The Virtualization of M&A

If you haven't heard yet, we're hosting a virtual summit June 10th and 11th. Join me and top level corporate development practitioners from Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Atlassian, Corning, Caterpillar, bmo, SAP and many more. This event's free and it's focused on sharing lessons learned. Visit Mascience to learn more. Now back to the podcast. 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. Hi Tim, here with Kimberly Baird, corporate development integration lead at Cisco. Kimberly is responsible for driving the successful integration of acquired organizations into Cisco by implementing best practice methodology rooted in M and a specific project and change management developed over 200 acquisitions. Today we're going to talk about how to adjust your M and a process to be efficient virtually. How are you doing today Kimberly?

I'm good. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me here today.

My pleasure. Maybe we could just start off with a brief explanation on your role at Cisco.

Sure. I'm an integration lead. As you mentioned in our corporate development function which reports up to the CFO of Cisco, I lead acquisition, integration and divestiture programs across all of Cisco and how I do that is partnering with business leadership to define the strategic desired outcomes for our investments. Then myself and my colleagues that are also integration leads, we lead cross functional M and A teams to plan and deliver on the business outcomes that we agree upon across the executive team.

You got to deliver on all those promises that Corp Dev made.

Exactly. We make it real.

The value creator. I like it. How have you personally seen today's environment with the downturn COVID 19 transform the industry?

We have seen a tremendous amount of change very quickly and obviously it's affected everybody across the globe and it's just happened so fast. So I can't really say exactly all the transformations happening in the industry, but I can speak to what happened to us directly. So at Cisco we of course had a mandated work from home policy that was implemented in March and we saw our in flight MA deals impacted immediately. We had deals at the announced stage, employee orientation, we had deals starting or in the process of due diligence, detailed discovery, integration planning. We had delays whole on divestiture, TSA exits. All of these were impacted in some way by COVID 19 and of course we saw travel plans canceled in person, meetings canceled and we just had to quickly pick up a virtual approach. Of course Cisco, we use our Cisco WebEx collaboration platform and that allowed us to adjust really quickly to the remote environment.

Basically all stages of all your deals sort of froze up for a minute and then you had to regroup and come up with a new game plan moving forward, which involved a lot of looking at things by using these teleconference conferencing tools and so forth.

Yeah, exactly. And I wouldn't say anything stopped. I think from the outside it appeared seamless, but internally we had to do a lot of thinking, how can we do this differently quickly? Some were obvious changes and others took a bit more time to plan out.

Yeah, I'd love to get into some of the techniques you've adopted to drive change to virtualize your M and A process.

Well, I think our flagship product, Cisco WebEx is really the standard we use. So we just went directly to that for all of our virtual events, our diligence, et cetera. I think one of the things that was and has been and will continue to be challenging is some of our flagstone capabilities that we highly regard in our M and A practice, like our discipline for employee orientation. That's when we bring acquired teams into Cisco and we work very hard to make them productive quickly. And of course that normally consists of a whole bunch of in person interaction and in person meetings. So that was one area that we were, that we have been very concerned about and we're continuing to improve on. We had to quickly augment for one of the deals that were being announced during the April time frame. And you know, specifically one of the deals had an employee population in Italy and that was just super sensitive. And we, of course Italy was at the height of their public health crisis at that point. We worked collectively with the management team at the target to have an announce event. Virtually it was short notice and of course all the people were affected. So much change at one time, as you can imagine, COVID 19 shutting down the entire country and then at the same time learning that you're being acquired by Cisco. It was a delicate dance. We also had an orientation event over in Australia at the same time, which you can imagine coming from the us There was a lot of travel planned and things that we had to adjust quickly. But it was, you know, one of the benefits of having a global team is we were able to quickly coordinate with a local team to help us from a remote standpoint.

So it sounds like a lot of your processes got pivoted into let's find a digital way of doing it and things sort of moved on and progressed. Was there anything that just didn't I'm.

Trying to think of an example where we were not able to do something. Yes. One thing that happened was we had some TSA exits as a result of a divestiture where we were moving some labs and those got stopped, halted and delayed where it wasn't safe for people to work together in that close proximity to move equipment. That was one reason. And then the other reason was just the regulatory situation in India and UK kept us from physically being able to move equipment.

Okay. So stuff that actually required some physical interaction couldn't be done, period.

Yeah, we've had to delay until we were able to work with local government authorities to, you know, set up a process that everyone felt comfortable with. And a couple of those are still sort of in a to be determined state, but we expect it to be closed out in the next couple of months.

