integration, maybe we can work back. Cause they do like the top funnel and Strategy. But I just trying to pick up some of the reasons why your perspective may be unique. Can you walk me through that journey? So we didn't emphasize that in your career and how you went through that to end up at where you're currently at.

Why don't we go back a little? The integration role at Adobe is also a culmination of some of the other opportunities that I had in the past. I started off as an engineer. I was a QA engineer at IBM. That was a great experience. I did investment banking after I graduated from mit. MIT for a couple of years and then I went into a McKinsey consulting role. So these were still removed, I think from I'll call it hands on keyboard or bringing the cash register type roles. When I went to my first role in CPG at Avon, that was the first opportunity that I had in a line role running a piano. And I was thrust into that again. An amazing leader. Liz Smith, who went on to become the CEO of Bloomin Brands, she just plucked me out of a strategy role and said I want you actually running transformation for the company. So she took a bet on that. Of course that was a high stakes opportunity, but a growth role. So that's one piece of it. Then I go to ebay eventually and I was both in a strategy role globally, which gave me a different vector of insight on what matters in a marketplace, but then also had the opportunity to run multiple countries as the GM of those businesses and also run operations for ebay North America. I like to call them pieces of my toolkit or part of my mosaic of learning. And so when I came to Adobe it was a great opportunity and the leadership team said, look, you're a real operator and we think we want a real operator to run integration. It's not merely a process role, it's not just a PM role, it's a bring the cash register role. At that time we had bought a couple of very large companies, Marketo Magento. And so that was an opportunity and there was some foresight from the leadership team to say we want an operator sitting in an integration role. I would argue I'm probably not the typical integration leader profile either. That was really important for my experience at Adobe.

That makes a lot of sense in getting an operator to run integration. 100% agree. But then not so common as well is integration to corporate development. Like it's a little backwards. Usually you get the banker that's done a lot of the front end and say, all right, do this for an in house company. I'm curious how that evolved. What was the change in how you had to adapt the skills to do the corporate development work?

Let's take it up levels. The first one is how did Adobe's leadership decide to make that shift right or expand my remit, if you will? I think Adobe as a culture, we've talked about inclusion, we've talked about how genuine it is. It's highly innovative. Adobe really leans into people in the sense that they had a vision for corporate development being very strategic and well pulled through to the operations. A lot of places do a different profile, if you will, in the seat. But it was a joint encouragement to me to say, yeah, we really want an operator also sitting doing the front end because it'll ensure that we do the right deals upfront. And of course, on the team, we can get into a very diverse set of skills. We have people who have been corporate development experts much longer than I have, who've been bankers much longer than I have, and I think that brings a real richness. Adobe. So that's the first part of your question, the second part, which is how did you lean into the skills? Because there is skill. I don't call them gaps. There's opportunities to step in and learn things. Back to the mosaic. I'm a sponge. I will ask anyone any question. Please teach me. And my legal team knows that, my finance team knows that, my tax team knows that, my employee experience team knows that I really enjoy learning. And Adobe is actually the kind of place that people really are genuinely interested in teaching each other things too. I cracked open books, I talked to people, I really dove deep. And I also lean on experts. So where I didn't know. I think this is important on your learning journey where you don't know something, don't pretend you know it, because that actually creates risk for the company. So I prefer to just admit when there's something and I tell the team that it's okay if you don't know everything. You're not going to be the best engineer, you're not going to know code quality. That's why we have people who code better than you. It's okay because we have a deep bench of diverse talent that we can lean on. And it's an amazing culture in which people are actually team Adobe. Everyone's in it together.

Yeah. You're building this profile of a unicorn of a corporate M and a practitioner that comes up through operations, leads integration, then leads corporate development. That's our whole thesis on this podcast. Well, let's go back to the Deal process. The strategy part we talked about how that's important. Now you sort of have this understanding of the company. Walk me through the thinking of that strategy, how that shapes now because of this unique perspective and is there a different way of thinking about it or is it generally the same? That you're working with your business unit leaders to understand how they think of their goals and how you can accelerate it through M and A strategy is.

