Adrie's Blog

Due Diligence

With every acquisition, expect to face Due Diligence - lawyers and accountants will dive into the books and systems with great enthusiasm. Due Diligence often unveils a lot about the company to be acquired which details are filled out with talks with the management team, their own vision and goals and backgrounds.

Something that doesn't get highlighted as much is the motivation of personnel. It is often difficult to figure out what their motivation really is and how people feel about the company, their role and the upcoming acquisition whilst the workforce often, particularly in service related companies, will determine the quality of the organisation.

These days, through the various social media available, you can find out a good deal about behaviour and motivation of the emplyees. Most larger organisation's personnel will have set up a page on Facedbook or a group on LinkedIn which is used for various discussions and issues. These pages give a good insight into the character and commitment of the people that are part of the organisation. Once you have read these pages, you can delve deeper into the inviduals by checking out their background further on the same sites, find out what they write about, what interests them, their hobbies and passtimes, you'll be amazed to see what people write about in their spare time (or bosses' time for that matter).

Next to that you can use tools such as Twitter and Tweetdeck to follow what people write about the company - these people may be emplyees, but they can equally be suppliers or customers. Social Media definitiely gives you a new dimension as to figuring out the "soft data" that are impossible to get at via the "normal" due diligence.