The M&A Science Podcast

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a dedicated M&A team to execute successful transactions. With proper team alignment and motivation, getting deals done is very much possible.

William (Bill) Stone, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of SS&C Technologies, a global provider of software and investment/financial services. Bill shares how their strategies have changed and the key lessons he has learned from conducting over 50 acquisitions.

Kison talks to Dustin Intihar, former Director of M&A and Strategic Alliances at The Lubrizol Corporation, about how to hunt for deals in M&A. Learn how to get a target to take your call, what that first conversation should look like, and how Dustin coaches business leaders on strategy development and target identification.

In this episode, Philip Soar shares his approach to sourcing opportunities, what does he look for in a company, and the different techniques to cultivate relationships with PE firms.

In this episode, Darren Lampert, CEO at GrowGeneration Corp, talks about what it's like going from a private to a public company. Darren lived through this transition and discusses how M&A has changed from private to public, how life as a CEO changed, and the benefits of becoming a public company.

Join this discussion as Kison and Martin talk about best practices when conducting international deals.

Often, leadership is overlooked in M&A. But make no mistake, a successful deal is largely attributed to leadership, much as it is when the deal fails

Kison speaks with Allen Gilmer, Founder of Enverus (formerly Drillinginfo) who has an interesting story of starting an M&A function from scratch and hiring a COO so he can step back but still retain control as a board member.

Jeff Hennig, Senior Director of Corporate Development at Xilinx, shares about how to put an effective workflow in place to manage communication. Learn when to start planning your communication strategy, common challenges, and why having a communication strategy is so important.

Kison will be discussing how to foster and maintain good relationships with deal targets.

Kison will be talking to Brett Shawn, Senior Vice President, Assistant General Counsel at Warburg Pincus LLC to discuss how M&A is executed from the legal perspective. They'll be covering minority deals, the different types of risks you are looking for in a deal-and how to mitigate them including COVID-19 related risks.

In this episode, Andrew shares why the legal team's involvement early in the deal process is important and the different key milestones in a deal they are responsible for. He also talks about the dangers of deal fever, working with corporate development teams, and more.

Keeping business leaders motivated and accountable for the deal post-close can be a difficult task. Ensure you have very realistic expectations around financial performance and operational goals so that they take the business case seriously. Hear from two industry experts on how you can incentivize business leaders to stay focused and retaining deal value.

Clayton Stanley, Vice President and Head of Corporate Development at AmeriVet Veterinary Partners, talks about how to make the JV model work on scale and figuring out the right size of the M&A team. Learn about how you can create a joint venture model that is scalable and the prioritization of tasks.

This episode of the M&A Science podcast features our friends over at Cisco. In this interview, we talked about evolving to Agile M&A at scale, with Ashley Rice, Sr. Consultant HR M&A at Cisco, and Kimberly Baird, Corporate Development Integration Lead at Cisco.

Kison interviews Matt Arsenault, Vice President of Corporate Development at Jamf, about the many career paths you can take in M&A. Learn how to shift career path gears, roles to look for when transitioning, and what the future of a corporate development role may look like.

This week's episode of the M&A Science podcast is unique. We recorded it almost a year ago but it got lost in the production process. Javid Moosaji, former M&A Sales Integration Strategy at PayPal. It's too good not to share with the M&A community - listen to it and you'll know why.

This episode is a session from our Holiday Summit last December with Emma Barton, Director, Alliance and Integration Management at AstraZeneca. We're talking about the spectrum of deals corporate development manages approaching partnerships and alliances and how those relationships may progress into M&A.

This episode of M&A Science is a session from the M&A Science Holiday Summit last year. The interview featured Carlos Cesta, Vice President of Corp Dev at Presidio discussed the best practices to capture value from initial deal prospecting to integration.

Kison sits down with John Orbe, Associate General Counsel - M&A at Emerson to talk about corporate VC deals, what the process looks like, and how to navigate challenges you may encounter.

Join Kison on this interview with Jerry Will, former Vice President of Corporate Development at 3M. We'll be learning about managing a multi-vertical M&A strategy through continuous improvement and leadership development.

Join Kison and Elena Sidelnikova, former Head of Finance and Corporate Development/M&A, CFO at Always Compassionate Home Care, for an interview about how to identify risks in software M&A.

How do you start building your corp dev function from scratch? Where would you start when you are the very first person in your department?

Kison interviews Gina Sandon, Director, Corporate Development, Merger & Acquisitions Synergy, Integration and Transition at IBM, about how to evolve your M&A workflow using Agile principles.

The partnership between the investment sponsor and the operating sponsor needs to be symbiotic to fully align both sides and help each other make the right decisions on deals. Learn how do these sponsors support each other through a transaction in this episode.