Cohen: Acquired companies need internal 'bat phone' contacts during integration
Stephanie Cohen · a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · Jan 2, 2019 · at 10:51
Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Goldman Sachs, discusses post-merger integration framework with interviewer Martine Cassato.
0:00 / 0:47exact quote · 47.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Taking a group of people internally who have experience with M&A, who know the internal business, who know how to get things done from your internal engineering team, from compliance, Having an internal team and pairing them with the company, I think is really important. You know, we talk about it a little bit as the bat phone. Like, who's the bat phone to the person inside corporate to actually get something done? Because those first hundred days tend to be really important for someone who comes in new to a job, for a new company that you've bought, and what can really kill you is if you're sitting off trying to get stuff done and you can't get access to the internal. So if you've bought something where you want to leave it, off to its own devices, but you want to make sure that they don't sync. You got to give them a bad phone.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Stephanie Cohen
Cohen: Strategy and M&A belong within the same team
“I think about it as the way that we think about it is that we want strategy and MNA to be in the same place. So instead of having a group of people that goes off and does strategy and a group of people that goes off and does MNA, and by the way, incentivizing …”
Cohen: Financial models should test assumptions, not produce single valuation targets
“And then you get yourself in a lot of trouble when that gets to a single answer. It's like 1.25 billion dollars, right? That inevitably that's wrong. What those, what the math teaches you is what do you need to believe in order for it to succeed?”
Cohen: Fear of losing targets to rivals drives maximum acquisition prices
“When I was on the sell side, my favorite thing was to find the buyer who not only wanted to win, but was afraid to lose. When you had the guy or the gal who thought that their arch, their biggest rival was going to buy something, that was how you actually got …”
Cohen: Companies with strong distribution should acquire secondary market players
“But if you're a big company, and you have access to, for example, clients and distribution, maybe the party that's a number two is a number two, because they don't have access to that. And so then they have the same product, but they don't have access. So then…”
Cohen: Isolating innovation projects risks alienating employees driving core daily operations
“You could get to a place where you actually distract the whole organization because in an organization of tens of thousands of people, there's a lot of people every day who just have to be with their clients, execute, and they need to have fun doing that and n…”
Cohen: M&A succeeds when integration leaders sit with dealmakers from inception
“When companies decide to do something for strategic reasons, when everyone gets together and decides, it's the right thing to do, and by everyone, I mean, it doesn't mean everyone has to agree, because getting to consensus in some of these situations may actua…”