The Mheda Journal

It seems like there has been a lot of merger & acquisition activity over the last 12-18 months in the material handling industry. A down economy often spurs such activity, as more struggling companies are ripe acquisition targets. So that part isn’t a surprise.

In the next issue of The MHEDA Journal, we will analyze a couple of recent industry acquisitions from both a manufacturer’s and distributor’s perspective. Among the questions we will answer is, How can you merge differing company cultures following an acquisition?

A distributor who I spoke to yesterday had an interesting take on that question. I’m withholding his name for now because he asked me to, but that doesn’t diminish the quality of his response. He said, in part, “You need to find an existing culture that has some fundamental similarities so broad imposition is not required.  Secondly, make the obvious changes in operations, expense and staffing immediately but do not change just to change.  Allow everyone to become acquainted developing relationships and trust in the future.  Utilize people from all your company departments to work with their counterparts and encourage everyone to ask questions concerning anything. Finally, allow things to settle for a bit after initial change. The single biggest piece of advice is that nothing is as easy as it looks and it will take time to raise performance to match your goals.  Given that make sure you are adequately capitalized to give yourself the time it will take.  It also takes a lot of mental and physical energy and be prepared for the drag on you and your staff.”

I’m certainly no expert on the topic, so I’d love to hear any feedback you have about how to blend cultures following a merger. One of my loyal readers, Josh Smith of AK Material Handling, proposed this question: “Regarding the recent and future acquisitions of manufacturers, how do you think they will impact on the relationships that manufacturers have with distributors?” So, what do you think?

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Tags: acquistions, manufacturer-distributor relationships, mergers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under material handling, small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.