Verify a cultural match
Once you’ve matched business needs, you need to figure out the most critical match: the people. At Farmers, Woudstra has been through the process to know how important that is.
“We needed to look at the people fit,” Woudstra says. “So this will be the seventh transaction in my career. I’ve been involved in selling companies and I’ve been involved in acquiring companies, and when you’re acquiring companies, it is a culture fit with the people.”
But, like evaluating the business deal, that takes time. You start it at the outset, when you begin negotiating with senior leaders, but you verify at each step, fleshing out how many people you speak with and, like any good marriage, by talking about your future together.
“We both had the opportunity to watch each other in action, so to speak, and we continued to talk about the future opportunities of coming together and it’s just through a lot of that contact over the last six months that has allowed us to get comfortable with them because we’re making the buying decision,” he says. “Certainly being comfortable with them and having the sense that they were extremely comfortable with us.”
You don’t sniff that out alone. Up to 20 leaders from Farmers came through and met with their counterparts within 21st Century.
“So it’s not just a matter of myself and one or two other people, there’s been a significant number of people involved in this process,” Woudstra says.
But even with that help, you still have to be there to be the face of the acquisition on both ends. When the deal was announced, Woudstra met with 21st Century leaders to field any questions about their future involvement.
“I traveled to Wilmington, Del. (21st Century’s headquarters), and spent one whole day there on site with the top 20 people within that business group and had the opportunities to listen to them talk about the things that they’re working on and explaining the strategy as to how we saw them fitting into our business plan,” he says. “I sat there for about three hours and let them ask every kind of question they wanted to ask me.”
During that process, time set aside for listening was first and foremost on his to-do list to ensure their comfort in the deal.
“First, I listened to them, things they’re working on in their business unit,” Woudstra says. “It’s like anything when you first start becoming a group — you don’t want to tell someone something; you want to listen. So the first few hours was me getting
an opportunity to listen to what they’re doing today within their business and having them have an opportunity to present it themselves on an individual basis, the top 20 people, and then, from there, it was a matter of talking to them about strategically how we saw this group of people in this part of the business adding value into the business.”
