Services
Creating an M&A strategy is easy. Developing a realistic, achievable M&A strategy requires experience in what it takes to deliver it.
Increased revenue and profitability. Strengthened market position and reputation. New products, services, customers, markets and capabilities. Achieving your business goals typically requires a mix of organic growth, acquisition, partnership and occasionally divestment. Finding and delivering the right balance takes focus, objectivity, and a clear understanding of your options. Most importantly, it requires you to know thyself: Your own vision for the future, and a realistic assessment of what it will take to get you there.
Guided by our deep practitioner’s experience in M&A and a mature, tested approach to M&A strategic planning, BTD will help you and your business define the future, plan your journey, and turn aspiration into reality. Unlike other acquisition strategy firms, our services are rooted in over 15 years of experience helping our clients deliver their acquisition goals, not just setting them. From market assessment to inorganic growth routemapping to target identification and profiling, our team will collaborate deeply with your own, bringing our global network of sector and geographic specialists to the table. Beyond the deep analysis, tools and insight needed to inform the process, an executable M&A strategy also relies on the quality of collaboration with your own team and confidence that your business – and its people – are up to the challenge.
Direction, clarity, common sense, commitment and momentum to your vision. An M&A journey we believe in, and the confidence to realise it.
Aquire
Successful M&A isn’t just about doing deals. It’s about doing the right deals, at the right price, at the right time.
Doing deals can be easy; getting them right isn’t. Finding targets that are genuinely able to further your strategic and commercial goals, confirming your own ability to realise those goals post-close, and structuring and negotiating the right deal terms to give it the best chance for long-term success at an acceptable return are only a few of the skills you need.
But experienced acquirers know that it takes more than a good process, robust tools and smart people. Experience is essential. Having enough of the right resources on hand to fully assess the deal, manage the target interaction and co-ordinate the process is also key. Most importantly, you must have the right incentives and conditions within your own team to ensure real objectivity and support.
BTD brings all three. Our proprietary framework, M&A Navigator, coupled with our experienced team allow us to act as an extension of your own M&A team, helping you find the right targets, understand the opportunities, challenges and risks from every angle, manage deal bias and negotiate the best price and terms to give the deal the best chance of long-term success.
Fewer deals. Better deals.
Integrate
Buying a business doesn’t improve your bottom line. What you do with it after completion can – but only you do the right things, and do them well.
And many still don’t. While outright failure is rare, deal underperformance is endemic, despite decades of best practice, research and experience. By some estimates, most acquisitions leave up to 35% of their estimated benefits on the table in the form of delayed delivery of growth objectives, inability to achieve cost synergies, and loss of business and customer focus.
The culprits remain firmly fixed in post-deal integration: Alongside the common issues of aligning cultures, keeping your leadership focused and engaged, and managing post-close surprises, we see a number of more fundamental challenges faced by acquirers of all sizes: insufficient resources to apply to integration, management and employee overload, confusion around the overall shape of the post-close business and degree of integration, and a disconnect between pre-deal aspirations and post-close realities.
With experience of over 75 acquisitions, integrations and restructurings since 2001, BTD knows what it takes to deliver your acquisition goals post-close. Our proprietary framework, M&A Navigator, ensures that every aspect of your integration is designed, planned and executed smoothly, delivering your deal benefits at minimum cost, risk and business disruption. Our team of experienced integration managers can help advise, guide, or co-ordinate the effort, while our deep functional and integration specialists are on hand to support every step along the way, from communications to culture and leadership teambuilding, from IT to finance and HR.
Deal objectives delivered. Costs managed. Back to business.
Sell
Any business can be sold – but at what price? Are you, and your business, ready and able to achieve the best terms for the deal?
Like M&A, business divestments often deliver suboptimal returns to the seller, and for relatively straightforward reasons. Focus on a single bidder, a poor understanding of how your sale sits alongside current market cycles and trends, and most importantly a lack of attention to preparing – not grooming – the business for sale well in advance.
The best results can only be achieved when clear, rational expectations exist and are communicated; the process and negotiations are well prepared; a competitive process involving multiple potential buyers is conducted, and the contract is perfectly understood. The challenges for SMEs and large corporations differ, but one fact remains the same: sales and divestments are complex, time consuming, and expensive, so need to be designed and run to work right first time. Why take chances: Ensure that your process is quick, comprehensive, efficient, and likely to complete.
BTD can help you prepare for business for sale or divestment, construct and negotiate the best terms, and guide or manage the process from start to finish. Our team of experienced sale managers and negotiators can help you find the best buyer, achieve the best terms, and complete the deal professionally.
Smooth process. Ideal buyer. Great price.
Separate
Breaking up is hard to do. Do you understand what it’s going to take, and the skills and resources to get it done before it goes to market?
Every business separation pre-divestment is uniquely complex, challenging and frustrating in its own way. Each one also represents a time for learning, inspiration and innovation. Getting through the process quickly while also maintaining the performance and value of the business to be sold is rarely as easy as it looks.
Unless the business was already autonomous, issues to be faced typically include IT systems and data partition, staff and facilities, confirmation of asset and IP ownership and a host of other items. But other challenges are often overlooked along the way: your ability to support and any transition services negotiated by the deal team (and the buyer’s ability to discontinue them within the anticipated timeframe); sensitive data access and security; and being ready for any potential repercussions to your own business (reputational or otherwise) if something goes wrong with the business after transition to its new owner.
BTD’s team of professional divestment managers has helped some of the largest global organisations plan, manage and accelerate their divestment separations. More than just experienced programme managers, they know what to look out for, and can advise, guide or manage your separation, leaving you to get back to work as quickly as possible. They can also help you create and implement your Transition Services Agreements to ensure both firms perform smoothly post-deal.
Successful business separation, delivered quickly in partnership with the seller.
Improve
Deal frequency doesn’t always translate into improved deal performance. Are you getting better at M&A from one deal to the next?
M&A is no longer something unique, special and rare. Even for smaller businesses, M&A is just another aspect of business as usual, and for many larger firms divestment is all part of managing the portfolio to maximise value. Despite this, studies have shown that there is no inherent link between the number of deals you do and your chance of success: Doing more M&A doesn’t automatically make you any better at it.
Consistently successful – and improving – M&A and integration requires three things: a robust process and toolset that balances quality with the flexibility to meet the differing needs of every deal team; a recognition that M&A is driven by experience over mechanics; and a culture and approach that encourages and rewards learning and knowledge sharing from one deal team to the next.
BTD has advised, benchmarked, trained and supported some of the largest corporate and private equity organisations around the world as they’ve worked to improve their own M&A and disposal processes and capabilities. We’ve also helped small businesses establish their own teams, approaches and toolsets, allowing them to execute M&A with confidence and without a dependency on outside help. We understand the need for each business to tailor their own approach, and bring cross-industry best practice learned by helping over 50 clients do the same.
Turn M&A and integration into a competitive difference for your business.