Really important, but PowerPoint strategy is not important. Experiential strategy and the people are the two parts of front end M and A and that's both internally from A who is sponsoring this internally at Adobe and therefore our partner in crime. And then also thinking about the company itself, the target or landscape of companies that we're considering and thinking about their strategy and their people. I'm in the software industry. There's no fab plan to get. It's really the IP and the people, the hearts and minds of the people that we're really thinking about. I think it's really important to partner hard with the business units and be a check and balance to push back a little bit. I'm sitting on the shoulders of a lot of previous leaders of corporate dev at Adobe who have been incredible over the years, decades of amazing acquisitions and transformative acquisitions. But the team is so special. Our reputation and the industry is so special. So we have amazing people on the team. But it's important to partner with the business unit leaders to really get clarity around their thesis. We use a tool together where we co author a strategic thesis for M and A with the business unit and we push back on each other before we really lean in and do a lot of work. And that's an important artifact, that's an important touchstone for me and the business unit and it's a way for us to get clear sponsorship around. Why do we want to do this and what is it going to do for the company?

What are examples of things you push back on?

Every deal has a different thesis. But the things that I tend to push on for clarity is what have you done organically? If that's something really important to you, then what have you done organically in this space? What have you done from a partnership angle in the space which leads you to. And therefore why is an outright acquisition important to you? There's a. And other people call that the bill by partner analysis. There's a logical piece of what was on your roadmap, what was on your business roadmap. Why is this the most important thing you need to do and have you partnered your way in it? Have you built something? Is this about using M and A as R and D? There's a lot of different ways to get at this. And so we have that dialogue up front before we get to numbers. It's counterintuitive. People are always saying, oh, have the corporate team, let's run some valuation, let's run some models. And I'm usually like, let's understand the front end first because that brings clarity before we start running spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are just spreadsheets. Data in, data out.

You're asking questions to essentially validate the thesis against the strategy.

Yes. And if it's a stated known strategy that's in roadmap, yes. You're asking questions to validate the thesis. The core question is why should we do this? And there's different parts of that and every deal has a different front end thesis. This is where I would say I'm really thankful for taking a stop at McKinsey and doing training there and working with the best of the best. There's some fundamental strategic frameworks that help you break down the problem. Also engineering helps you do this. It's just breaking the problem into its logical pieces and figuring out which assertions, which hypotheses in your thesis just don't hold true. Or you need data. Now we're going to get into the pre LOI or pre A to N process. What data do we need in order to prove out what we're saying? We just try to be structured about it, thoughtful and structured about it. Some are leaps of faith. Of course you're going to go in with an assertion that you have believe, but we just try to be structured about that thesis.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Had that conversation. Really validate those components. And it sounds like this is your segue to get that alignment early as you bring additional folks in and then from this point I take it it gets approved by a governing body. Do you have to pitch this as a formal thing?

We're very buttoned up. We have a governance process, we've got a Mac committee, there's stage gates that we absolutely go through. The strategic piece can take weeks, months to develop clarity around and we want to spend the time with the leaders to do that. We don't move forward unless we have somebody in the C suite who raises their hand and says, I'm the sponsor for this opportunity. We really work on that interlock, we call it interlock, sometimes upfront, which is just to get that alignment I've seen not just at Adobe and a lot of other places where the corp dev teams again, so smart, amazing people willing to work really hard. They end up going down the path of investigating a transaction. And then when we get to a gate, two strategic questions in from Mr. CEO and the thesis falls apart. And so I really try with the team to do the work upfront to get that clarity. So you're not burning three months, six months further down the funnel in the work, which is hugely demotivating for a team. They're all running at it really hard. But if you don't have that clarity up front, it just becomes work that could have been saved is the way I look at it.

The question I had on top of my mind was the timeline around this, because you got deals that get brought up to you and it's through this auction process which you got to deal with those compressed timelines and then you get deals that you find and maybe you have a little more leverage and control because selling a company, Adobe, hey, sure, let's work something out here. Can you give me a sense of like, how does that come in play? Because it sounds like a lot of consideration on the strategy and what does that look like when you got to deal with those two situations you're talking about?

How do we react? There's proactive and reactive. We don't control external timelines. If somebody is for sale and they're running a process and they have a timeline, those will come. My goal is to reduce our surprise factor and it doesn't have to be on a specific name of an asset. But thematically we've done a lot of work. The whole team has done a lot of work with the executives to thematically understand where we would want to accelerate. Regardless if it's company A or B, there are thematic spaces that we're watching that we do pre work on and therefore at any moment, if something in that related space comes up, we've already done the front end on the strategy. Not about a target, but about the thesis. I think that's an important difference before we do work on a name. The tectonic shift in the market, the strategic thesis, which is agnostic to which of the five companies in that space is already done. So we get really clear and we lock arms with our cfo, our CEO. We know the things that we're really interested in and we're not going to drive the timing necessarily. Sometimes we may, sometimes we won't, but we know what we're interested in.

