The Back-Office Surprises Nobody Warned You About When Going Global
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.
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.
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
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.
ECI Software Solutions is a private equity-backed SMB cloud software company serving roughly 25,000 customers in more than 80 countries. Over its 27-year history, ECI has acquired more than 20 companies and now runs around 70 different products, nearly all of them fully absorbed into a single ERP and HRIS environment.
Jennifer Lipschultz
Jennifer Lipschultz is Senior Director of M&A Integration and Corporate Project Management at ECI Software Solutions, where she has led integration on more than 20 acquisitions over the past seven years. Her mechanical engineering background shapes the structured, repeatable playbook she uses to move acquired companies from close to full integration across the US, Europe, and India.
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