M&A Science

"If we get a banker inbound for a company and we've never heard of it before... it's probably too late." That's Chrissy Cox's rule at Booz Allen Hamilton. It's also why about 80% of the firm's deals involve a company it already had a relationship or partnership with.

Chrissy explains how her team maps capability gaps with market leaders, looks at hundreds of companies a year, and keeps targets on a watch list until they're actionable. Liberty IT sat on that list for years before a proprietary deal. She also covers testing culture from the first meeting (including the CEO answer that ended a process on the spot), what made the PAR Government carve-out hard, and why one market leader now owns each integration.

Chrissy's team pulls business leaders, bankers, and PE portfolios together "to create one pipeline," and she's clear it can't be "1-inch deep." DealRoom Pipeline keeps every target, deal note, contact, and email in one view, with PitchBook data flowing in automatically. See how it works: click here.

Nathan Rust, Senior VP of Corporate Development, Salas O'Brien

More than 30 mergers in three years. A 100 percent success rate. And a first diligence list that's just 10 questions long.

Nathan Rust runs corporate development at Salas O'Brien with a team of three. They look at more than 200 opportunities a year, and fewer than a third get past the first call. That screen happens before anyone talks price. It checks three things: will the leaders stay for the long term, do they love the work, and would you go to dinner with them and their spouse?

Nathan also explains why he gives every prospective seller the contact details of every past merger leader, and why 20 to 40 percent of the price rolls into equity. He covers why his team won't retrade a deal after the LOI. The result: 93 percent of shareholders from 15 years of mergers are still with the company.

Most buyers send a 500-question list where every item is marked top priority. Nathan sends 10. DealRoom Diligence helps you build a focused request list, assign each item to the seller and track it in one workspace, then save it as a template for the next deal. Centralizing the process can "reduce your due diligence time by 50%." See how it works: click here.

Mauro Sambati, Partner – Gianni & Origoni

Donato Romano, Partner – Gianni & Origoni

In 2022, the Italian government ordered a 2018 deal undone. A Hong Kong company owned by a Chinese conglomerate had bought 75% of an Italian drone maker without complying with Italy's Golden Power rules, and the shares went back to the original seller.

Mauro Sambati and Donato Romano, partners at Gianni & Origoni, explain what foreign buyers need to get right in Italy. They cover how Golden Power reviews now stack on top of EU merger control, and why clearance belongs in the SPA as a condition precedent instead of a post-closing filing. They also explain why lockbox structures now rival closing accounts, why Italian earnouts stay simple and short, and how strict labor rules shape any restructuring plan. Plus: how Japanese, Korean, UK and US buyers negotiate differently, and why time spent building trust with founders is time invested.

Mauro's point about running regulatory analysis alongside financial and legal diligence, and Donato's about putting the Golden Power filing on the transaction checklist, describe the problem DealRoom Diligence was built for. Every request, owner and finding sits in one place, so a regulatory filing doesn't get lost between workstreams. Reduce your due diligence time by 50% by centralizing your diligence process. Click here to learn more.

President & CEO of The ChemQuest Group. Previously, as VP of Corporate Strategy at Milliken & Company

Close to 100 people. Roughly 18 functions running diligence. A checklist of 100-plus items. On the largest deal in Milliken & Company's history, Robert Lovegrove kept all of it anchored to four questions.

Robert, VP Corporate Strategy at Milliken, breaks them down: Is the technology's advantage defensible? Can we live with the customer concentration? Do we believe in the market's growth? Who are the key people, and how do we keep them? He also covers adjacency maps built down to the profit-center level, why Milliken won its two largest deals without being the highest bidder, and the customer awareness study that became non-negotiable after key customer programs wound down within two years of a close.

Robert's warning that a diligence team that size can easily get bogged down is the problem DealRoom Diligence was built for. Requests, owners, and findings sit in one workspace, and the findings list carries straight into the integration plan. See how centralizing diligence can reduce due diligence time by 50%: click here.

Birgitta Elfversson, Non-executive director at Netlight Consulting AB

Lars Elfversson, VP/Co-Founder, Netlight Consulting AB

Most deal teams think they're choosing between ten targets and fifty. Lars Elfversson says "it is often two versus fifty." When the list gets that thin, every deal starts to feel like one you can't lose.

Birgitta and Lars have built and governed several roll-up platforms as operators, board members, and investors. They explain how teams drift from their original criteria one acquisition at a time. They also cover why three filters (business type, size, profitability) are enough to build a strong long list, and when a board should spend one of its "silver bullets" to stop a deal. They finish with why most failures after close come down to people, and why "semi-integrating" everything rarely works.

Lars's case for a massive target list, one big enough that weak deals fall away without a fight, is what DealRoom Pipeline was built for. You can track every target against your own criteria with custom fields and stages, and funnel views show where each deal sits. See how it works: click here.

No guest today. No interview. Just Kison talking directly to you.

After 400 episodes and nearly 100 founding members, Kison wanted to give you a real update - where M&A Science has been, what we're building, and where this is going.

