Shoot the Moon with Revenue Rocket

Employee Involvement during the Sale of your Business

Episode Summary

In this episode of Shoot the Moon, Mike and Ryan will discuss how to maintain operations during the sale of your business and when is the right time to inform employees of the combination. We’ll answer questions like who should be involved and when? When should you give out your employee or client names? What happens if people find out too soon?

Episode Notes

You’ve built your business for a long time and now you’re ready to sell it for many different reasons. The process can be lonely, but it’s not a bad thing when you need to continue to run the business and create stakeholder value. So, who should be involved when you start this process? Listen to the episode to get our full run down on the process and employee expectations.

During a process it’s easy for employees to feel the distractions and shifts in priorities. It is important for a few reasons to keep employees at bay during the sale of your business to ensure continuity of operations before and during the combination. In this episode we will talk through some of the most pervasive employee challenges we encounter during a transaction:

• Involving management too early can spur unwanted opinions stemming from lack of understanding of the accretive nature of the transaction. 
• Knowing which employees to involve in due diligence is also important as it is likely the other party will want details directly from those executing. 
• Avoid bringing in the market facing people till the end.  It is easy for this persona to like to use any advantage they have during a sales cycle and nothing ruins deals faster than loose lips. 
• Set clear expectations as to why they are being asked to participate in the process and ensure the priorities of those involved remain on running the business vs just the process. 
• When getting close to global announcement make sure you bring in leads from each department to be able to articulate the positive nature of the transaction on each group. 
• If certain people are going to be asked to leave the company it is always best to leave those decisions up to the combined entity and for the decisions to be executed after the combination is complete.  Nothing will derail performance like staff looking for a new job. 

In closing it is important to have a methodical approach to involving employees in the process as well as ensuring that the completed transaction benefits everyone. Bringing in the wrong employees too early can cause stress or even the risk of the deal not getting done. It's imperative that everyone get behind the positive momentum that will be created once the business is sold.