But it sounds like a lot of the general diligence integration activity still progresses, just shifting it more towards a digital medium and how you're using conferencing tools.

Yes, exactly.

What's a bit like.

It's interesting to realize that oh wow, we can do even more remotely than we thought. It's interesting even for us because we feel at Cisco we feel like very virtualized. I work with people all over the globe all the time, constantly on video calls and collaborating virtually and yet there was much more we could do.

What was it like adopting new technologies during this time?

Well, you witnessed that today as I was learning to use Skype. There's some hurdles, especially when people aren't familiar with the tools that you're trying to use to collaborate with them. Personally, I've found that we actually are using the collaboration tools more to their fullest extent and they've been quite helpful. We've been adopting deeper capabilities that we didn't use before and discovering new things even on our own product that we hadn't used. That has been good. The other side of that, the struggles include, like I said, when people are first using the platform, for example, when they're first learning to use WebEx and they've been using a different platform, for example, in first time meetings, when we have between us and a target company, it's a bit more challenging because you have to overcome the hurdle of them getting used to the technology. But also in those first time meetings, it's difficult to get comfortable anyway, everyone's worried about their first impression. They they're trying to sell the company to Cisco. There's inherently some stress in the situation and that's an area where in the Past we've really put a high emphasis on having an in person engagement which that obviously helps alleviate the stress. So that has been a challenge those first time meetings.

Yeah, that is actually interesting because you have a lot going on with just M and A, the complexity of it and the tension and stress it creates. But then now you're having to adopt to this whole new environment and situation at the same time, which adds added pressure on top of that.

Exactly. And so like I said earlier, there's a lot of things that we quickly shifted and yes, that was successful. We have yet to kind of derive how that may have impacted the processes that we usually implement positively or negatively and kind of assess and learn from that and go forward. But that's not a natural part of our practice anyway. Every time we do something differently, like we did with the Australia team that I mentioned earlier, we have a lessons learned discussion and we keep tabs on, okay, how did, how did people react to that new way of doing things and what would we do differently next time?

Any positives that come out of this that hey, we've actually found better ways of doing things?

Yeah, I think the diligence process, I found some unexpected benefits. I think because people were forced to change the way they were used to doing it, which was an in person environment. We looked to use and augment our meetings with collaboration tools and tracking tools and we ended up better documenting, I think the conversations and the hours of diligence that we put in on a recent deal. So it was actually a big benefit because of course you always want to have, you want to have assets that, and data that you can share downstream with, for example, integration planning teams. That is much more handy than it would have normally been because we took more time to ensure that we were structuring and documenting the sessions because we wanted to make sure we covered everything. When you have an in person meeting, you sort of, you bank on the fact that you're gonna have time maybe in the hallway to ask another question or something like that. And so I think the team, teams put a lot more thought into making sure the virtual engagement would go well.

That's really interesting because you're right. It's so much easier to record a conversation when you're using a conference tool. And now you just turn these diligence calls into depositions in a sense, right?

Yes. I don't want to put that language on it because I hope it doesn't feel that way. But yeah, but for the sake of.

Reference, it's like, hey, we could use this information and we have it well documented, correct?

Yeah. The documentation is important because as you can imagine, many of our targets are much smaller than Cisco, usually a very small team and we outnumber them in droves. So we work very hard to streamline that process and only have certain people, so to speak, in the room during that conversation, during the diligent conversations so that we can keep it more casual.

Cool. Well, you mentioned onboarding events have changed since the pandemic. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Sure. Onboarding or employee orientation. When employees are brought into Cisco officially, they usually get their badges, they get their laptops configured. We usually have an event to welcome them. We have a whole slew of things that we do to make them feel welcome, to get them up and ready and productive very quickly. We've been forced to completely virtualize that experience. Like I said earlier, we're still experimenting with ways to make that engagement more personalized because you do you lose some of that in person connection. I think that it's more difficult to get a dialogue going. Like I said earlier, you're trying to make them comfortable. They might be new to the technology or virtual work environments. I think thankfully many of the acquisitions that we do are more than not software based and usually pretty savvy in terms of using collaboration tools and whether it be Slack or some other tool that maybe they need to change over to something Cisco. When they come into Cisco they still are very comfortable with technology and collaboration tools in general.

Have you noticed a lack of enthusiasm because of lack of in person experience?

