You’re committed to growing your business. While you see opportunities for organic growth, you realize that organic growth alone requires extensive time and effort. So your mind goes to the other option: acquisitions.
Stop. Recognize that many acquisitions fail before they even happen. Not because acquisitions are inherently a bad idea but because we make the wrong acquisitions for the wrong reasons. And don’t give sufficient thought to integrating them.
The first question to ask is: What do you want to acquire and why?
Are you acquiring revenue? Market share? Technology? Assets? Volume? Customers? IP?
A beachhead into a geographic market? Capabilities in a vertical market? A potentially harmful competitor?
Be clear on what, specifically, you want to acquire and why.
The second question to ask is: How do you best integrate the acquisition?
Should you let the acquisition run entirely independent of your existing business? Or should you fully integrate it into your business? Should you integrate the back end of the businesses and keep separate the customer-facing ends?
Give sufficient forethought to answering these questions. Or what you might end up acquiring is grief. And being consumed by what you consume.
Your thoughts?
Michael
Why Acquisitions Fail Before They Even Happen
