SSIM™ - The Small business Simple Integration Method

When you integrate an acquired smaller business and an acquirer, do you use a big business approach?

Why?

Small and mid-size businesses behave, perform and respond differently to large businesses; their integrations are not only less complex, but they are also different in nature to large integrations.

Intista developed the SSIM™ (the Small business Simple Integration Method) to reduce the complexities that other approaches use.

Don’t make it too complex

The SSIM™ is how we help acquirers approach the integration of an a business that they have, or intend to acquire.

The Five Steps

  1. Work with the acquiring or “Deal” team
    • Understand why is a business is being acquired, and what value is being sought
  2. Develop integration objectives
    • Everyone in the business works on these. They are based upon the reasons for acquiring
  3. Work out how you want to integrate a business
    • With the objectives you can decide what the workstreams will be (either teams, departments, regions or verticals)
    • Each workstream will create a charter of priorities and focus activities to merge together their area of the people, technologies, operations, processes and cultures of the two businesses
  4. Create the list of projects and activities needed to integrate the two businesses together
    • Each workstream creates their own list, from the charters and “standard integration tasks”
  5. Execute the integration plan and merge the businesses
    • Run the many projects and tasks, with the correct priority
    • This requires many people to coordinate, communicate, adjust for unexpected items
    • Constantly report the status back up to leadership

Each step in the SSIM™ has been developed to be as straightforward as possible. We guide you through the steps either in person, via our online subscription for the Certified Acquisition Integration Manager course, or via the individual integration course topics – depending upon your preference.

For more insight about business size and behaviors, read our blog business culture and the corporate lifecycle

You can measure the size of a business by the number of employees, or how much revenue it makes. However, there’s a difference in the way that they behave, too: small businesses have an agility and re-activeness that large businesses cannot do (in most cases).

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