- First, you need to find out if your department is not going to be axed immediately. A lot of functions will become redundant depending on your size (sales, HR, finance, IT are the most likely to go).
- Next, you need to find out what the org structure of the acquiring company is and how you integrate there. Each function that the acquiring company has will be replicated on your site in many cases. One example: You currently might not have a separation of product owners and project managers. If your acquirer sees these roles as different, then you will have to follow suit and people need to pick sides. Another example: If you have a regulatory department that currently reports to you as VP engineering, but the acquiring company has regulatory report into the GM/CEO whatever, then you will lose this team.
- If you can negotiate part of the post-acquisition plan, please make sure that the acquiring party agrees to grow you / your site at least to double the size. This means budget and head count (easy to forget the latter) must be allocated for the next 5 years. Otherwise you will not likely be able to hire anybody over the next 2 years, because you are not aligned to the budgetting season and head count is frozen. You need the growth just to handle all the new communication overhead you have with the acquirer.
- Resist the temptation to realign salaries and job grades too fast to the acquiring party. I have been in an acquisition where this was not handeled well. You can end up with overpayed employees who were just in the start-up for a long time and underpaid new hires. This can seriously mess things up and cause conflict among employees. Take your time and align with the new organization when everybody understands their new roles.
- Don't expect founders to stick around. They were used to running the ship and getting told what to do rarely works out unless for the vesting.
- Distance yourself quickly emotionally from "your" start-up. The likelyhood is large that the acquisition will break everything even though everyone has best intentions (compare most comments here). Don't be sad if it does.
- If you are an engineering VP now, you will likely end up as a senior manager or director. Put all your effort into being put into a director grade. Even if this is not justified normally (you need a team of 30-100 reports and/or 30-100m in sales normally to be called a director), it is much better to negotiate higher positions at the start. As many acquisitions are not allowed to scale, it might be very tough to ever be promoted for the next 5 years otherwise.
- If you can fight it, make sure that you retain on-site IT people. Corporate function are usually hell, but corporate IT is the worst.
- First, you need to find out if your department is not going to be axed immediately. A lot of functions will become redundant depending on your size (sales, HR, finance, IT are the most likely to go).
- Next, you need to find out what the org structure of the acquiring company is and how you integrate there. Each function that the acquiring company has will be replicated on your site in many cases. One example: You currently might not have a separation of product owners and project managers. If your acquirer sees these roles as different, then you will have to follow suit and people need to pick sides. Another example: If you have a regulatory department that currently reports to you as VP engineering, but the acquiring company has regulatory report into the GM/CEO whatever, then you will lose this team.
- If you can negotiate part of the post-acquisition plan, please make sure that the acquiring party agrees to grow you / your site at least to double the size. This means budget and head count (easy to forget the latter) must be allocated for the next 5 years. Otherwise you will not likely be able to hire anybody over the next 2 years, because you are not aligned to the budgetting season and head count is frozen. You need the growth just to handle all the new communication overhead you have with the acquirer.
- Resist the temptation to realign salaries and job grades too fast to the acquiring party. I have been in an acquisition where this was not handeled well. You can end up with overpayed employees who were just in the start-up for a long time and underpaid new hires. This can seriously mess things up and cause conflict among employees. Take your time and align with the new organization when everybody understands their new roles.
- Don't expect founders to stick around. They were used to running the ship and getting told what to do rarely works out unless for the vesting.
- Distance yourself quickly emotionally from "your" start-up. The likelyhood is large that the acquisition will break everything even though everyone has best intentions (compare most comments here). Don't be sad if it does.
- If you are an engineering VP now, you will likely end up as a senior manager or director. Put all your effort into being put into a director grade. Even if this is not justified normally (you need a team of 30-100 reports and/or 30-100m in sales normally to be called a director), it is much better to negotiate higher positions at the start. As many acquisitions are not allowed to scale, it might be very tough to ever be promoted for the next 5 years otherwise.
- If you can fight it, make sure that you retain on-site IT people. Corporate function are usually hell, but corporate IT is the worst.