Jay Mandel and his company, Tri Star Metals LLC, had never worked with a public relations firm before, until he, along with other shareholders and external partner Hagener-Feinstahl, bought out the company’s three founding shareholders.
While no negative changes were made, Mandel and his team knew there would be some worries from employees at the company, which produces and distributes stainless steel and aluminum products. So they hired a PR firm, which, along with an outside consultant, helped in the transition by preparing Mandel and his team for questions they might be asked.
“Those were two incredibly valuable assets,” says Mandel, president of the $40 million company.
Smart Business spoke with Mandel about how to prepare employees for an acquisition.
Q. What lessons did you learn from the outside help?
Those of us who were deeply involved in the transaction, we had it in our head why we wanted to do this and the strengths. We really needed to be able to effectively communicate those ideas to everybody, whether it’s the people working on our shop floor, to the people in accounting, to our salespeople.
We really need to be able to explain to them what the benefits are so they could effectively communicate it, not only to themselves and their families but to our customers and our other suppliers.
And our management consultant, the other thing I think he really did was he did spend some time to sit down and say to us, ‘Here are some of the weaknesses each of the individual, key managers has and areas you need to work on.’
Q. What advice would you have on managing through an acquisition?
First and foremost, you need to spend time trying to anticipate what your employees’ needs and concerns are.
You really need to sit down and try to put yourself in their position, what are going to be their thoughts and concerns and how is it going to impact their life. It’s really easy for companies, when you do a transition like we have, to sit there, look at the big, macroeconomic benefits and look at the synergies and the strengths that it is going to bring to both companies. But it’s more important to sometimes also sit down and say, ‘OK, how is this going to impact our employees and what thoughts or concerns are going to come up for them as we go down this road?’