You have a lot of that fleshed out opportunity comes up. You got the conversations already about the space. May already have talked about the company or have a sense of where they sit. Might be a logo on your market map somewhere.

Yeah.

That cuts down of what you described earlier. That needs to happen to then position you to accelerate on that opportunity and then focus on those specific risks that surprises that you want to avoid.

Kisa, you know you're spot on and it actually helps the flood of inbounds coming in. So I'm sure every leader has hundreds of inbounds that come in weekly to the team. And as Adobe we get a lot coming inbound rather than not understand where those fit in our you called it a market map, we don't call it a market map. But thematically it's actually much easier to onboard our team and say hey, these are the things we care about. So there are inbounds that come in if they fit somewhere in the thematic space. We're going to lean in and do a little work, take an intro call, something like that. So it actually helps with top of funnel. It makes us more efficient on top of funnel because we know who's interesting to talk to.

I think the too many inbounds is 100 plus billion market cap problem. No, if all corporate folks have that problem. But it's a good problem. But it does. It's interesting. We do the same. We have a lot of inbound leads and it's a lot of stuff to filter out. So that makes sense. How about proactive? I'd be curious about that because when I think of building an M and A function, my default would be to go hire a managing director at the investment bank that I've worked with on a couple of deals. I'd want to bring them in for their ability to really hunting closed deals and especially on that proactive front. How do you think through that? Especially coming from your background where it's more about extracting value on these deals.

Everyone on my team has a different strength and brings something different to the table. Those who have decades of banking experience surely bring something specific and special to the table. When you specifically ask that question in the context of being proactive and again in the space that I live in may be different than other leaders. A lot of it is getting to know and connect with founders of high growth SaaS companies. We also have a direct investing program. It's very selective but it gives us the opportunity to also look around the corner, possibly put capital work as an investor on a cap table of a company that we're interested in. It could be a space that's really not thematic for us at the moment, but it's a forward looking idea that we want to be close to. Bankers do have relationships with a lot of different companies, but those founders really enjoy talking to ex engineers because you can connect and talk about that. Some like to talk to ex operators. We think really carefully about also what I'll call stakeholder mapping and who's cultivating relationships with different companies. So I don't think it's a one size fits all. That's the theme that I have on the team. Everyone brings something different, diversity, especially in M and A. I'll call it an orchestrated symphony. In another way, it's important to have different people who do different things because founders connect to different leaders connect to different people. VCs connect to different people. It's a different landscape that we're in so we don't have pride about it. If you're the best person to connect, terrific. If I'm the best person to connect, terrific. But it's not cookie cutter.

What would you say is the one thing that really drives M and A success?

I'm going to pick two.

Fair enough. You can have two.

Adobe is all about the product and the people. Adobe is a very special culture in itself and it goes all the way back to our founders John and Chuck. They were people first, leaders even though they were innovators in technology as well. And we're a product company. Kisan, you shared with me that you were a photoshop 3 user. People stop me and they're like I love Acrobat or I'm an indesign user and people really are rabid fans of the product and we are a product led company. These are two strategy assigned. We talked about strategy, making sure that everything fits. It's really a focus around the ip, what's the product you're getting, how great is that product, how it's complimentary to what we do and then it's the talent all the way from the founder or the CEO down to his leaders to the QA engineer that's coming in as part of the fabric of Adobe. Our approach on post merger integration is this comes from our Chief People Officer Gloria Chen. We change every time we acquire a company so we don't just expect the company to snap to Adobe. She said often Adobe changes every single time and we should be open to change every single time. And I found that to be very genuine and very true. Since I do have integration, every integration that I'VE led. We're open to take elements of not just the culture but the processes. Wow, you do that better than we do. You're innovating here and we could learn a little bit about that. I think that's approach is a little bit different than some other places that have 300 page playbooks and they're just like, hey, do this, do this, do this. We try to take a product centric and a few people centric approach to both the front end of the deal and the post close.

