Gilly Green

So they'd obviously done a lot of pre-work and analysis, but they were quite slick at getting the data on board, particularly into their CRM systems.

So there's some great ideas and things out there, but I think culture is one of those things that people make a lot of mistakes over and they don't really look at it in the right way.

You've got to look at the outputs of culture because it's really hard to understand what it is if you just take it from a conversation.

Absolutely.

And the board owns it, full stop.

They have to drive it.

They have to make sure it's looking like what they expect it to look like.

But I think the CEO has a real responsibility on making sure that that culture is really rolled out in terms of the communications.

And if you don't see the CEO ever, if the CEO isn't out there doing the communications, getting in front of the key people, then you're not doing the right things, actually.

And that's a really good point about the two CEOs, because you need to decide pre-deal what's going to happen there so that when the deal is announced, everybody is on the same page moving forwards, not looking back and fighting in between who's going to be the CEO and who's going to be whatever role.

And one of the key things I think we saw on one of our best practice examples was they talked about everything beforehand.

And it was two bigger firms coming together.

They knew exactly who was going to be the CEO.

They knew exactly who was going to be the COO, head of change, all of those key roles.

But they literally talked about everything.

They talked about the fact that their incentives were different and they would have to align somehow.

They didn't necessarily do the work to align them beforehand, but they knew it was going to happen beforehand.

So they could preempt it with messaging with people as they went along.

So, you know, the more preparation you can do pre-deal and really hit the ground running, the better on that one.