I think it's too soon to tell. I mean it's hard because usually the feedback from surveys and things we're trying to do a little bit more hands on follow up so that we really get a better pulse on what's going on with folks. But it's a little bit too soon to, to know if it's. If the virtualized experience has impacted negatively in any way. We're not seeing that now, but we're going to keep an eye on it.

Yeah, that'll definitely be interesting. How's the importance of follow ups change since virtualizing the process?

Like I said, I think we've just taken a more active role and we need to take, we need to I think take a more proactive stance on personally following up with people and giving them a chance to connect in that way. Because I mean we'll still do surveys and things like that. But that of course doesn't feel personal.

Right.

So I think just sort of an observation overall, as we've been planning some of these more virtualized engagements is just like you're seeing with restaurants and everything else in the COVID environment. It just takes a lot more time. It takes more time, more resources and more money to execute in a really effective way because you have to plan. Like for example, we have some planning going on for employee orientation coming up and we are expecting to have to do the laptop configurations completely virtually. That means that we need to make the group smaller, lead the employees coming in through the steps, leading them through by hand and step by step when usually we get them all in a room, tell them here you go, start the steps and we'll help you and come around and help you personally. But we're not able to do it that way. So we're looking at having many, many more sessions than we would have normally had because we think we need to make the group smaller and lead them through the process in a more hands on way because it's virtual.

Yeah, that is interesting. So you're not stuffing a hundred people in a room. You're really paring that down to a lot smaller groups.

Right. And so of course on the integration side that means more IT people for more period of time and that cost is expanded because we need to do it. I mean the priority is to get the incoming employees up and running and productive and feeling like they know what to do and not not lost in the process.

Right, yeah. It sounds like you're taking that view and really looking at that employee experience for them and making sure that you're delivering on it and adjusting according to your typical approach.

We're trying. Yeah. I mean every day is new challenge it seems like. Right?

Yeah, I think that's kind of the game right now. Everybody's got to keep iterating to keep up with the new challenges from new environment. What's your advice for those looking to virtualize their M and A process? You guys are obviously actively doing deals on a regular basis, but there's obviously some folks that haven't and they're going to get ready to start doing deals again. What would you tell them?

Oh, that's a great perspective. I would definitely recommend using the collaboration tools at your disposal and use all those capabilities to the limit. If you're new to the collaboration tools, make sure you practice first because you want to exude that confidence when you're engaging with the target. You need to be familiar with your tools and capabilities as does your team. So you all look like you know what you're Doing. I haven't had to do that with my team because we're lucky. We use Cisco WebEx all the time so everybody knows what to do. But it is important because you are providing in many cases a first impression. Those impressions last, as you know.

Are you guys using any chat tools? I'm pretty sure using a task tracking tool because I know I talked to other folks at Cisco. Are you guys using other tools in conjunction with that?

Yeah, well, we use WebEx teams internally to Cisco. It's all connected.

That's where you get the chat functionality.

Yeah, we get our chat functionality there. We can share documents. We do all of that stuff over the WebEx teams environment. That actually is a little best practice that I think is pretty awesome, which is to have the chat environment with your internal team during things like diligence sessions, etc. So you have that ongoing dialogue and you don't have to expose that to the target. Right. And you can talk about your questions and things like that offline.

I agree. I mean, we use that internally and find it huge productivity value. So I'm surprised when I see companies that don't take up that opportunity because they are pretty accessible tools. Yeah.

And people don't realize how much it helps. I think that if you push yourself and you push your team to use the technology to its fullest, you'll see benefits that last beyond this pandemic situation. Because what I really think is the silver lining, like you were saying before, is that these types of challenges force behaviors to change. If you can be more productive with the collaboration tools you use, it'll become an ongoing practice. So that's something that I think is really important. And I just wanted to also mention, because M and A is so it is so important to keep that information confidential that I also recommend to someone that's coming in and maybe considering how they're going to virtualize the environment that they normally do person to person, that you're very cognizant about the security of the platforms that you choose and even consult your IT and security departments to make sure that you understand the user agreements and how your data is being protected, used, stored and transported.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's important to keep them in the loop, otherwise they'll come after you at some point. You don't want that. I've been on enough of those calls.

Yeah. I mean, just knowing the back end of how some of this data is mined and utilized by providers, it. It's really important to know if you're doing. If you're having confidential conversations over a platform, you need to know that that data is protected, especially if you're recording.

Yep, that's true. And following it's process. Sometimes they like their tools plugged in a single sign on and things like that. Is there any other sort of advice you'd give around virtualizing a process? I know we talked a lot about the tools. I'm curious particularly as sort of how do you get that mindset that we're going to be very pro change and adaptive agile?

