The Back-Office Surprises Nobody Warned You About When Going Global
Release Date: 08/06/2026
The Seller’s Power Shift: How to Defend Valuation After the LOI
M&A Science
Signing the LOI can feel like you’ve won. For the seller, it may actually be the moment when the balance of power starts moving the other way. Praveen Ghanta learned that firsthand while selling HiddenLevers. A key enterprise contract slipped during diligence, the valuation story changed, and just before the diligence period expired, the buyer came back asking to reprice the deal by nearly 50%. What followed was a tense negotiation over how much to concede, what to protect, and when walking away becomes the better option. What You'll Learn Why seller leverage changes after signing an LOI...
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The Discount Is the Wrong Question in Private Equity Secondaries
M&A Science
Secondary deals are often judged by a single metric: the discount. Richard Chow thinks that's the wrong place to start. After spending most of his career investing in and advising on secondaries, Richard has seen what happens when investors focus too heavily on price and miss what is actually driving the transaction. Richard and Kison walk through the decisions behind LP-led deals, continuation vehicles, private-market liquidity, and some of the assumptions buyers routinely get wrong. They also get into Richard's own investing mistakes, including a SpaceX opportunity he passed on, and what it...
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How to Finance Acquisitions Without Giving Up Equity
M&A Science
How do you keep buying companies without eventually losing control of the company you built? SS&C Technologies founder and CEO Bill Stone has spent four decades avoiding exactly that. Rather than treating each acquisition as an isolated transaction, SS&C built a system around protecting ownership, using debt when the economics make sense, paying it down quickly, and creating enough value after close to preserve capacity for the next deal. Bill walks through the decisions behind acquisitions including FMC, GlobeOp, and Blue Prism, his experience taking SS&C private with...
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Where AI Actually Helps and Fails in M&A Legal Work
M&A Science
AI can now draft, review, and benchmark deal documents in a fraction of the time it used to take, but knowing when to trust the output is a different skill entirely. Aaron Binstock, a partner at Cooley with nearly 20 years of transactional experience, has seen both sides of that tradeoff firsthand. Where does AI actually save time on a deal, and where does it create false confidence? What happened when a client's AI-generated tax step chart was built on the wrong assumption? How does reverse prompting produce a better first draft than a single one-shot prompt? And what's changing about how...
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The Back-Office Surprises Nobody Warned You About When Going Global
M&A Science
Due diligence covers deal terms, but it doesn't cover what happens once you're running payroll, benefits, and banking in a country you've never operated in before. A legal entity change can lock a company out of its own bank account overnight. Benefits plans get frozen in by local law. A language rollout can hit five systems on the same go-live day. And having handled one acquisition in a country doesn't guarantee the next one plays out the same way. Jennifer Lipschultz has led integration on more than 20 acquisitions across the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and India for ECI Software...
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How to Structure an Acquihire Deal in the AI Talent Race
M&A Science
AI talent deals are no longer small acquihires built around a simple price per engineer. Some now carry billion-dollar price tags, forcing buyers to rethink deal structure, diligence, tax exposure, and retention. Baker McKenzie’s M&A Partner Derek Liu has personally signed over $110 billion in transactions from both sides of the table. That mismatch, old tools built for a different kind of deal, is what's forcing corp dev and legal teams to rework their playbook, and it's the throughline of this conversation. What You'll Learn The real cost difference between a stock purchase, an asset...
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What Buyers Want from Bankers and Founders
M&A Science
Your standard teaser tells a buyer everything about your company and nothing about why you fit their strategy right now. When sellers expect the buyer to figure out that alignment, the deal dies on the desk. Andrew Morbitzer has led more than $2 billion in acquisitions at Intuit and GoDaddy, worked on the sell-side as an M&A advisor, and returned to the buy-side as VP of Corporate Development at Life360. What You'll Learn Why do corp dev teams default to no on inbound deals before the first conversation How banker incentives and buyer incentives point in opposite directions How to...
