M&A Science with Kison Patel | E210

Managing the M&A process.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Kison Patel, Co-founder, and CEO of M&A Science. M&A science produces a product called Deal Room, a platform for monitoring the entire life cycle of an M&A deal. M&A science is a company with multiple product lines covering education and technology for managing the M&A process focused around making M&A more of a collaborative people focus process.

Episode Highlights:

  • 2.00: Kison says that they originally focused on diligence management. The traditional way was using an Excel tracker to request documentation from the company you are acquiring and then follow up with clarification questions. 

  • 5.01: Agile is being used more and more in non-technology-related industries because it works well if you execute it properly, says Jason.

  • 6.10: In the early days, you used to have physical data rooms if you look at business. You had the banker boxes and had somebody to guard the access to get to this room. So you would have to fly in to review the documents, scan them, and put them on the server, says Kison.

  • 7.34: Organizations in this past five years have truly realized that all the values created after the deal is gone, and if you don’t set that deal up for success, you are going to make a lot of frustrations for all the change management that needs to be done.

  • 11.00: Jason asks, where did a lot of M&A learning come from? Is that coming from success stories you played, or are HR people coming and playing a role in this? 

  • 11.32: We have seen the auction process is just going in a blink of an eye. We are trying to figure out how organizations we work with should do proper diligence, let alone integration planning with a compressed time frame, says Kison.

  • 13.10: Kison explains that they are working directly with corporations because they had more stake, and they had to own the results. So if they can help them produce better results, that was a big win for them. 

  • 16.31: The ultimate thing that we created was a compelling reason to change because anytime we introduce something, whether it was a new practice or a technology, we always gotta go back end reference and say, we’re doing this to solve these problems, says Kison.

  • 19.23: Jason asks Kison if you have one wish for something that can change in your company or industry as a whole, what would have been? 

  • 19.33: 90 plus percent of the time, when we look at problems, it is just some communication breakdown. Better reminders and more transparency on good frameworks work well on communication, says Kison.

  • 22.52: The challenge is getting the right skilled people to keep evolving the company. It becomes such a big emphasis on hiring because it allows you to get the talent in to optimize operations and help optimize the customer experience. 

  • 26.48: Just continuing the growth and making the difference in the industry where it’s not just focused on the outcome of the revenues, but seeing the value you are creating in this before and after state that makes such a big difference is most exciting, affirms Kison.

3 Key Points

  1. Each organization is there to serve its customers. For us, the acquisition is what ultimately will mean for the customers, how we serve them and how we will come together to help them better, says Kison.

  2. A skill we don’t learn enough in school is sitting back and figuring out the obstacles. If you want to learn how to do that, spend some time teaching, says Jason.

  3. HR piece is probably one of the biggest challenges that we are coming across today, and it’s tough because that’s part of the muscles you got to develop, says Kison.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “We put people pay information, customer contracts, trade secrets, and similar things together into one product to have the same data security that you’d expect in a virtual data room type of product, but also, in addition, added the workflows same from the inspiration of the project management tools.” – Kison

  • “As you go through a deal process, there is a leader in the very front end that is running around hunting the deal, doing the negotiation stuff.” – Kison

  • “Some projects manually manage tracking stuff and can be completely automated. And it is not so much about replacing the rolls or limiting the rolls. It is more about shifting from activity that’s not valuable.” – Kison

  • “Sometimes, part of the problem is we don’t necessarily equate the sufficient degree of time required to communicate properly.” - Jason

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech