A lot of information is available on M&A strategy, transaction and even integration. But very little goes into real practice, how to overcome the various daily challenges. This blog will be in two parts. The first examines real-life experiences of M&A in general, bridging from the transaction to integration and integration value creation. The second part shows some practical case examples of how to use the new Midaxo tool to process your M&A cases.

My name is Kaija Katariina Erkkilä. I have travelled a long path - from working in a small private company, to 16 years in global corporate life in several countries, a board member in a family business and start-ups, business angel, M&A integration coach, trainer and author for the past 14 years - to become a true start-up entrepreneur. All along, my view point has been sales/general management, with an external focus on customers and an internal focus on people development.

My passion is to give back what I have learned, to share and develop further. That’s why it is so wonderful now to work with my colleagues to combine my M&A experience with their skills in the latest SaaS technology. After more than 30 years in business, my idealistic excitement is still intact, so hopefully this blog and Midaxo’s new M&A tool can benefit the M&A community as a whole.

Even a small M&A case can be very complex and disturb the buyer and target company’s customer relationships and operations for a long time. Since no one is an expert of all aspects of M&A, please share your experiences, comments and questions – they can be just the point someone else needs.

Why Midaxo?

My first M&A experience was in 1988, when my employer, a Finnish company, acquired our distributor’s operation for the US, Canada and South America. By that time I had spent almost four years in the US as the liaison between the Finnish supplier and the North/South American sales and service operation. Despite my in-depth knowledge of the target company, the post-merger integration was not easy. Since then I have been involved in several transactions and integrations, first as a corporate executive and later as a coach and consultant. The cases have varied from smaller, domestic ones to multi-country cross-border cases with a buyer consortium. Over the years we have tried many methods and tools to manage the process, with varying degrees of success. But nothing has been found that really would make the work easier and more transparent.

About four years ago I met young software engineers, who expressed interest in these issues. It took some experiments until we, with the help of several corporations’ M&A teams, found an approach, that our advisors felt to bring real value to their processes. But you are the best judges of that. Have a look at our pages, comment and suggest improvements. Only together we can develop changes that truly help the process and improve the M&A success rate and value creation

At 15 I spent a summer in Copenhagen as an au pair. There I saw the film by Omar Sharif and Barbara Streisand in which she sang “people, who need people, are the luckiest in the world”. It hit me then, and it is still one of my favorites. We all need other people to improve and succeed. I hope this blog can become a venue for us to do that.

Let’s be in touch, share, and help each other to learn more.

Based on early feedback we decided to implement and publish a few enhancements:

• option to recover lost / forgotten passwords
• a "Guide" view that makes it easier to read process instructions
• small fix to project template preview
• the invitation email sent after adding a new user now includes name of the inviter

New Guide tab

Some users reported that the original design (in whichonly a single task's instructions are show at a time) wasn't the most user friendly way to represent the process instructions. Therefore we quickly implemented a new Guide feature that shows more content (and also subtask instructions) in the same view and lets users drill down to read more about each subtask.

Midaxo Free went live today, Wednesday, February 1. It's designed to help companies like your's design their own custom M&A and post-merger integration process. We have included a comprehensive process framework that provides an excellent starting point.

We will continuously make improvements based on user feedback and what we learn from usage analytics data. I will keep posting about new developments. Don't hesitate to comment or send your ideas and feedback directly to me (email: kalle.kilpi@midaxo.com, phone: +358 (0)50 501 3682).

Premium features for project execution are currently under development and will be available to the first pilot customers in March. Please contact me if you are interested.

Thanks,
Kalle