Due diligence covers deal terms, but it doesn't cover what happens once you're running payroll, benefits, and banking in a brand new (to you) country. 

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A legal entity change can lock a company out of its own bank account overnight. Benefits plans get frozen in by local law and have to be harmonized deal by deal, not defaulted to US policy. A language rollout can hit a website, a CRM, a billing portal, and a support desk all on the same go-live day.

Add to that,  having handled one acquisition in a country doesn't guarantee the next one will play out the same way.

Jennifer Lipschultz has led integration on more than 20 acquisitions at ECI Software Solutions, a PE-backed SMB cloud company operating in 80 countries, across Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, and India. And according to her, the back-office surprises rarely show up on paper.  This episode is a walkthrough of the playbook ECI runs before and after close.

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What You'll Learn

• Why a legal entity change can freeze a company out of its own bank account
• How Swedish per diem rules can turn expense reimbursements into taxable income
• What actually goes into a change engagement session, and why managers get briefed first
• How one go-live day can trigger a five-system language rollout
• Why fluency in one acquisition doesn't guarantee the next
• What belongs on a pre-close global integration checklist

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If you're dealing with a cross-border acquisition where the back office keeps breaking in ways diligence never caught, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has integration playbooks pulled from practitioners running 20-plus deals, to help you build your pre-close checklist before the surprises hit instead of after.