You close the books on another fiscal year with a touch of relief about being able to put it behind you and with an enthusiastic optimism about the one ahead.  Three months later you find you have missed your revenue goal for the first quarter.  The business you had counted on from existing clients just didn’t materialize or it didn’t produce the revenue you were counting on.  You realize that the number in the new business column was just too ambitious. 

There are two main functions in business:  making things and selling them.  Look closely at any successful company in any industry and you will see that the personnel in charge of making things are trained in their craft.  Likewise, the people in charge of selling them.   The figure below says it all:

A common way for companies to meet their growth objectives is through mergers and acquisitions.  This is a fundamental shift and not a passing fad.

Achieving excellence in M&A starts with an honest self-appraisal of your current capabilities.  And, according to a recent global study, many companies are far more confident than they should be.  In the study, companies that achieved their stated merger objectives more than 75% of the time were classified as “high achievers” and those that met objectives less than 25% of the time were called “low achievers.”

You’d think, given their poor track record, these low achievers would be gun-shy about doing more deals… and, you’d be wrong.  They are just as likely as the high achievers to “go for broke” and try to improve their business in this fashion– over and over again.

To beat the odds, companies need to improve their capabilities in every phase of the M&A process, from pipeline management and deal execution to integration and ongoing operations.  The goal is to make M&A fast, efficient, and repeatable… and to manage risk effectively.

As deals become an increasingly important part of corporate strategy, a “good enough” approach to M&A probably isn’t. 

Due to the fact that I’m knee-deep in turnaround strategies for 3 clients right now, I MUST give “props” to Tim Ferriss and his blog entry today…

There are a lot of hard choices and big decisions in life. Dealing with most of them requires facing daunting — but transient — discomfort. I encourage you to read the following, which helped me to eliminate the rationalization we so often use to avoid doing what is important.

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.

Whether it’s an employee that you like, but isn’t doing the job or whether or not you’re going to the gym today, ALWAYS take what my Daddy calls “The Hard Right” rather than “The Easy Left.”