M&A Science
M&A Science, hosted by Kison Patel (Founder & CEO of DealRoom), is your go-to podcast for mastering the art of mergers and acquisitions. Each week, Kison and his expert guests from leading brands like Xerox, FastLap, and Cisco dig deep into real-world M&A strategies, offering actionable insights to optimize your M&A practice. Whether you're an experienced practitioner or new to the field, M&A Science provides practical advice on key topics like sourcing, due diligence, integration, divestitures, and more. With over 300 episodes, this podcast is the premier thought leadership resource designed to streamline your deal-making process. Start listening...
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The Real Work Behind the Close: When Judgment Beats the Checklist
<p >Brent Baxter, Sam Delestienne, Steve Hoffman, John Strenger, and Matt Melsen</p> <p >Winning a banker-run auction at 5% under the highest bid. Closing a deal when co-sellers have not spoken in months. Getting through 22 countries of employment complexity with a client who refused to work with EOR providers. Acquiring a Netherlands-based public company and discovering the due diligence documents were in Dutch. These are the problems that no playbook prepares you for. Four corp dev professionals share how they handled them, and what it cost when they got it wrong.</p> <p >What You'll Learn</p> How to win a...
The Nordic Compounder Playbook: How Jörgen Wigh Runs 85 Companies With 22 HQ Staff and No Integration
<p >Jörgen Wigh, CEO of Lagercrantz Group</p> <p >Lagercrantz Group has completed 90+ acquisitions over 20 years and never sold one. CEO Jörgen Wigh runs 85 niche B2B companies under a 22-person headquarters with no integration, no exits, and no value realization targets.</p> <p >This is Part 2 of 2. Part 1 covers the deal model, while Part 2 is the operating culture. Jörgen gets into how 85 autonomous companies are governed without a matrix structure, why this model exists almost exclusively in the Nordics, what makes a founder walk away from a signed deal twice, why Lagercrantz deliberately targets a 10% failure rat...
The Nordic Compounder Playbook: How Lagercrantz Bought 90 Companies and Never Sold One
<p >Jörgen Wigh, CEO of Lagercrantz Group</p> <p >Jörgen Wigh has been CEO of Lagercrantz Group (STO: LAGR-B) for over 20 years. In that time he completed 90+ acquisitions, built a portfolio of 85 niche B2B companies, and delivered 15 consecutive years of record earnings per share. No capital raises. No forced integration. No exits. The Nordic compounder model has quietly outperformed global markets for decades, and Lagercrantz is one of the longest-running, most disciplined examples of it in operation. In Part 1 of 2, Jörgen walks through the deal model behind that track record. </p> <p > What You'll Learn</p> How...
M&A Integration Technology: What Actually Works
<p >Jim Buckley, VP M&A Integration at Coursera | Todd Manley, VP of Corp Dev Integration at Intel | Carey Pugh is Sr. Director, M&A Corporate Integration at Ansys | Mahesh Ganesan, Sr. Director, M&A Integration at UKG Four integration leaders from Intel, Coursera, Ansys, and UKG debate what integration technology actually delivers versus what creates expensive overhead and where the real value leaks are. Todd Manley, Jim Buckley, Carey Pugh, and Mahesh Ganesan bring decades of deal experience to a conversation with no presentations and no curated answers.</p> <p >What You'll Learn</p> Why the diligence-to-integration handoff keeps...
Partner Before You Buy: The Pre-Acquisition Strategy Corp Dev Teams Skip
<p > Tomer Stavitsky is SVP and Chief Corporate Development Officer at Omnicell (NASDAQ: OMCL)</p> <p >Corp dev teams treat M&A and partnerships as separate tracks, but Tomer Stavitsky looks at them holistically. In this episode, he breaks down the partner-first approach: an acquisition framework for situations where the target isn't ready, the PE owner isn't selling, or your integration capacity isn't there. He walks us through structuring the partnership, keeping the acquisition thesis alive through execution, negotiating and defending a right of first refusal, and managing the three-way stakeholder dynamic without signaling the wrong things at the wrong...
How M&A Turns a Chemical Company Into a Tech Business
<p >Chandradev Mehta, SVP Strategy and Business Development at Hexion Inc.</p> <p >Chandradev Mehta, SVP Strategy and Business Development at Hexion Inc., breaks down how a commodity chemical company uses M&A to transform into a technology-enabled, chemistry-as-a-service business. He covers the acquisition of an AI and MarTech company, the build vs. buy vs. partner decision framework, integration planning discipline, banker selection, small deal execution, and JV governance.</p> <p >What You'll Learn</p> How to build a genuine build vs. buy vs. partner framework and when each is right Why buying a commercialized or near-commercialized business changes your r...
CPG Exit Strategy: How to Build a Consumer Brand Strategics Will Acquire | Keith Levy Part 2
<p >Keith Levy, Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital</p> <p >Most consumer brand founders think about exit as an event. Keith Levy thinks about it as a design requirement.</p> <p >In the second of two episodes, Keith walks through what exit-ready actually looks like in CPG: the revenue and EBITDA thresholds that matter, why you have to get beyond the corp dev team to the operators who actually need what you're building, how capital gets wasted at every stage of a brand's lifecycle, and what the investments that produce exits have in common versus the ones that don't.<...
CPG Due Diligence: The Operator Framework Behind a $1B Exit | Keith Levy Part 1
<p >Keith Levy, Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital</p> <p >Keith Levy backed an exit of just under $1B and a $400M exit using the same five-pillar framework, and he starts with the founder every time. Finance comes last.</p> <p >As Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital, Keith has spent six years evaluating consumer brands across food, beverage, pet food, snacks, and cosmetics. Before that he was CMO at Anheuser-Busch through the $52B InBev deal, president of Royal Canin USA for Mars, and the strategic acquirer who led the Kind acquisition at Mars Wrigley. He knows what the...
400 Acquisitions and a Failed Process: What Happens When You Don't Integrate
<p>Matt James, EVP, CFO & Chief Acquisition Officer at Oakbridge Insurance</p> <p >Roll-up platforms that skipped real integration are getting exposed when they go to market. Buyers want proof of organic growth, clean data, and a platform that actually functions as one. A lot of processes are breaking down because those proof points aren't there.</p> <p >Matt James co-founded Oakbridge Insurance in 2020 and has since closed 60+ acquisitions, integrating 100% from day of close. This conversation covers how he built that system, what went wrong with billion-dollar competitors, and what he would fix first if he walked into a revenue-aggregating...
M&A Roll-Up Playbook: The IRR Framework That Replaced Budgets at Zayo | Dan Caruso (Part 2)
<p >Dan Caruso, Managing Director, Caruso Ventures; Founding CEO of Zayo Group</p> <p >This is Part 2 of our conversation with Dan Caruso, founder and former CEO of Zayo Group. Be sure to start with Part 1. It covers the Zayo thesis, deal sourcing, structure, and the negotiation playbook, whereas this episode picks up at the execution.</p> <p >Part 2 is about the equity value-creation framework Dan built at Zayo, applying the same IRR math PE firms use for their portfolio companies to daily operating decisions. It replaced budgets and tied every compensation decision to a single equation. It ends with...
