The objective of this project was to develop an acquisition strategy for the client. There are a variety of strategic approaches to acquisitions used by companies and consultants. Most of these involve some fairly extensive analysis of the Company, its objectives and its strengths. This is followed by attempts to match these criteria with acquisition candidates identified by some fairly extensive surveying of the fields of available companies.
In our experience, this approach creates quite a lot of work for business development departments and/or consultants, but rarely produces a result worthy of the effort.
We believe it is better to move forward by a series of iterations, in effect some intuitive guesses combined with relatively superficial analysis until the prospects begin to ‘feel right’. The reason this is so important is that it is always the individuals in the Company that have to make the acquisition work. If it doesn’t feel right early on, we suspect that no amount of analysis will make it feel any better later.
Investigation and analysis can be used to separate several good possibilities, and of course have to be employed as part of a diligent investigation of the acquisition and a plan for its assimilation.
Acquisitions are considered to be a quick way to growth, a way of entering hitherto unfamiliar markets or of acquiring additional products, but as clients may know, acquisitions can be much more destructive than anticipated if done without adequate forethought.