Deals: Value creation strategies

Look at your M&A from a different perspective

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2024 mid-year Canadian M&A update

Resilient deal strategies for dynamic markets

2024 Canadian M&A outlook

Prepare now to create value

Doing the right deals

Why capabilities are more important than ever for M&A

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a key strategic lever to enhance the value of a business—whether it be to generate growth, enhance capabilities or reduce operational costs. It’s also a chance for business transformation, bringing business models, workflows, and workplace cultures into the 21st century.

In recent years, M&A has become more and more complex as a result of the increasing size of deals and expectations for accelerated value capture. Being clear on the value creation potential of your deal will help you ensure its success and deliver value after the deal is signed.

Our dedicated Value Creation team helps clients ensure no value is left on the table. Bringing together our end-to-end capabilities and technology across the M&A lifecycle, we provide an integrated approach to value creation through M&A.

“It’s our ambition to make deal making game changing, helping you resolve key challenges and deliver maximum value through M&A.”

Sean Rowe, PwC Canada Value Creation leader

How we can help

Growth strategy

Deliver more value to your shareholders

Looking to grow a company you’ve just acquired or kick-start growth at a maturing business that’s facing disruption? We can help you develop or refine your strategy that will guide your business to achieve sustainable growth, give your stakeholders confidence that targets are set and can be met, and give management additional focus and direction.

We’ll help you set your business ambition, generate and evaluate key initiatives, identify options to fill gaps and deliver your plan, which may include turnaround strategy, international growth strategy or market entry strategy.

Integrated due diligence

Get a head start through due diligence

When acquiring a business, evaluating the risks and opportunities of the transaction is critical—whether it be the ability for the business to scale to meet its growth expectations or to evaluate the synergy opportunities that can be facilitated by the target.

We help clients use complex data to view risks and opportunities across multiple dimensions: workforce, customers, products and assets. Insights derived through rigorous analysis, by people with real deal experience, are the key to unlocking lasting value. Through commercial due diligence, operational due diligence, IT due diligence, HR due diligence and financial due diligence, you’ll feel confident in your deal thesis or, where appropriate, have the business case and rationale to walk away from a deal.

In addition, we help our clients with HR due diligence to identify HR issues that may affect the price of their deal. We work with you to identify and understand critical HR and workforce issues early in the transaction, quantify their relevance and ensure material considerations are clearly documented and brought to the forefront. We also provide early insight into culture and other challenges that may pose a threat to the success of the transaction.

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Business transformation

Future proof your business

M&A is increasingly an opportunity to transform the business. Whether it be a small technology acquisition that drives new capabilities or a large acquisition that brings economies of scale, the first 100 days are critical in establishing bold transformational goals and a roadmap to achieve these goals.

Taking a fresh look at business and operating models, we help clients establish cross functional capabilities, drive procurement and shared service savings, and embrace digital technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Acquisitions

Integrate a carve out

Executing a merger or acquisition can be a complex process. With carve outs comes the additional complexity of disentangling with the parent. This process can be intensely difficult for employees as the business copes with significant levels of change. But done well, carve outs can drive innovation, customer satisfaction and core product growth.

From the outset of the deal, we help clients identify the level of entanglement, develop transaction service agreements (TSAs) and integration plans. In order to leverage their new scale, we help clients establish a new operating model (including greater use of shared services or outsourcing) and maintain focus on their people strategy throughout the deal journey. Integrating the cultures of both organizations is a key component to ensuring the carve out is successful and meets its expected value.

Day-1 sets the tone. With the deal set in motion, you need to plan with a people lens. What talent can you not afford to lose? Will there be cultural differences post integration? Who will lead and are they ready? We help our clients ensure they have the right leadership in place with the right objectives. We identify key strategic HR decisions required based on the nature of the transaction, including leveraging HR due diligence findings to create a comprehensive plan to support the transition to Day-1 operations.

Adopt to the new way of working. The deal is done, but communication and integration doesn’t stop. Do your people know what they need to do in this new business to be successful? Are there programs in place to help them along this journey? We focus on organizational values to reflect our clients desired purpose, mission, and vision. We help our clients implement a targeted and sustainable HR solution that will stretch beyond Day-1 and into the future.

Divestitures

Prepare to sell

Getting ready to sell a part of your business can be tough. What is the scope of the carved out business? What can be done to improve valuations? How do we disentangle before the sale? What buyers are the right fit? Without clarity on the answer to these questions, the sale can deliver sub-optimal outcomes. That’s where we come in.

We help our clients assess the implications of their divestiture across their business from any point in the deal process, with a value creation mindset. From developing the divestment strategy and defining the business outcomes post-sale, to targeting potential buyers and executing on sell side due diligence, we help our clients stay focused on value creation through their divestiture.

Operations

Improve operational value

For most organizations, the goal is to create and deliver value to shareholders. Our experienced value creation teams can help transform your operations from strategy to execution at any point in your deals journey. Using the latest technology and analytics tools, we can help you evaluate and build the right operational capabilities to enhance value and bring you insights around opportunities to improve.

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