M&A Science

Days before closing a carve-out, Danielle Fortier's team found the seller's vendor list was off by dozens of vendors. Danielle, a partner at Cooley with four corporate carve-outs closed this year, explains why: back-office vendors are shared across every business line, and deal leads rarely focus on them early.
Her roadmap maps every entanglement, checks it against what the buyer already has, and sends only true gaps to the TSA. Cloud hosting, finance and IT security are the usual traps. Settle TSA length and pricing in the LOI. She has seen sellers assume three months while buyers assumed 18.
Her biggest warning is over-relying on the TSA. Six months in, you still go to the seller for everything.
That vendor surprise happens when entanglements, gap owners and TSA schedules live in lists nobody fully trusts. DealRoom keeps carve-out diligence, open requests and integration planning in one connected platform, so gaps found in diligence carry into the post-close plan. See how Infoblox consolidated 5+ tools from pipeline through integration: Infoblox's Case Study

"Never use the word 'trust me.' It's those people you can't trust." Jerry Cedicci, Kison Patel's boss from twenty years ago, built hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate, cafes, hotels, and restaurants. This is his playbook.
For Jerry, trust is structural. Ask to run the business you're buying, let the seller fire you anytime, and hand them every card so they can't lose. He pushes the other side to name a price first so he never negotiates against himself, and he'll pay full price when the seller finances it.
Then Kison raises a competitor he wants to buy that won't share financials. Jerry works it live: skip the financials and ask how many clients, set your threshold, size what the company could become, and offer 6 against an expected 5 to 10.
In corporate M&A, Kison notes, earning a seller's trust can take a year, which means tracking targets long before they're ready to sell. Qualfon reviews 75–100 targets a year and runs that pipeline in DealRoom with real-time reporting: read more here.

"At the closing table, I left with a check of $10 million." Jerry Cedicci bought a run-down Chicago hotel for $14 million and sold it for $24 million within a year.
Jerry grew up in a French orphanage and arrived in the US in 1981 barely speaking English. Kison Patel hunted properties with Jerry about 20 years ago and learned much of his dealmaking from him. When a bank rejected Jerry's loan, he asked exactly why and got $3 million from the next bank.
A landlord warned that the average bakery does $450 a day. Jerry's first did $1,500 on day one, and he wrote a $10 million option to buy the building into the lease, exercising it 10 years later. Skipping that option on his Michigan Avenue store was, he says, the biggest mistake of his life.
Jerry's costliest mistake was an opportunity he saw and never locked in. Corp dev teams lose targets the same way when the pipeline lives in scattered spreadsheets. Jamf moved its deal tracking into DealRoom and cut deal time in half. Learn more about Jamf's case study here.

A $100 million preferred equity check with a 15% compounding floor needs $200 million back in five years, and all of it sits ahead of the producers holding common equity.
Bill Johnson grew Liberty to $250 million in revenue in seven and a half years without taking on any equity. He explains why Liberty sits out auctions and how Goldman's preferred position in the Newfront sale to Willis crammed down common shareholders.
He breaks down a pro forma move PE firms accept: cut an owner's $600,000 pay to a $150,000 salary, then ask for a 10 or 11 multiple on the difference. And he owns Liberty's mistake. After growing too fast, Liberty paused M&A in 2023 at about $150 million in revenue to build systems and upgrade leadership.
Liberty's fix was a pre-close integration roadmap, built to integrate each deal within 60 to 90 days. That only holds when diligence and integration plans live in one place. See how Liberty built a single source of M&A truth with DealRoom and recorded $200K cost savings in the first year: read the case study here.

Kim Jones, HR Director of M&A
One acquired CEO slowed his own deal by a month or two to lock down customer commitments and build relationships with buyer leadership. At announcement, employees clapped.
Kim Jones has spent over a decade as an HR deal lead at large tech companies, from single-employee acqui-hires to acquisitions bringing in thousands. The deals that integrated smoothly, she says, were the ones where leaders on both sides were enabled early. Process gets compliance. Trust gets advocacy.
Kim explains how closing fast without a plan creates integration debt, why "you'll run independent" needs a shared definition, and why integration should start at LOI. She also covers honest retention conversations, a quarterly org council for tracking talent, and an employee uprising over butterscotch Life Savers.
Integration debt builds when the deal thesis and diligence findings never become a plan leaders can carry. DealRoom keeps diligence and integration planning in one connected platform, so the plan exists before close. See how Wipfli runs both in DealRoom, where across its last three transactions not a single person from the incoming firm asked for training: here.