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This free leadership kickoff M&A presentation establishes the integration framework, governance structure, and milestone sequence for finance, one of the most operationally complex workstreams. Three success metrics anchor everything: achieve 15% revenue growth, protect a 20% operating margin, and retain 95% of employees. Those targets aren't aspirational. They're the integration's scorecard, and finance decisions get evaluated against them.
Five guiding principles govern how the finance integration team will operate:
- Produce better results together than either company could achieve independently.
- Deliver consistent service to customers globally.
- Share ideas and alternative viewpoints, but recognize that the acquirer makes final decisions.
- Move quickly and pursue the best path expeditiously.
- Communicate openly, honestly, and with integrity.
Finance has a lot of ground to cover in different areas on Day 1:
- Accounting establishes opening balances, valuations, financial statement reporting, and cost centers.
- Accounts payable handles vendor setup, payments, and T&E.
- Payroll sets up employee records and manages the transition services agreement; planning stands up the budget and reporting process.
- Treasury establishes cash management and bank accounts.
- Tax addresses entity structure and multi-jurisdictional compliance.
- Risk handles insurance claims and security.
- Investor relations manages communications.
Four active workstreams — valuation, financial due diligence, transition services agreement, and process and operations due diligence — each have lead assignments, current status, and next steps documented, with E&Y engaged on the financial due diligence and valuation tracks.
The systems comparison highlights the depth of the integration work ahead. On the employee-facing side, job posting, talent assessment, new hire processing, payroll, learning management, travel, and expense systems are all running on different platforms across the two companies. On the back-office side, accounting, planning, fixed assets, data, BI reporting, and workers' comp systems are entirely misaligned.
Selecting and consolidating to unified platforms across each category is a multi-year effort that runs well beyond the 100-day integration window, but the sequencing decisions made in the first 30 days will determine how fast and how cleanly that consolidation can happen.