As with many businesses, life happens fast! With an aggressive inorganic growth strategy planned, and their largest acquisition of the year just completed, our client’s leadership team recognized the need for repeatable HR M&A processes to guide all future acquisitions. They turned to The Grasp Group for help.

The client had acquired and integrated other companies in the past but had not documented the processes followed or captured their learnings for future acquisitions. Leveraging our previous experience we provided an M&A playbook structure to open up dialog with the various business groups involved. The structure allowed us to quickly understand both how and why our client approached deals the way they did. We were then able to customize our M&A playbook to incorporate internal best practices as appropriate and to ensure a “familiar face” to activities along the way. To help ensure a deep understanding of the playbook within the organization we shared experiences and the rationale behind the processes as designed.

The M&A Playbook provides clear documentation of all HR processes from pre-due diligence to post integration, outlining roles and responsibilities, and capturing tools and best practices to be used to manage all future acquisitions.

This project is best described by the client’s Vice President of Human Resources,
 

"As a company, we acquire other organizations as part of our growth strategy- in fact; we've completed 6 acquisitions in 2 years.  But, we approach each acquisition and resulting integration as if they were separate and unique transactions.  Meaning, we didn't have a consistent plan for handling acquisitions from an HR perspective.  When we discussed this issue with Geoff, he immediately began working with us to take some of our own best practices, add his own considerable M&A experience, and within 3 months, develop a template acquisition strategy, project plan templates and working documents to support any of our ongoing communication, planning and/or reporting needs.  Now, when we approach an acquisition, we have a consistent approach and set of tools to effectively manage each transition without recreating every piece of the process.  Geoff listened to our needs, helped us develop a game plan to resolve our issues, and then executed against that game plan to deliver targeted, effective tools."

Chip Ross
Vice President, Human Resources