I like the philosophy of that approach. But then is there this perspective that culture doesn't matter as much when you do deals because you're going to essentially pick out the parts that you may want to bring over in your company and it's not so much of, hey, this is such a big deal to understand this culture because ultimately we'll figure out what's going to be a give or take.

This is not about picking apart a company's culture. We're looking at companies and how their culture meshes with ours.

Was there an opportunity where you say, hey, this culture is too far out there from ours. We're not going to do this deal.

That comes way up front. If we can't see the leadership team meshing inside of the Adobe leadership team or being part of it, sometimes it's a strategic disagreement and if vision and strategy don't come together from leadership teams, that's going to be very hard from a standpoint. And then the other part, which is, can you see these people working well together to drive continued growth? Those are questions I think we ask ourselves very early in the process, trying.

To get a sense of the early assessment. Are there things that pop out as red flags you look for right off the bat when you start understanding culture?

I don't think it's about red flags. I think again, we're talking end to end. As a deal leader, you're not trying to just get a deal successfully across the line and signed. You have to think all the way forward into value realization for the shareholder. Back to software. We only really get IP and people. You need to think all the way through logically. And this is where logic trees and decision trees. It's like you have to go down all those branches and think about the leaders who are in place, how deep the bench is, who the culture carriers are who are going to help you through change management when the company comes in. So understanding culture and people is critical to deal success. So I won't say it's one red flag and of course, if you saw high employee attrition in engineering and product and you're trying to buy IP and the attrition rates are super high, yes, Kisan, that would be a flag.

There's a little fire going on right there.

Then you start to feel that great. Is it about leadership? Is it about vision around the product roadmap? Is it about missing ship dates? You see how that one factoid, that one data point that a corp dev leader could see could actually unfold into a bunch of things that you need to diligent and understand for success later.

How do you communicate this as you're learning about culture? Is there like a formal way of documenting it? Is there some kind of culture matrix or what does that look like?

That's like trying to diagram a person's soul. I don't know that there's a checklist for a deal. We have a lot of checklists for that. Closing checklist. I don't think there's a culture checklist now. This is where I think it's important to pick the right team internally. And that's why we do work all the way to the top to say who's going to sponsor this. I always have a sense of who the culture carriers on our side are, who the culture touchstones are, where they understand what it would take to be successful at Adobe. So that's kind of an important thing to me as I think through team staffing and team dynamics. And then I think you got to look when you're meeting the diligence. Meetings with companies are not just about diligence, they're also about understanding the folks, the folks who are coming in. So we encourage all of our teams to keep an eye out. Right, you're running your work stream for diligence, but you're also getting to know people.

That's a lot of learning. Let's talk about your culture. Specifically, how do you approach building your team?

I employ, I think back to the mosaic of leadership, a theme we keep coming back to. I really believe in diversity of thought. I have benefited from that in my career. I've built the toolkit like we talked about, being diverse. I hire for that and I encourage my team to never stop learning. Don't let somebody tell you you can't strike the whole risk thing out of your vocabulary. We've really gone on a path to recruit folks from every walk of life. Obviously we have a lot of people on the team who have banking backgrounds or finance backgrounds or accounting backgrounds actually, or legal backgrounds. And we are all willing to teach each other in that process. We have learning sessions that we run internally. We bring in a lot of folks to teach. One thing that I encourage all of our team to do is go learn one area of Adobe. So if you came straight out of business school and all you've done is banking or growth equity, how could you go spend time with a product manager and understand what it takes to ship a product or a sales leader. Do some windshield time with the sales leader and understand what it takes to sell in a big six figure enterprise deal. Understand what they do so that you can help them during a deal process and that you can help the company translate for those things. So that's my mentality around hiring and staffing for the team.

On that last part, that's, that's easy to tell people. But how do you actually get them to do that?

Adobe has so many opportunities to do that. Like all of our folks can enroll in the sales training and enablement. We have a be the customer program where you can go with the sales leader to go call in customers or renewal customers. In our digital experience business we have eat your dog food, your own dog food mentality where we private beta all our products internally and lots of the team are users of our products. So I think there's a lot of opportunities to do that. Again, if you're interested, if you're interested in learning, there's plenty of opportunities to do that. And then apprentice, go spend time on deals. It's the easiest, right? When you're living in the trenches with a product leader or an engineering leader, ask questions, be curious.

Yeah, I like that idea of making sure those opportunities are there and accessible for them to dig in and learn. I like the line to use diversity of thought. That's a good way to put it. But it ultimately comes down to a visible value when you do have that.

