How to Compress a Diligence Memo for an Effective Integration Hand-Off
About the play
This play is designed to shorten the diligence memo for readability during hand-off to the integration team.
Preparation
The due diligence memo is extremely hefty and usually contains 30 to 50 pages for the integration team to read. It’s wishful thinking that every person involved in the integration team would read every piece of that document...there lies the problem.
It’s no secret that a knowledge chasm between diligence and integration teams can lead to value leaks. Even when the integration lead is involved early in the process, there will be new people added during the formal integration process.
Execute this play and shorten your diligence memo to ensure that everyone will read your report for effective integration planning. The final result should be no more than four pages.
People
Head of Corp Dev, Deal Sponsor, Integration Lead, Functional leads
Difficulty
Easy
Materials
Pen and paper
Time
Approximately 2hours
Running the Play:
Convey meeting with all the functional leaders
Summarize the Diligence Memo pulling out the following key things:
- Scope of the Deal
- Integration Budget
- Key Decision Made
- Integration Type - Understand and agree with leaders upfront regarding how much integration is needed for the acquisition and inform the integration team. It helps outline the rest of the transaction.
- Synergies - Be transparent as to why you are doing the deal in the first place so that the integration team has clarity around the value that you are hoping to create.
- Constraints and Assumptions - Declare the limitations and assumptions of the deal upfront.
- KPIs - Whether it’s revenue synergies, cost synergies, or employee retention, be clear regarding the success metrics of the deal.
- Disruption Metric - Set a metric that the team needs to watch out for during integration. We don’t w
Hand-off your 4-page document to the integration team
Other plays
Validating the Acquisition Plan
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