Synergon Capital

The case is about a new acquisition by a company called Synergon Capital. It is an U.S based financial service which usually acquires turn-around candidates. These candidates are small companies with an established market position and poor management. The newest acquisition, Beauchamp, Becker & Company, located in Britain, does not fit the target candidate of Synergon Capital at all.

The Beauchamp acquisition is challenging for Synergon because of three main issues.

The first issue which has to be taken into account is the difference in culture . In terms of company culture Synergon’s way of performance and competition is contra Beauchamp’s way of having long-term customers and strong reliability in the market. The baseline is that the two companies have the same target market but have a different way of approaching their goals. Furthermore, the national culture of USA and Britain has to be considered. There are different rules of how people work together and how they behave, which are actually not depending on the company culture but instead on the national culture.

Secondly the managers are not informed about the integration process. This leads to an unstructured and chaotic way of the integration process. Nobody actually knows how the integration will be executed and what dependencies exists. The result of this procedure is that both companies are not performing anymore, and all effort goes into internal processes.

The third challenge is that Beauchamp does not fit the target candidate of Synergon. Synergon has experience in integrating small turn-around companies with bad management. Beauchamp has a good market position as well as a strong management. Synergon’s integration processes are not built for such a kind of candidate.

This deal can only be saved if both companies will accept the differences in culture and also adapt their processes to it . At the moment the situation is quite complex and unstructured. It might be a good move to engage a communication specialist which would help to calm the situation. This person will train both the Synergon and Beauchamp teams in learning each other’s culture. This helps Synergon to recover reliability and create a common ground on which they can work together with Beauchamp on a permanent basis.

Secondly the management team needs to be informed. They have to lead the change throughout the company. If they are not informed they will not support this change and the companies will not be profitable during that time . Creating a project plan helps to structure the integration process and all the necessary dependencies. Another result is that the teams know their counterparts and this will facilitate things if questions arise or if some new requests will come up

Thirdly Synergon needs to adapt its processes to the integration