Integrate acquisitions effectively. In my prior life, I worked at a billion-dollar public company in the software service space, and I initially ran strategy mergers and acquisitions for that company. It’s called ChoicePoint, a New York Stock Exchange fairly midsized company, with about $1 billion in revenue. It eventually sold to LexisNexis, but I actually led the acquisition of 18 companies. So, I would say, half joking and half not, that gave me a lot of opportunities to make a lot of mistakes and see what worked. And you know, among the 18 acquisitions that I worked on, some were terrific successes and some were real failures and a lot were in between. Like anything in life, experience counts for a lot, and I went through a lot of many different situations. I saw what worked well and what didn’t. I tried to leverage that experience.
It didn’t make sense to have two different brands. We very, very quickly moved the Parasun name and kind of transitioned out of the Parasun name over a very tight, three-month period and had them become IBBS. We really make sure they branded IBBS very quickly as soon as it was practical with their customer base and got out there in front of their customers and made sure they knew this was not going to be a satellite business but a new, larger business that was going to be stronger and bring all the good things they had with Parasun plus some extra level of resources and improved investment into the future.
We certainly try very hard to bridge the different cultures. Whenever you do an acquisition, you always try to bring the cultures together, and I think we’ve tried very hard with a lot of person-to-person visits both ways — Vancouver coming to Atlanta and Atlanta coming to Vancouver. To help the companies become much closer, we’ve done a lot of things, like we’ve had some off-site meetings. Earlier this year, I took a group this year from Vancouver out skiing for a day, right before the Olympics, and that was a lot of fun. Some of the times those people-building exercises go a long way. Having people socially mix and get to know each other outside of work, that’s proved to be very effective.
The third thing is people like to be part of a winning team and they like to succeed. What’s been important to the team in Vancouver is that they know they are part of a stronger company that has a very exciting future ahead and is moving into some new areas. Again, communicating to them where we are going and giving them a handle on the future and a view into the future is something that we take seriously, and again we haven’t done it perfectly, but we have done well in that regard over the past year and a half, since we acquired them in late 2008.
HOW TO REACH: Integrated Broadband Services, (866) 286-1899 or www.ibbs.com
