Preparing a company for acquisition can lead founders to make short-term decisions that please the acquirer but undermine the brand's core agility, setting it up for failure post-sale. The focus shifts from longevity to a transaction.

In a counterintuitive move, The Laundress hired a banker recommended by their acquirer, Unilever. The logic was that large corporations prefer negotiating with known, tough entities, and this banker had a proven track record of extracting maximum value for founders.

In a competitive M&A process where the target is reluctant, a marginal price increase may not work. A winning strategy can be to 'overpay' significantly. This makes the offer financially indefensible for the board to reject and immediately ends the bidding process, guaranteeing the acquisition.

Founders should be wary of earn-out clauses. Acquirers can impose layers of pointless processes and overhead costs, tanking the profitability of a successful business and making it impossible for the founder to ever receive their earn-out payment.

The most critical contractual failure in The Laundress's sale to Unilever was the absence of a detailed transition plan. A vague clause to "keep doing what you do" created an ambiguous power vacuum, leading to operational chaos and the brand's post-acquisition implosion.

Brands must view partner and supplier experiences as integral to the overall "total experience." Friction for partners, like slow system access, ultimately degrades the service and perception delivered to the end customer, making it a C-level concern, not just an IT issue.

Amazon's attempt to 'Amazonify' Whole Foods by adding processed foods like Doritos and Pepsi highlights the brand clash that causes two-thirds of corporate acquisitions to fail. The strategy, which includes hiding junk food in back rooms, is a sign of impatience and a fundamental misunderstanding of the acquired brand's value.

Firms invest heavily in sourcing candidates but fail at onboarding. The crucial first 90 days, when an executive is most vulnerable, are often neglected, treating the hire as a 'done deal' instead of the beginning of a critical integration phase.

During a merger, prioritize people over process. Technical integration is secondary to building trust between teams. Use simple, cultural activities like joint happy hours and "show-and-tells" about the tech stack to humanize the engineering effort and foster empathetic collaboration early on.