Merger integration for SaaS start-up

The client, a B2B healthcare technology SaaS start-up with more than $35M in funding and one vertical suite of products, was witnessing rapid consolidation of their B2B clients, and an increasing preference for all-in-one solutions rather than deep verticals.

The competitor landscape was facing significant consolidations, with a view to achieving market dominance and serving the largest, most profitable customers.

The choice was clear: stay the same size and face market irrelevance or begin a strategy of targeted acquisitions to fill product gaps and make and sustain a strong market position.

Integration skills were just one piece of the puzzle: understanding which products and features should be prioritized was critical in a booming healthcare market where making the right choices could create tens of millions in revenue, and making the wrong choices could mean letting competitors develop an insurmountable lead in the marketplace.

The client faced a number of challenges in pursuing the number of acquisitions required to stay market competitive. With rapidly consolidating customers and competitors, acquisition options were declining.

The pace of acquisition also meant that the client, a search fund CEO who had recently acquired the company himself, had very little time to establish himself with the leadership team, build a reputation in the industry, and establish a long-term strategy before needing to complete the first of several acquisitions.

Artemis was brought in to spearhead the pre-announcement, announcement, and post-announcement integration process to ensure minimal employee attrition and maintain market competitiveness. We:

• created a pre-announcement integration plan that included employee and competitor retention priorities, communications planning, and integration workstream definition and implementation.
• made recommendations to strengthen the market position including defining a customer advisory panel and customer feedback methods.
• managed the post-announcement plan to drive employee engagement and troubleshoot areas affecting potential employee retention, culture, or long-term planning.

We used our post-merger integration (PMI) playbook to rapidly establish key workstreams and run the communications process by:

• project managing the integration via 1:1s with workstream leaders, frequent CEO touchpoints, and frequent leadership standups to set priorities, review progress, and create supporting materials.
• coordinating with the leadership team and functional consultants to ensure aligned priorities and clear progress against goals.
• providing extensive guidance templates to fast-track progress and set weekly, achievable priorities that were high-impact.

We recommended leadership team accountabilities through workstreams and work plans by:

• attributing responsibilities to leaders including their role in the long-term integration, defining workstreams, and capturing tasks.
• inputting leadership role definitions and decisions to ensure clarity and post-integration planned changes.

We crafted communications and announcement planning, inlcuding:

• highly choreographed communications around the acquisition designed to carefully manage relationships and promote employee and customer retention.
• carefully sequenced and prepared announcement events, platforms, messaging, and methodology across employees, customers, partners, and the press. This required deep research on interdependencies, such as how some product features would be sunset so as not to compete with preferred partners, and reassurance that critical contacts could be honored
• ensuring all employee questions were answered via a multi-platform approach including live events, dedicated asynchronous feedback mechanisms, leadership meet-and-greets, social events, and extensive documentation about planned changes