That's hard to say because I feel like I thrive in that environment. That's my passion. I love driving change. I think the way that you do that, especially in this environment, is you, you work to understand what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes. I know it sounds corny, but it's so true. If you do this, then you'll inherently understand people's motivations and their fears. I'm a believer that business is run by people and I have sort of an optimist point of view where I and I feel like I know the people that I work with, they come to work wanting to do a good job, they want to make a difference. And I think that that's the same thing with any small company that we're looking to buy. They've been a part of something, they've grown something to this, to this point and they've been an important part of it. They want to make sure they continue to be valuable. And that's really how I've driven change in my past and currently is this understanding what motivates people to take action and then setting them up for success when they do?

Empathy.

Yeah.

That's your secret?

Yes.

You heard that Kimberly Baird, Just let it out. There's whole secret to M and A integration is empathy.

It's really not a secret. But yeah, I mean I think that it's just really important to think about where people are coming from. And certainly now it's even more complex. Right. Every single person is affected in some way by the pandemic situation that's going on. So you have to bring that into consideration as well. And I try to do that every day that I come to work. Try to take that empathetic point of view even when I get frustrated.

Yeah, that's important.

It's a process.

So an interesting topic that's come up in a couple of interviews is really getting alignment around your team members during integration and making sure they're focused. Can you give me some examples of what goes wrong when you don't have people focused on integration?

Yeah, absolutely. Basically all your worst fears are realized. Is that a good example? I mean, people that are coming in, if they're not properly handled and helped and provided the right environment, they're not productive. They'll struggle. Especially in a big company like ours, it's very easy to get lost if they don't have the ability to adapt and find their way on their own. They don't feel like they're contributing value, which going back to what I said before, that's what really matters to them. They came from a place where their contributions mattered. They saw direct results of their actions. One of the challenges coming into a big company like Cisco, if you're coming from a small company, is it's just so large and complex and there's a whole set of acronyms that people use that are different than anywhere else in the industry. So if you don't keep them engaged, within months, the highly skilled individuals will move on to other jobs and other companies leaders will exit and take their best with them. And so then what you have from an integration standpoint is as a buyer, you take on all the added complexity of the acquired operations without the benefit of the value delivery which is inherently delivered by the people.

So there's big value and focus around keeping everybody engaged.

Absolutely.

What's the trick to doing that?

The trick beyond what I've said already, I think is setting up a process that keeps very consistent touch points along the way. Of course, we have the introductory sessions. They learn how to use our tools, our processes, things like that, so that they can be productive inside of Cisco and then just keeping a pulse on the team and our people and communities. Team does a fantastic job of doing that. We do that with reviews, with the executives. We do that by polling and keeping in touch with the employee population that has come into Cisco. We track acquisitions, the value that we're driving with the people and talent. For three years, we keep tabs on who's left. Have we retained everybody? Are we meeting our desired metrics that we set forth in the beginning of the acquisition?

So you've been at Cisco for about 20 years now. Can you share what you've seen in terms of how the integration process has evolved over those years?

Sure. You know, I've only been in M and A for about five of those years, but at Cisco, one in five people are from an acquisition. So no matter where you are within the company, you have some exposure to acquisitions and our M and A practice, I would just Say in the first 10 years we were very full integration focused. It was like we buy the company, we bring it into Cisco, it becomes a part of Cisco completely, all processes, everything about it. I think over time we realized that we could take more of a hybrid approach or even more of a federated approach in some cases like Meraki, which has been tremendously successful. So I think over time we've adjusted our practice to really focus on delivery of value and what outcomes we're looking to achieve based on of course, our business and financial models that we, that we produce during diligence and validate during diligence. And I think our practice has changed tremendously in the last five years that I've been here to really embrace the diversity that new companies and talent bring in and then trying to make sure that we use the scale and size of Cisco to their benefit. Who doesn't want to create a company, build a product and see it just flourish, just scale worldwide, thousands of partners selling it. That's the dream. We try very hard to help make that a reality for whatever company that's coming in. How that gets translated might be different, but hoping to bring the benefits of what we provide, what we have here at Cisco, to those really unique and talented folks that, that develop technology.

Yeah, that's interesting. How does that I guess in the details with your actual execution approach of integration, change things?

Can you restate that question for me?

Well, it just sounds like you're sort of more attuned to these companies needs and you're giving them a lot more room versus really having that traditional strict discipline of an integration process. And I'm wondering if that sort of changes things mechanically for the way you actually go about executing integration.