In this episode:

• Why episodes are moving to Thursdays
• How the Intelligence Hub actually works (and why it's better for M&A than ChatGPT)
• What's coming next: Buyer-Led M&A Certification and Enterprise Intelligence Hub
• Ways to get involved: Membership and the Deal Leader program

If you've been part of this journey, this one's for you.

Ready to join? Become an M&A Scientist: www.mascience.com/membership - $995/year for full access to the Intelligence Hub, live sessions, and practitioner community.

Limited time: Become a member by March 1st, get $100 to the M&A Science shop.

Want to contribute? Become a Deal Leader (20+ deals required): Email [email protected]

Tens of thousands of Excel cells. That's what one target counted in the standard integration plan Ciprian Stan sent them, before asking if he expected them to fill in every one. He didn't. He expected them to cut 80 percent of it.

In part two of this conversation, Ciprian, M&A Integration Manager at SALESIANER Gruppe, makes the case for putting a preliminary integration plan inside the business case before signing, with milestones set for every workstream. He also covers when to build plans top-down versus bottom-up, why sellers often tell buyers what they think will close the deal, how an overlapping acquisition can wreck an earnout seller's trust, and why he doesn't trust AI with real power yet.

Ciprian's rule is simple: the integration plan exists before you sign, not on day one. DealRoom Integration lets your integration team plan from live diligence findings, then carries workstreams, owners, and synergy targets into Day 1. See how it works: click here.

Most M&A deals fail because integration was "something to figure out later". By the time execution realities, cultural risks, and people impacts surface, the deal is locked, and teams must work around untested assumptions.

In this episode of the M&A Science podcast, Ciprian Stan, M&A Integration Manager at SALESIANER Gruppe, explains that integration must be a strategic input to increase chances of success.

Things You'll Learn

• The importance of involving Integration early in the process
• Pre LOI preparations and expectations
• Cultural Diligence and what to look for
• How to communicate the deal the right way

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Want to know what 100+ deal professionals learned in 2025? The State of M&A 2026 Report by DealRoom breaks down the real challenges, trends, and priorities shaping M&A this year. Download your copy now: https://hubs.ly/Q03ZxRvD0

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[00:03:38] From Computer Science to M&A Integration – How an engineering background shaped Ciprian's integration mindset.

[00:07:41] First Exposure to M&A by Accident – Learning integration the hard way through a CBRE–Johnson Controls acquisition.

[00:10:18] Systems Thinking in Integration – Why no single workstream (IT, culture, ops) should dominate integration.

[00:13:54] Proactive vs. Reactive Buyers – How deliberate M&A strategy outperforms impulse and competitive-response deals.

[00:16:08] What "Good Strategy" Actually Looks Like – Using geographic and capability gaps to drive successful acquisitions.

[00:21:40] Why Integration Must Be Involved Early – How late involvement leads to unexecutable deal strategies.

[00:23:47] LOI Reality Check – Managing uncertainty, pricing flexibility, and risk before committing to a deal.

[00:33:19] Three Schools of Thought on Culture – Ignoring culture, adapting to it, or using it as a value-creation lever.

[00:43:53] The Case for Time Between Sign and Close – Why integration planning works best with a deliberate gap before closing.

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Questions, comments, concerns? Follow Kison Patel for behind-the-scenes insights on modern M&A.

"Inexperienced teams design structures to win negotiations. Experienced teams design structures to make the business work after the deal closes."

Carlos Cesta has worked on about 125 deals across Verizon, Dentsu, Presidio, and NP Digital. Here he lays out the deal spiral: deal structure, diligence findings, and integration strategy, three spokes you keep revisiting as you learn more. A forecast you don't trust becomes an earn-out, and that earn-out changes how fast you can integrate.

He also explains reverse diligence. Put the real post-close changes on the table before you close, like system migrations and org chart changes, and watch how the seller reacts. Plus his 70/30 earn-out starting point, and why he renegotiates early when targets will miss.

Carlos's six-month postmortems with sellers kept landing on one point: they wanted to see the integration plan. So his teams started running integration workstreams in parallel with diligence. DealRoom Integration is built for that. Integration planning starts during diligence, and each finding carries an owner and links to the integration task that resolves it. See how it works: click here.

Christian Hassold, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategic Partnerships at Wpromote x Giant Spoon

"A hundred opportunities in your funnel will likely only materialize one to two actionable opportunities." That's Christian Hassold's funnel math after building corporate development functions at ChannelAdvisor, CommerceIQ, Salsify, and Wpromote x Giant Spoon.

Christian walks Kison through his five-pillar lean M&A framework: deep dive the business, define and battle test the strategy, communicate it, run the funnel, and commit to close. His version of commit to close still has a stop list: dishonesty, fraud, or a culture that isn't a fit. Everything else gets cataloged and weighed as a pattern. He also shares how he flew to Atlanta to interview a failing competitor's employees before making his pitch, then sold the combined business to ChannelAdvisor.

Christian catalogs red flags as the deal runs and gives the integration team a front-row seat from the LOI. DealRoom Diligence is built for that workflow: every finding gets an owner and a mitigation plan, and the integration team can plan workstreams from live findings before close instead of from a handover deck. See how findings work: click here.