And I would say he's on especially in M and A. If you think about the role, everyone's a fiduciary for the company, but the corp dev team, the M and A legal team, you are serving as a check and balance for the company to spend capital on the right things. And so you absolutely need diversity of thought to make sure you're pressuring everything. But you also have the obligation to dissent. You're not just there to go along with the business leader. You ask me what kind of questions do you ask the business leader. It's an active debate and I encourage everyone on the team you have the obligation to speak up and dissent. If you don't believe the assertion or you don't believe it's the right thing to do. At Adobe, the best idea wins, honestly. Our CEO Sean Chanoonarayan, he fosters that where the debate is welcome. It's healthy. Our founders were like that. That helps. You need diversity, otherwise you have too much likeness of thinking you could end up going down a path where you didn't uncover all the pieces you needed to uncover. So I actually think that's paramount as a corp dev leader to have some diversity of thought.

How do you encourage debates? Because that's something you periodically remind people, hey, it's good to debate. What do you do to. Actually I'm on a lot of calls with people and I love debating but then I can tell there's different types of people and some are more reserved. I don't know, it's one of those things like do you encourage or force or I don't know, how do you get people to do that?

There's a whole body of work, maybe it's out of Google. Even that is around creating a safe environment for a debate. Debating does not mean you have to yell at each other. This is not a debate team from high school. You can be respectful to debate well, you have to actively listen. Well, if you're really going to pummel an idea, not the person, the idea, you really have to think and listen to exchange ideas. Adobe, again, an amazing culture creates the space for best idea. In that sense it's very flat from a hierarchy. Anybody from anywhere can have an idea, can get time with senior leaders, very open in that sense. And that's always been my mantra in my own career and my teams. But it's easy to do at Adobe in a sense. That's just how we roll. We encourage people to speak up and I do. You're asking me how do you do that? Because of course if you're just like a brand new two year analyst out of a bank and coming in, you do want to debate with the head of the group. I invite that I call on people in our team meetings. Right? Because we do, we wrangle over the problem too. It's like I, if somebody didn't speak up, I'll say, hey, person acts like, what do you think? Are you a thumbs up or a down or a down? We don't shut anybody down. We don't. It's very respectful culture. We really listen to each other. It's inclusive in that way. So yeah, there are things you can do, but I think in general you just have to create A space for people to do that.

Yeah, occasionally you're prompting. I like that. I've been telling people on my team that I like losing debates. I'm not going to make it easy, but I welcome it because it's a fun thing to do and ultimately you're not always going to win. And if you can prove me, that's actually a good thing because I'll ultimately learn from it and then it's great. Help me identify and I tell them like, yeah, I'm right 80, 90% of the time. There's times where I'm not so fair game.

Knowing when to back off, knowing when you're just debating for the sake of debating. It takes some maturity too. And it sounds like you keep on as a leader. You don't want to win every debate because who needs to be the smartest person on the room then you didn't hire. Right. I'm actually looking to hire people way smarter than I am on the team. Again for Adobe. That's good for Adobe.

That's the secret to great leadership right there. How do you bring all this skill together to capture the intended value of the deal?

Deals are super dynamic. So I really view it as making sure you have the right ecosystem in place. And back to when we talked about the upfront piece, right. Who are the right stakeholders? Who's the ecosystem of players that you need? The sponsorship has to be clear. The Mac committee, the M and A committee has to be on sides. The thesis has to be checked. There's a lot of these pieces. They're not linear gates, but they're pieces that are necessary. I think the other piece is being willing. We just talked about being willing to be wrong. So you came in with the thesis. If you hold too hard to that thesis and are not willing to hear new information during confirmatory or as you learn things, you will end up in the wrong place. You have to be willing to constantly challenge your own thesis, debate yourself and question what you thought going in. And we do that actively all the time. Back to artifacts and things, tools that we use. After we write this thesis memo, as we go from assigned LOI into the confirmatory period, we have every work stream write their assertions down. What are your top assertions? What do you have to believe to do this? And we come back to it. We come back to it and we say, does this still hold true? Does this still hold true? So I think it's important to keep testing and debating yourself, having the right stakeholders at the table. We talk about leadership, being involved and present in the deal process. It's often off the side of the desk of a lot of our execs. They're doing 10% extra, 20% extra becomes on top of the work they're doing. And they have to be confidential, so they can't really talk about it. But it's important for them to be present and active in the analysis all the way through. The worst you can have is somebody floating at a high level and not really digging in. That will also cause you to get off track from intended deal value. It becomes at the end, you signed up for something and now you're not sure if that's the right thing. So I think those are some pieces of bringing the skills together.

