Growing by acquisition is one way to increase your revenue, but it is not an easy endeavor. Additionally, every acquisition is different. There is no cookie cutter approach to integrating companies.
Whether you are a private equity firm, investment bank or the acquiring company, hiring the right team to perform technical due diligence will help mitigate the risk of acquisition. Telecomthink can prepare a company to go through a potential technical and operational due diligence prior to considering a merger or sale.
Most acquiring firms have a set of investment objectives in mind when acquiring a company. Performing technical due diligence to evaluate the product, architecture, processes, and organization helps to ensure that those objectives are met prior to closing the investment. Additionally, a detailed look at these aspects helps validate any assumptions the investment firm has made.
M&A teams typically put a lot of emphasis on the legal and financial diligence, but they tend to overlook or underestimate the importance of truly understanding, from the technical aspect, what they are investing in.
Our consultants would find answers to questions like these:
People
• Do they have the right team running the show?
• Are there any flight-risks of key employees on the technical side?
• Can their top talent take vacations without receiving calls for help?
• Are the star employees over paid or under paid?
• Do they wear multiple hats?
• Are they overwhelmed or underworked?
Process
• Is their technical tribal-knowledge well documented?
• Are they operating efficiently?
• Are they using the right technical and operational tools?
• Are they adaptable and/or compatible for post M&A integration?
• Do they manage by numbers / operational metrics?
• Is there any Visibility and Accountability across the organization?
• Are there any adequate information security policies in place?
Technology
• Are they using the technology that they have effectively?
• Can their technology scale to expected growth levels?
• Is there any intellectual property? If yes, is it worth its value?
• Is the technology redundant or can it be integrated with the acquirer?
• Are their systems highly available and geographically redundant?
• Can their technology implementation & operation run with lower cost?