Yes, it does. And I would say looking over the span of 20 years, we've been learning over time, in the last, more recent history, the last couple of years, we've really been changing the way we operate to try to map more obviously to the business that's coming in. Only focus on the things that matter. And really trying to. I've heard this in so many different M and A talk, but kind of identifying that secret sauce of that team and making sure that that's protected. Right. And that is probably the most important thing because we have seen in the past where we've split up teams, we've split teams coming into Cisco and then they lose their continuity. And if that's really an important part of the way they deliver value, then we would consider taking a different approach.

Have you gone through an integration where you went through the process and you started like discovering some new opportunities where hey, here's an idea of something that we could do to create value. Maybe it's not like a defined value driver of the deal, but could potentially align us when doing one of these deals.

Like other adjacencies.

Yeah, just kind of finding some other ways to extract value during the integration process because it just sounds like you're approaching it different but then it's almost like the modern be agile about it. And I'm curious if you guys take any of that in when you're working with the companies and start identifying other areas to create value.

Yeah, we do. We have. I don't, I'm trying to recall the deal, but one of the, one of the deals was sort of the breaking point in terms of how we architect our salesforce environment and using some of the practices that they had in their environment to really help drive recommendations for a ubiquitous salesforce environment. For us at Cisco, anyone that has been a serial acquirer knows that the operational elements build up. Right. You have multiple instances of things that start getting hosted in the IT environment and it becomes more and more difficult to have one cohesive architecture. So one of our acquisitions really helped us to break that model and figure out how to scale in a more operationally streamlined way. That was really great. Those are the kinds of things I think more operational in nature. As we've seen our progression of moving towards a software based model really be implemented. You can see that in the back end in the operations where we can apply some of the new thinking from acquisitions into our broader IT architecture and environment.

I actually have to give a talk at the conference about post merger innovation. So don't just integrate. Innovate is the talk title I'm working on with Toby Tester. So this is helpful for that actually.

Oh cool.

I guess I'm curious to know, for a company it sounds easy, right? Oh yeah. You see some opportunity there. You can actually learn the best practice from this company acquiring instead of putting them on as rigid integration plan that you originally planned. Be open minded, iterate on it. Because you might identify an area that you can actually bring into your parent organization that could make a big. How do you get, is it just purely a mindset thing or how do you get to that point where you're thinking that way?

That's such a great question. We have been working relentlessly on that. We have been, we have been very focused on changing our mindset, making sure that when we come into a situation we're not imposing. We try not to impose our own values and our own assumptions, try to be open minded and really more of a solutioning and a growth mindset. It takes time. I think that again you mentioned, and I keep saying it even though I'm embarrassed about it. Yeah. 20 years at Cisco, the culture has changed tremendously. We have changed as a company so much. And I mean, I couldn't be more proud to be an employee at Cisco right now after this many years. I can say that especially during this pandemic. I mean, Chuck just announced our earnings results yesterday. I couldn't have been more proud about how our company as a whole is approaching the market with empathy, putting our employees first, our customers and partners first, and trying to help solve problems for them. And that's it, right? It's the empathy, it's the problem solving. It's like, how can we make this work for you and us? And that's really what we're striving for. I don't think there's a prescriptive way to do that. It's a real culture change and a, a change management tact over time.

It is mindset. How much would you wait on that? Because we always talk about leadership and leadership's the driver of success in M and A. Is it really a leadership thing? And if so, who are the key leaders that would drive that mindset?

Well, I think, I mean, obviously all levels of leadership have a part to play and some do that better than others. Right. I mean, I think I've seen just recently in our employee, our CEO Chuck has been providing us weekly updates on the business and we have these massive company meetings every single week. I think that message coming from the top of empathy and caring for others and, and really giving back has just helped catapult our culture forward. It's just been amazing. The influence that leadership has is amazing. I think working within your scope, like myself as an integration lead, I feel it's my responsibility to drive that change, that mindset in the ways that I mentioned earlier. Pushing people, setting them up for success when they make a change and elevating those people and giving them kudos when they're really putting themselves out there. I've had people challenge me like Kimberly. We really need to be thinking about this or we really need to be paying attention to that. And I hear them and if it makes sense, I will change my direction. And I think people really respect that. So, you know, you just have to be real and willing to make changes yourself too. You know, I agree.

I think you're right. It's sort of looking at yourself as much as you're looking at the changes you're looking to make and being willing to have those tough conversations around it. What's the advice you would give around avoiding the whole performance dip post integration, since that tends to be a very common thing?

