Going Global – Integration of Acquired Businesses
Over the last month i have been writing a series of articles on how the REA Group went global. To date these articles have covered organic entry to new markets, acquisition based entry into Europe, Asia and the Middle East, how we structured ourselves to lead a global business and how we used internal consultants. This article looks at once we acquired a new business, how we integrated that business into the REA Group.
Integration planning started long before an acquisition was completed. During the due diligence process, we would look at the business we were acquiring and then systematically work out what level of integraton we would need in the businesss and over what period of time would we need to execute the integration. Now when we thought about integration, we looked at the obvious things like finance, HR, systems and processes, products, marketing, and technology. We also looked at cultural integraton and how we can bring the acquired company into the Group as an equal member.
Firstly, not every integration is the same. You need to think about the requirements of each business and then tailor the integration to the business requirements.
Next we separated the integration tasks into 3 phases. The first phase, which was done as quickly as possible and was deisgned to make sure that we could track and monitor the financial performance of the acquisition. We therefore focused in the first phase on financial integration – especially moving the new company to the REA Group financial platform. During phase one we would also look for quick wins in cost reduction especially if the acquired company was paying for a service (e.g. ComScore) that we already had access too.
The second phase of integration went deeper in the business takes a little longer and goes deeper within the business. In this phase we would integrate the new site into the overall group of sites and ensure that there is linking between the sites as this helps SEO and cross site traffic. We would also look at HR integration through the implementation of common systems and processes so that we could assess the people in the acquired business. During this phase we would also send in the Group Performance Team that can be thought of as an internal consulting team that brings best practice into the acquired company. This team would primarily look for ways in which the acquired company’s sales and marketing team could benefit from the knowledge and experience of the REA Group as a whole.
Finally, phase three is all about technology integration and this would take a much longer time. When technology is integrated, it is about three things – internal technology (tools used for running the business), the products themselves (in this case the websites) and finally the hosting of the sites. The underlying philosophy is that there are cost savings and efficiency gains from having a common set of internal tools, having a minimum number of data centres for hosting and finally having a common technology platform so that products could be launched faster and the overall cost of development could be reduced. Full technology integration tended to take 6 – 12 months depending on other projects that were running in parallel.
The last and most important aspect of integration is cultural integration. This is really a part of each phase and is something has to be driven by the CEO. The onjective of cultural integration is to introduce the REA Group’s culture to the target company and then to align the company’s culture to the Groups’ culture. This takes a while but is very important for the long term growth of the Group.
The last part of integration is leadership. The approach we took was to assign a full time integration manager to lead all phases. The integration manager was carefully selected as it is important that they are a great representative of the Group, have the implied authority of the CEO, and are able to truly lead the integration effort.
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