We've been talking about growth through acquisition. And this is an increasingly common feature of the economic landscape all around the world. And therefore, it's oftentimes a common part of a particular business's strategy. And we walked through an acquisition analysis. This is a tool in your toolkit to help you think through the potential pros and cons of a particular acquisition. And think about the benefits and the costs. And so, as we've done all of that I think several key themes have emerged. Let's revisit some of the key themes as we've talked about growth through acquisition. First of all, again growth through acquisition is a common growth strategy. It's potentially the most common growth strategy. If a firm wants to grow into a particular product market or geographic market, often times they attempt to do that through acquisition. Why do they do that? Because mergers and acquisitions can be an effective way to enter that in your market. Oftentimes it's a way to overcome or bypass entry barriers, and so oftentimes that's the reason that it's attempted. But again, caution is in order. Acquisitions are often attempted, but they're much less frequently successful. We know that on average, most acquisitions fail. Why do they fail? Well, acquisitions can fail for many reasons. First of all, it might simply be the wrong target. It's just not the right combination of businesses. There's not an obvious benefit to combining the businesses. They might have very different incompatible business models. And there's all kinds of bad acquisitions that just should have been avoided in the first place. Also, a problem for acquisition success might be just the difficulty of implementation. Often times it's easy to underestimate how hard it will be to just put those firms together, to integrate their operations, to sort of merge the cultures. There are a lot of things about post-merger integration that are very difficult. Looks easy on paper. Much more difficult in practice. So that can be the Achilles heel of a lot of acquisitions as well. Another problem with acquisitions is simply over payment. It's very common for an acquiring firm to just pay too much for that target firm. And once they incur all the additional costs of integration, all those costs of success as it were. It just adds up to something that ends up being a net negative. When contemplating an acquisition, you should carefully consider the alternatives. In other words, there are other ways to go here. And you should make sure you carefully consider those other alternative strategies. For instance, maybe you could achieve the same strategic objective through organic growth. You might just focus your time and resources and energy on innovation, or scaling your existing business model. Just simply doing more of what you do in more markets. You might alternatively consider a strategic alliance. Maybe that's a potentially less risky, less expensive way to enter a new product or geographic market. We can find a strategic partner and put some sort of an agreement together, to work together and share the revenues. So these are alternatives to growth through acquisition, and it may be that they're better alternatives. Again, you have to carefully think about the pros and the cons and think about whether one of these routes is a better route to go than the risky route of making that potential acquisition. A successful acquisition requires clarity. It requires clarity about how it will create value. Remember it goes back to this basic idea and strategy of what generates a valuable competitive position. When you're thinking about a potential acquisition, you need to really confront whether that acquisition is going to enhance the value of your existing competitive position. The strategic benefits of an acquisition should exceed the purchase price and the other costs associated with that acquisition. That seems like sort of an intuitively obvious idea, but an acquisition analysis is at its heart a cost benefit analysis. Do the benefits outweight the costs? If they do, you might think about going forward, but that's not enough. That strategic benefit less the acquisition costs, should also be more attractive to you than the other strategic options. This is, in other words, a way of thinking about opportunity cost. Are there other strategies you should pursue instead of making this acquisition? And would those create more value or lead to better growth opportunities.? And finally, again, post-merger integration is extremely difficult, but it's critically important for success. Don't underestimate the difficulty associated with integrating those two firms' business operations, their cultures, and all the things to make that combined operation in the future successful.