Yeah, I mean, it's common. It can't be avoided. It happens. It just needs to be mitigated like you would with any risk you want to try to shorten the time and duration of that dip. We plan carefully. Like I said earlier, we just have really consistent touch points with the acquired team through the anticipated dip. You usually have a timeframe when you know that's going to happen. Of course you have to pay attention because sometimes organizational changes might make it worse or better. There's things that happen outside of the control of even the management team that, that, that brings in the acquired company. So you have to keep an eye on, on how broader organizational changes might impact them directly. You know, I had an acquisition that we were really, we are really excited about the value that they're delivering over WebEx, but some of the capabilities that they were meant to deliver were, were delayed. And that's because of COVID Right. We had to like prioritize other things. And so keeping the team engaged through that timeframe is really important. And like I said, we track for three years and on larger transactions even longer, up to five years. So as an integration lead, personally, I make sure to try and stay in touch and if there's anything we can do to help from the broader Cisco environment, we bring those things to bear.

This is a hard thing, right? Because if you're especially Cisco, you tend to acquire growth companies and to balance growth in a business while going through an organization where you have another company that wants you to consolidate your salesforce, instance, your ERP systems accounting payroll, all while trying to balance continued growth. That's mission impossible. So one I'm curious is what is the key things that really cause that performance dip?

Well, that's an interesting point you make. Oftentimes with technology investments, we bring in a core group of talent technology that they've developed. More often than not, we need to make changes to their product. We need to integrate it into a platform that exists at Cisco. We need to migrate their operation in the cloud, whatever it is. There's things operationally that take time, also that take engineering effort. I think that the key is to work with the technology executives, the folks in the business that are responsible for the success of the people, the technology, the product roadmap coming in to inspire the incoming team members to say, hey, we're, yes, we're going to make changes here, there, in this other place, but that's going to help you realize even more value. Scale your product globally, scale your product to major global customers. That, I think, is the whole make a difference part. If you're willing, you've done all this work to develop the product that you clearly believe in it, right. And this is the chance and kind of the work that needs to be done to integrate it into something bigger and to see it hopefully grow beyond your expectations. Part of that, that's the part like, from an engineering standpoint, like, it's about inspiring that promise of, of more value.

And then on your end, I guess, coming back to the Cisco side, there's sort of a balancing act, because, one, you need to prioritize what you're integrating first. And keeping all this in mind, I'm curious to know, how do you look at the sort of speed of integration while you're looking at the company in terms of how they're trying to grow but being able to adjust? Because there's this mantra that everybody wants to integrate as fast as possible, but is there a lens around looking at that where, wait a minute, maybe we need to really architect this in a way that may not be as fast as possible, but sort of creates that balancing act between getting the value that we want out of this integration, but still not tampering with as bad of a performance hampering as that could potentially happen if we try to rush everything.

That's a great question. We do. We have staggered, especially operational integration for certain teams, depending on the business case. If there's significant operational capabilities that need to be stood up, for example, then we would just phase it out. Right. To make sure that we integrate at the right time. So we are very cognizant of that and we adjust as needed. Yes, you do want to integrate quickly, but that's all about making the employees productive. If they're not going to be productive because they're actually still working on all their legacy systems, you have to accommodate for that too. Right. So there's. It's just a mix. You just have to take kind of a hybrid approach.

We're going to have to pick up another interview around integration strategy next.

I'd love to do that.

Cost factoring, all of it. Kimberly, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M and A?

Have you seen. Have you seen the movie Office Space.

Yes, I have.

There's a scene in that movie about a printer and they're corporate workers and they're just tired of the man and they're really unhappy and they take it all out on the printer and they take it out to a field, just hammer it to pieces. One time we got a call from the epa. We're like, what about some of our own devices in pieces in a field? I won't say where that was. That was pretty telling. This was not an integration, by the way. It was a divestiture. But yeah, some former employees had taken the printer out to the field and had their way with it. That was surprising.

You guys don't make printers? They take Cisco routers out to the field?

No, no. It was just something from the office that, I don't know, they took their frustrations out on. There is actually a lot of stories, but you can't especially. This is not the topic. But in divestitures you have to plan and know that things are going to happen. You cannot make everybody happy in a situation where companies are separating. There is a lot of stories like that, but I thought that was kind of a funny one because of the connection to the movie. It is.

I like it. Kimberly, I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for your time today.

You're so welcome. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

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SA.