A lot of what you're describing makes it sound a very dynamic way of working or agile. And even the point you made earlier about the culture piece and how Adobe's culture changes as they make these acquisitions. Is there an angle there where you work through this integration and there's all these different integration approaches. Obviously we got the depth of integration, partial, full, not integrating. But then in their, like they have these unique ways of doing things and other things that you'll say, hey, they're actually doing this. That's better than what we're currently doing. Can that turn into a broader transformation initiative for Adobe? Is there a way to tackle that? Or is that.

I think you got it. We're dynamic in the deal process, but you also have to be responsive and dynamic post close. You learn through discovery a lot more things about each other, the company coming in, and they get to know Adobe. So we always come into that phase with what we call the integration strategy plan of record, which is knowing what we knew at that moment. Here's what we intended to do from an integration standpoint. As we discover and learn, we pivot off of that. We do take a dynamic approach. The point is, though, you have to close the loop. So if you're going to make a change to the plan of record, you can't do it in a silo. You have to make sure all the ecosystem, all the stakeholders, from go to market to security to back office systems, everybody has to understand the change that was made strategically so that it can all flow through. That's the hardest part of being an integration leader, is you got to close, rope, you got a tick and tie. And it's a system mentality, it's not a silo mentality in making those changes.

Yeah, because how do you drive a bigger initiative that could bubble up for folks that Already overstacked. You're doing multiple integrations so everybody's overwhelmed and understaffed.

There is a programmatic part of this. Right? You're not just flying by the seat of your pants. We have an amazing integration management office team. There's a role for templates, there's a role for process, there's a role for governance and check ins and milestones. We use that scaffolding, if you will, that process to ensure hygiene. The thoughts will change every time. To your point, it's a different, oh, we found this, it's transformative. But we have this, a process layer that these leaders bring to the table so that we're making sure again, value realization that we're ticking through. So I think this is where you want to be creative, you want to be dynamic, but you also need governance in the integration process. You need governance and process as well as creativity and being dynamic.

You make all this sound all too easy.

You're kind.

I wish we had time to talk about go to market integration. That's a whole other interview. Adobe's known for it. I want to pick that apart. It seems like that tends to be the crux of integration failure is when you don't get that right.

That's interesting that you say that. I don't know that I agree with you on that. I think go to market strategy is really important, but it's just one piece of a holistic strategy.

Wouldn't it be the critical piece of that holistic strategy that if you want to capture revenue synergies, depends on the.

Target, it depends on the asset.

That's true. If you're purely buying a product and that's where you're integrating, then a lot of that stuff goes out the window.

It sounds like we could debate this for a long time. That would be fun.

We could. We're going to hold around too. We'll have to invite some friends to make a more interesting debate out of this too. Get some more diversity of thoughts.

That sounds great.

Last thing I have to ask, what's the craziest thing a founder's purchased after closing a deal.

So I'm not going to tell you a story from Adobe, but I do know this. A very good friend of mine who is a founder, his company was purchased by a very large payment company and he went and bought an island.

Actually bought an island?

Yeah.

They say that's a thing for planning integration. Or the post close is did they have enough money to buy an island? Because if they do, you shouldn't.

I'm Glad to verify that for you. Again, it wasn't a deal at Adobe.

But I take it they didn't stick around for integration.

He actually, I think he stayed around for a little bit.

Maybe he got to work remote from the island and then it worked out that way. So that could be the takeaway. Here is There you go. They got enough money to the island. Make sure your plan includes working remote from the island.

And now that there's a kind of a hybrid reality that we're in, maybe that becomes easier.

Actually, I think so.

Not that I have a cultural checklist, but I'm going to put that on the checklist because that's an interesting question.

To ask because you hit the island threshold, you got this in there. Play. Hannah, thank you so much for taking the time. I enjoyed the conversation, learned a lot about making M and a successful end to end. Thank you for helping me become a better M and A scientist.

Thanks for having me, Kisan.

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. Visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's mascience.com here's to the deal. Views and opinions expressed on M and A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.