Deal Leader Workshop: How to Avoid the “Acquisition Graveyard”

About

Why do acquisitions that clear rigorous diligence and integration planning still fail to deliver value? This workshop addresses the acquisition graveyard phenomenon—where deals that dominated leadership attention in Year 1 drift into zombie status by Year 3, consuming resources while delivering diminishing returns. By Year 4, someone asks: "Whatever happened to that acquisition?"

Attendees will work through a Graveyard Acquisition Audit in a hands-on sandbox environment, applying Tiger Team M&A’s platform and framework to assess real-world deal scenarios, discuss value-creation diagnostics, and take away actionable tools to adapt for their own deal portfolios.

Participants will:

Diagnose strategic drift patterns and identify warning signs before deals become zombies
Build strategic anchoring systems that maintain deal coherence across stakeholder transitions
Design Year 2+ governance models that sustain value capture without Day 1 intensity
Apply recovery frameworks to recalibrate stalled deals—or make the explicit decision to pivot or close

Key Frameworks & Tools

Participants leave with four battle-tested tools:

Process Pillar	Objective & Impact
Deal NorthStar	Create programmatic rationales that act as strategic anchors to guide decisions across the deal lifecycle
Strategic Anchoring Map	Establish coherence for your deal strategy that persists across deal phases and stakeholder transitions
KPI Alignment Check	Ensure success metrics best represent each deal’s value drivers, so you can measure integration execution in terms of value capture
Blocker Assessment	Diagnose what's actually stalling deal ROI, to define an action plan focused on root causes to unblock value

About the Speakers

Gwen Pope is the founder of Tiger Team M&A, bringing 20+ years experience in enterprise M&A, in corporate development, integration management, and M&A advisory leadership roles at Google, Microsoft, eBay, and other serial acquirers. She is currently CEO and co-founder of Tiger Team M&A, a vertical AI solution provider enabling repeatable deal ROI through M&A operational excellence.

Kison Patel is the Founder & Chief Scientist at M&A Science, where he's standardizing buy-side M&A by turning operator experience into repeatable operating standards—playbooks, templates, and role-based execution tracks that help deal teams move from diligence to value capture with fewer surprises.

This workshop complements the self-paced course How to Avoid the Acquisition Graveyard, available in the M&A Science Intelligence Hub.

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