With the slumping economy, Greg Beyerl decided there was only one
way for his company to grow:
through acquisitions.
As president and CEO of Sign
Craft Industries, Beyerl set a
goal in early 2008 to reach $10
million in revenue by 2010.
Since then, the sign company
has acquired two of its competitors and posted 2008 revenue of
$5.3 million, and Beyerl projects
2009 revenue of $9 million, putting the company well within
reach of its goal for 2010.
Because Beyerl was already
familiar with the customers and
management teams of the
acquired companies, a large
component of the transition
was communicating the change
to the 60 employees, both old
and new.
Smart Business spoke with
Beyerl about how to inform
employees about an acquisition
and how to help them adjust
through the change.
Q. How do you communicate to
employees about an acquisition?
During the process, you don’t
want hardly anybody to know
because information getting out
can be catastrophic to either
company if the acquisition does
not go through. We waited until
the deal was done.
We believed the best way to
break the news was in large
group meetings. Finding out
information from other than the
source is never good.
We told them upfront what
the objectives were, what we
thought the numbers were
going to be when we’re done
looking at the two companies,
how we’re going to go about the
process and, again, with an eye on integrity, we stood by what
we were going to do.
Be honest. That goes from
why the acquisition made sense,
what our objective is out of
making that acquisition, and
more importantly, because they
probably didn’t listen to an
awful lot of that, start off with
what’s the impact on them.
Whenever you get into one of
these acquisitions, you have the
nasty word that goes around
that’s called synergy. It’s a beautiful thing for companies —
that’s what makes a lot of these
acquisitions worthwhile
— but to an employee
base, that means that
people are going to be
losing their jobs.
We conveyed to our
employees and to the
other employees that if
you’re good at your job, if
you work hard, if you do
the things that you’re suppose to do, you’re going
to have a job.
We candidly tell them
upfront that we will be
reviewing everybody on
both sides and try to get
the best set of employees in the right jobs that
we can.