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220 Deals. One Playbook. How to Scale M&A Without Losing Control
M&A Science
If you scale the deal flow without the operating infrastructure to match it, things break fast. The playbook is a document nobody opens, closing weeks turn into fire drills, and the returns you modeled start to slip. Shawn Rodricks, Head of M&A - Independent Consultant, built the infrastructure before the volume hit. He closed 220 acquisitions across two organizations, 37 at Rexall in pharmacy and 183 at Amerivet Veterinary Partners, by wiring in the operating system from the start. What You'll Learn The five-part operating model behind 220 acquisitions How to hire for biz dev vs. corp...
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How to Build a Deal Model That Beats PE on Price
M&A Science
Buyers who mistake a high LOI bid for a winning strategy are easy prey for sellers who know the growth equity playbook. Jeremy Segal's position: precision at the LOI stage is a stronger differentiator than price. Jeremy Segal is EVP of Corporate Development at Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), a publicly traded software company that has nearly doubled revenue through M&A, from under $400 million to nearly $1 billion. He has closed roughly 50 acquisitions across his career at Progress, LogMeIn, and Akamai. How do you build a cost-optimization model before LOI for lines you know you can execute?...
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The People You Lose in M&A: Key Talent Retention Before Close
M&A Science
The people who leave post-close are usually the ones the deal depended on. Which means the problem starts with how you read culture before LOI and whether financial incentives are the only retention tool you are building with. Haseeb Jawad heads corporate development at Commvault, running a lean team with full accountability from sourcing through integration. He has led two to three acquisitions per year across multiple companies, sat on both sides of a transaction, and serves as his own IMO lead. The signals that tell you a deal will lose people are visible from the first founder...
info_outline Jennifer Lipschultz, Sr. Director Merger & Acquisition Integration and Corporate Project Management
Due diligence covers deal terms, but it doesn't cover what happens once you're running payroll, benefits, and banking in a country you've never operated in before. A legal entity change can lock a company out of its own bank account overnight. Benefits plans get frozen in by local law. A language rollout can hit five systems on the same go-live day. And having handled one acquisition in a country doesn't guarantee the next one plays out the same way.
Jennifer Lipschultz has led integration on more than 20 acquisitions across the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and India for ECI Software Solutions, a PE-backed SMB software company operating in 80 countries.
If your next acquisition involves operating somewhere new, this is the walkthrough to have ready before you find yourself improvising in real time.
What You'll Learn
- Why a legal entity change can freeze a company out of its own bank account
- How Swedish per diem rules can turn expense reimbursements into taxable income
- What actually goes into a change engagement session, and why managers get briefed first
- How one go-live day can trigger a five-system language rollout
- Why fluency in one acquisition doesn't guarantee the next
- What belongs on a pre-close global integration checklist
If you're dealing with a cross-border acquisition where the back office keeps breaking in ways diligence never caught, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has integration playbooks pulled from practitioners running 20-plus deals, to help you build your pre-close checklist before the surprises hit instead of after.
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The Buyer-Led M&A™ Summit is back
August 18th, free and virtual. We're releasing the State of AI in M&A 2026 report live at the event before it goes public. Benchmark your program, hear from practitioners across the industry, and leave with a clearer picture of where dealmaking is headed.
Register here: https://hubs.ly/Q04kBhzV0
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Episode Chapters
[00:00] Introduction and Guest Background
[03:05] From Engineering to Global Integration
[06:20] What Full Absorption Really Means
[08:17] The Pre-Close Integration Playbook
[13:41] What Breaks First Abroad
[15:49] When English Fluency Is Assumed
[20:21] A Same-Day Language Rollout
[22:07] Locked Out of a Bank Account
[24:35] Sweden's Expense Reporting Maze
[27:59] Harmonizing Benefits Across Borders
[34:09] Running a Change Engagement Session
[42:30] Earning Trust With Senior Leadership
[44:19] Finding Risk in the Data Room
[46:36] A Pre-Close Global Checklist
[48:56] Lessons From Walking the Floor