Blend, don’t stitch
When you have decided to add a new unit, acquisition, product or service, you want to make the addition as seamless as possible. You want the acquired entity to blend with your company. You don’t want to stitch it on so the seams show.
Solving that problem comes back to combining cultures. There are different ways to accomplish that, based on the size and nature of the acquisition.
At Syniverse, Holcombe’s team has completed one acquisition on average of every 12 to 18 months during his tenure. They’ve ranged from a 2007 acquisition that added more than 100 employees in Germany to a smaller acquisition of a Boca Raton-based company.
The Boca Raton acquisition was a product-based addition. The European acquisition, which also added personnel in England, was much more focused on the people involved and took more resources on Syniverse’s part.
“The key was getting our teams in Tampa and Germany to work together,” Holcombe says. “We tried to cross-pollinate the teams; we had them travel back and forth and spend a lot of time talking about the project plan. When you do an acquisition on a global basis, there are just differences on a cultural basis on how people communicate, what people say to each other, do they interpret things differently. Those are all things that make the process more complicated. Geography and time zone differences make it very difficult to pull that kind of information together.”
That’s why Holcombe stays involved in the merger and acquisition process at all times. Though you don’t want to micromanage your people, when it comes to moves that could radically shift your culture, you need to be hands on. You need to be the voice that is reinforcing the common themes you want all areas of your organization — both older and newer — to live by.
“First, I want to go back to how the new part of the organization treats customers,” Holcombe says. “Are they service-oriented, do they put customers first, do they make sure they do all the right things for customers? That is our big key, because if you’re working on a problem together and they’re putting customers first and you’re putting customers first, you’re all working toward the same goal. Then you know you’re living by the same cultural principles, which is good for the entire organization.”
How to reach: Syniverse Technologies Inc., (813) 637-5000 or www.syniverse.com
