M&A Services
Creation of acquisition integration Playbook & Integration Execution
The Client
A $500M private equity owned recreational destination group, including 12 year-round resorts and additional partnerships with 14 other resorts across the United States and Canada.
The Challenge
The client was formed as a result of two private equity firms entering into a joint venture that brought together destinations from four major resort companies. Each of the four companies had disparate systems and business processes, which needed to be combined to recognize the value and synergy targets identified in the transaction. The business also planned to increase and accelerate future acquisitions, however, lacked the management infrastructure and cross-functional roadmap needed to drive functional due diligence and post-close integration activities. The VP of Integration tapped to lead the acquisition work engaged Dietrich to:
- Develop a tailored acquisition playbook comprised of due diligence templates and integration tools;
- Create acquisition change management and synergy realization strategies;
- Lead current and future integrations, managing dependencies across 11 functional areas.
The Approach
Dietrich tailored an integration playbook for their business and led acquisition activities across all functional groups within the organization, working with functional team leaders and executive management to create an enterprise-wide integration plan.
- Assessed resource bandwidth and state of acquired businesses to determine workstream priority.
- Organized integration activities by functional work groups and assisted them in identifying the critical path tasks, milestones, interdependencies and required timelines for recently signed acquisitions.
- Developed an overall integration approach and management structure.
- Created comprehensive end-to-end current state process maps (systems and processes) for critical functions identifying handoffs and accountabilities.
- Leveraged the Dietrich Integration Playbook to support:
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- Due diligence and integration management strategy
- Definitions and tasks by function for implementation and measurement
- Functional work group templates and integration management templates
- Change enablement (communication, training)
- Onboarding kit
- Approach for synergy capture
- Metrics and dashboard reporting examples
- Visual of the integration process and key steps to be completed at each juncture
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- Created steering committee reporting materials: status, key communication/interfaces with acquired company, milestones.
- Defined integration approach/process; organization structure for IMO, functional area due diligence checklists, data request for M&A team and checklist for M&A team to “hand-off” integration to IMO.
- Lessons learned from each integration were incorporated into the playbook for use with future acquisitions.
The Result
Dietrich created accelerated value and synergy while reducing integration disruption for the business. Dietrich’s work fostered collaborative relationships with functional work groups to develop tools and templates enabling ongoing client ownership. This included improved functional due dilligence process to reduce risk, and more efficent integration. The team also facilitated knowledge transfer between leadership and functional work groups, devloping an M&A hand-off checklist to ensure critical information was shared and work groups were educated on expectations for specifics characteristics of the acqusition. This promoted a cultural shift toward ongoing integration. Value was also delivered in established processes to continually enhance tools and templates by incorporating feedback and lessons learned after closing each acquisition.