Just finished my first day on the job after the acquisition

That small, soft, cuddly and playful company that made a killer product while losing money hand-over-fist for years has been officially, finally (three year transition) acquired. I now for the very first time ever work for a big, bad, multibillion dollar multi-national corporation. boo hoo!

Very,very glad to have any job with benefits in this economy, but after having read the new 175 page employee handbook I wanted to weep. We now have the autonomy of a straitjacket and big brother is almost literally everywhere (I understand that this is very common these days but just not used to it yet). No doubt the acquisition sure beats the slow, agonising death-spiral that we had been on over the last ten years–yes, definitely beats that alternative, hands-down.

We didn’t do too much on the first day beyond literal housecleaning or reading a book: most of the systems did not work, no one had email and we are no longer allowed to surf for hours at a time anymore, :dubious: so we were pretty much dead in the water that day. One could get used to that. :slight_smile:

What has been your experience with working for an acquired company?

Termination.

Why was your “killer product” company losing money? Incompetent management?

Anyway, I had an experience of being the co-owner of an acquired company working for the acquiring company for a requisite number of years. Although mine was not a money-losing company :slight_smile: and the management was quite competent, thank you very much.

The experience has soured me hugely on big corporations. I worked for big corporations before, but usually as a tiny cog in the machine. This was a bit higher on the ladder. Everything that used to take a day in the small company now took three months, with literally 20 times more people involved in the decision process, and the result was usually worse than what we did before.

So - prepare for a LOT of “big corporation” bull. Lots of management shifts. A lot of utterly incompetent decisions being made by management promoted way beyond their level of competence. And lots, lots, of red tape. But hey - at least you didn’t go under :slight_smile:

I joined a BBC (RH) a couple of years after it acquired a BBC of similar size (M) and eventually started my current career in Consulting when I got promoted to the Fix-It Team that was implementing the new management software, needed in order to be able to analize the data from former-M’s factories and businesses.

RH was very centralized in many ways (product lines had slightly different specs in different countries but were managed centrally; you could ask any CSR about any product and she’d be able to get it for you/find the right product for your needs, either right then or after asking a coworker who knew that particular line better); it had a very “can do” attitude*; people were used to thinking of the whole company as “our team”, to sharing information freely, etc. People would see a coworker who was not wearing his PPE and kick him out of the area until he came back properly “armored”. People were proud to work there, and with good reason.

M was what’s called in Spain “a steaming pile of taifas”. The taifas were the tiny Muslim kingdoms into which the Cordoba Caliphate eventually split up, some of which made Andorra look big. People based their power on not sharing information; product lines were a bloody mess; waste was both taken for granted and hidden; in one factory, the financial auditors took one look at the floor, called Legal at Central, and the Production Manager and Factory Manager left work that day in cuffs on account of having dumped poison all over the place for years (over 80% of the people in RH’s Finance departments had degrees in Chemistry or Engineering… they knew an illegal dump when they saw one) - how do you spell Superfund Site? In another factory, offgrade material had not been entered properly into the books or disposed of at all in over 30 years: tons of material which would have been considered “non-dangerous town waste” if disposed of properly had to be destroyed as “dangerous industrial waste” instead.

One of my coworkers in the “consultants team” (most of us, internal) was from the Superfund site: she was on record as having protested the factory’s practices for years, so she got “rescued” and placed in the fix-it team. Another one was from a factory where in order to advance you had to belong to a certain Country Club where nobody with his skin color had ever been a member (no Jews or Catholics either); he went from being an overworked, underappreciated Production Engineer, to being part of the Training section of the Fix-It Team, to being the new Operations Manager (North America) for his original business (so, his former bosses’ boss… only, several of those bosses had gotten replaced by people who did not belong to that country club).

For the country club people, for the salespeople who were used to dealing with only a handful of clients and a handful of products and saying “not my product” “no idea” if anybody ever inquired about a different product line, the acquisition was very bad news. For the people who worked in factories that got closed down and who were not willing to move, it was very bad news. For the people who got internal promotions, it was helluva news!

  • One of the external consultants told the folks in my rollout we were the most can-do people he’d ever met. After we got him to explain what that meant (most of us were ESL and had never encountered the expression before) we looked at each other, looked at him and said “but… we know our bosses won’t tell us to do anything we can not do.” My factory manager explained “and if we do find we’re short on resources, we point it out and either the requirements get modified to match the resources, or we’re given more resources. I do realize this is exceptional.”

The management was okay, nothing special, but the main causes of our losses:

The biggest chunk of our business came from the construction and banking industries which took a huge hit after 911 and haven’t really ever fully recovered.

Our overall potential market is super-saturated now and the competition is brutal so everyone is selling on price to try to stay in business. The product itself has become a commodity more or less, whereas, our product is top-of-the-line which requires higher prices to maintain any margin. bad combination for us right now

Our research and development costs were higher than others, so it cost us more per unit sold to recover these R&D costs.

We became an attractive niche target for our larger competitors. For them, our R&D costs round off to zero, but it was a huge cost for us.

