M&A Integration Recommendations

It varies based on the size of the deal and what your resources are. Tuck-ins have different requirements than bolt-ons which are different than transformations with are different than traditional merger-integration. You said integrations so I am going to assume that's what you meant and that you have the resources (specifically human capital resources) to do this.

If you have someone completely dedicated to the integration, that's a start. If you don't odds of success go way down.

You need a Gantt chart with delivery timelines, milestones, and owners that goes end to end across IT, Finance/Accounting, Sales/Marketing, HR, Product, and whatever other divisions you've got. IT is the one that everyone forgets and underrates because it's less of a vertical in most businesses and more of a horizontal. Don't do that. From those functions come cross-functional workstreams like value creation, employee experience, customer experience, vendor experience, which need their own plans that come from dependencies on your verticals. Understanding at a basic level the Order-to-Cash, Hire-to-Retire, Procure-to-Pay, and Account-to-Report lifecycles is a great start.

From there, depending on your investment thesis, you need to have a crisp value creation plan that should include your cost and revenue synergy targets by quarter. It can't just be "we're going to make $XXM by EOQY." How you actually sell from positioning to pricing to transacting to training to account planning to all the systems that underlie these are all important. Cost synergies require a delicate touch, regardless of whether you are talking about RIFs or vendor consolidation... If you don't have a good comms plan attached to cost synergies, someone is getting torched.

Basically, you need a plan for just about every aspect of business if it's a merger of equals or something where you care about the asset beyond just acquihiring or whatever. Everyone needs to be bought in on the plan. You need an owner of that plan with enough political capital to get it done. And don't underrate the requirements gathering process for IT or you're gonna have a bad time.

An integration is going to take up a ton of your time. You're essentially asking people to overhaul their relationship to their place of employment - the place is growing, there are new team members, shared responsibilities, etc. Having a plan going in is essential - how exactly are the new joiners stacking up against the existing company? Are there jobs which are redundant now post-merger? How will the two cultures mesh, and how might you help them mesh more fluidly? Really understanding what's going to happen to your people is key, in my opinion. If existing strong performers feel like they're being overlooked because of the new growth, they may end up leaving (or worse, competing!).