How to Compress Diligence Memo for an Effective Integration Hand-Off

This play, created by Kerry Perez, Head of Diligence and Integration Management Office (M&A) at AMN Healthcare, is designed to shorten the diligence memo for readability during hand-off to the integration team.

Play by

Kerry Perez

Head of Enterprise Strategy at AMN Healthcare

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 the knowledge chasm between the diligence team and the integration team is often the culprit when it comes to value leaks. Even when you involve the integration lead early in the process, there will be additional new people as they expand the team in 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 4 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