This advisor's role is not to make decisions but to provide a cool-headed, pragmatic perspective. They test your hypotheses and translate them into practical terms, helping to improve results and limit losses by identifying blind spots before you commit.
Surprises are best uncovered during due diligence. Finding them after closing, even if they seem beneficial (like an un-negotiated supplier contract), indicates flawed homework and disrupts the integration plan, damaging credibility with stakeholders.
Don't just hand over a massive standard integration plan and expect the target's team to fill it out. This overwhelms and alienates them. Instead, present it as a menu of possibilities and work with them to collaboratively narrow it down to what's relevant for the deal.
In an earn-out scenario, acquiring another company that competes for the same geography or clients can make a seller's targets unachievable. This is a major breach of trust unless the possibility was discussed upfront. Serial acquirers must plan for this and communicate their M&A strategy transparently.
Even well-intentioned sellers are motivated to close a deal and may present information in the most favorable light. This is often a human behavioral bias, not malicious lying. Acquirers must actively challenge and validate seller statements by testing assumptions and seeking external information.
To ensure integration is considered from the start, embed a preliminary plan directly into the business case template. This forces the deal team to define key milestones for major workstreams (e.g., branding, IT, finance) before the deal is approved, creating a solid backbone for post-close execution.
Instead of walking away immediately upon finding inaccuracies, quantify the risk. Rebuild your business case assuming the worst probable scenario based on the discovered misrepresentations. If the deal remains net positive even with these new, pessimistic assumptions, it may still be a viable investment.
While freelancers provide expert M&A support without full-time overhead, a key inefficiency is onboarding them to your company's specifics. By creating a relationship with a trusted freelancer or boutique firm, you build cumulative knowledge and reduce this learning curve on subsequent deals.
While AI can easily generate checklists and templates, its transformative potential comes from its reasoning capabilities. It can parse decades of industry data to suggest a course of action and, more importantly, articulate the arguments and counterarguments, educating the user on the second-order consequences of their decisions.