Yes, I am so grateful that we did not go under. Jobs are so scarce now and generally low paying. The job situation in my industry will probably never get back to where it was pre-911. (sobs a bit)

We’re feeling the red tape already even on the very first day. But I still have a job and that’s what it’s all about for now.

Oh, my, yes. I could write a book about my experiences with this (figure of speech…I’m not going to write a book, what are you kidding? Me, write a book?).

I was quite content working as a software implementation consultant for a small company. I knew the owners and they knew everyone who worked for them. I had spent many years in corporate jobs and management before becoming a consultant and was quite happy to leave all that behind. I found that culturally most all of the people at the company doing my job shared a certain iconoclastic individuality. We had all been through the corporate mill and liked being away from it and doing project work for clients.

Well, somewhere along the line the owners concluded the numbers weren’t adding up anymore - during the economic downturn a few years ago small business credit froze and they never really got back to where they wanted to be to grow at the right pace. So, they took the plunge and sold to a giant big 4 (big 6? who can keep track of what the number is anymore…) auditing firm that was getting back into the software implementation business. We were told by our leadership that “nothing would change for us” - that we would keep doing what we were doing, it would just roll up to new set of books. OK, I guess, let’s see where this all goes…

Part of the deal they struck with the new company was that all of us consultants would come over as Managers in the new company. Fundamentally, this was because we were well paid at the old company and this is how they needed to level us in order to justify our pay. OK, I guess, let’s see where this all goes…

So, we come over and they bombard us with volumes and volumes of onboarding materials, websites with thousands of links leading to thousands of more links leading to thousands of more links - please read it all. Because it’s an audit firm we are subject to buttloads of stinky regulations regarding our personal finances that we need to report to management - we need to get approval for who we have our accounts with, which investments we choose, etc. There was some questions about my spouses employement that required a ruling from their legal department. YIKES!!

And we were all sent to Dallas for an orientation meeting. The meeting was entirely a download of more information about how they do things, nary a moment spent making any attempt to recognize and bridge the clear cultural gaps between where we were coming from to where they wanted us to be. More training, more orientation, all delivered as if we were new hires into our position as Manager. Again, nothing tailored for us being acquired and the differences therein.

Also, in the old company we all worked virtually, travelled to the client site to do our work or worked from home. Well, the new company expected us to be in the office when we weren’t at a client site. They really didn’t get the whole travel to the client thing.

Naturally, the people we interacted with in the offices were a different breed. Business Major go-getters hoping to make Partner someday. Not my ilk - not my milieu.

Well, eventually it became clear that being a Manager had job requirements - not the least of which was responsibility for generating revenue - selling. We had specific number to hit. So, eventually it came performance review time and we were being evaluated based on all of the Manager job requirements. Whereas in the past I was considered an excellent software implementation consultant, I was now considered a sub-par audit firm Manager.

I won’t even get into the type of work they tried to sell me for - which was not even close to what I had been doing for the last 20 years.

So, bye-bye! I walked away from an annual bonus, as well as a retention bonus if I had stayed at least 18 months - I left a lot of money on the table. I was not alone by any stretch of the imagination. A large percentage of my friends also left.

Thankfully, I am in a field where it is easy to get a job, and I have lots of contacts. I slipped right into another firm much like my old firm and I’m back doing software implemetation consulting.

(Bye the way - I heard through the grapevine that one of the original owners left also after the sale was final.)

The way to think about it is that you just got laid off from your old job, but the good news is you just got a brand new job at a new place. The confusing part is that the new place has the same desks and coffee maker as the old place. That’s what will trip you up. It looks like the old place, but it is not the old place. As long as you keep that in mind, you’ll do fine. It may be that you liked your old job, and don’t care very much for your new job. Then you’ll have to leave your new job and get another new job.

All the stuff they tell you about how nothing will change is not even really a lie, it’s like putting that you have a great sense of humor and like walks on the beach in a personal ad. I mean, it’s not true, but does it count as a lie when everyone knows it’s just one of those things you say?

Oooooooooh! I’d love to find a job where I could analize things! :cool:

I’ve been an employee of a company that was acquired twice: We were swallowed up by a medium sized company and then about five years later an even bigger company bought us.

After the first acquisition there were a lot of layoffs, especially in my office. Our little group was spared because we were working on a critical project. So I made it until the second acquisition, and even a few years later. Then they closed our office for good.

I survived the 80s where every company I worked for was bought up by another company, sometimes multiple times.
It affected management a lot more than it affected me, most of the time the only difference was the signature on my paycheck.
I guess I was lucky.

That kind of is it, in a nutshell. You might not get laid off right away, or even never, but it happens to a lot of people who get acquired. If you don’t get laid off, be prepared for “us versus them” for a while (quite a long while, even). Then, next time your company acquires someone, you’ll be the US! :slight_smile:

Calgary’s major business is oil and gas, and these types of companies are like revolving doors of acquisitions and mergers and buying and selling each other. It’s very much the norm in downtown Calgary, too.