Tim Christie

Avoid Pitfalls Not Mentioned in the Playbooks   Over our years of working on transactions, we’ve seen a lot--lots of good things and lots of bad things.  Last month we addressed the Three Handy "Do's" for M&A Success .  This month we’re looking at the Don’ts. Don’t Number 1: Don’t Treat M&A as a Strategy in Itself Companies that treat M&A as a strategy often build impressive deal engines. They get good—sometimes great—at due diligence, negotiation, and even integration. But in our experience,...

Playbooks can be valuable tools that offer structure and minimize errors, but they alone can't ensure successful acquisitions or guard against hidden deal killers in M&A. To improve your chances of success, keep the playbook and add these three critical Do’s.

Despite their strategic promise, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) often fail to deliver expected financial returns for acquirers. While postmortems typically blame execution issues like flawed integration or employee turnover, the root cause may lie in the financial modeling process itself. Finance teams frequently build overly optimistic assumptions into deal models, creating unrealistic expectations for synergies, customer retention, and cross-selling potential.