M&A Science, hosted by Kison Patel (Founder & CEO of DealRoom), is your go-to podcast for mastering the art of mergers and acquisitions. Each week, Kison and his expert guests from leading brands like Xerox, FastLap, and Cisco dig deep into real-world M&A strategies, offering actionable insights to optimize your M&A practice.
Whether you're an experienced practitioner or new to the field, M&A Science provides practical advice on key topics like sourcing, due diligence, integration, divestitures, and more. With over 300 episodes, this podcast is the premier thought leadership resource designed to streamline your deal-making process.
Start listening today and visit mascience.com/podcast to access over 300 episodes. Brought to you by DealRoom, the leading M&A optimization platform used by the best M&A teams around the world
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Données mises à jour le 20/09/2026
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Why PE Rollups Fail the People Who Built the Business
Épisode 433
jeudi 17 septembre 2026 • Durée 48:05
A rollup can look attractive at signing: cash today, equity in a larger platform, and the promise of participating in what gets built next. But sellers rarely spend as much time understanding what sits above that equity, what has to happen before it becomes liquid, or whose economics take priority when the platform eventually exits.
Bill Johnson, Founder, Chairman & CEO of The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers, has completed roughly 50 acquisitions while building Liberty without PE equity capital. He joins Kison Patel to challenge some of the assumptions behind acquisition-led growth and explore what buyers and sellers often discover only after the deal is done.
What You'll Learn
What sellers should understand about common vs. preferred equity
How investor timelines can change deal economics after close
Why seller character is so difficult to diligence
What happens when acquisition growth outruns integration capacity
How Liberty balanced M&A, organic growth, and leverage
When red flags between LOI and close should make you walk away
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You can do fifty deals and still run into something you've never seen before. DealPilot , powered by M&A Science, gives you practitioner-built guidance from 400+ interviews and thousands of real acquisitions. When the playbook stops working, know what to do next.
Why M&A Integration Fails Without Leadership Enablement
Épisode 432
jeudi 10 septembre 2026 • Durée 54:05
Integration problems often get blamed on culture after close. The real issue may have started earlier, when leaders were never given enough clarity on how to operate inside the new company. Kim Jones is an HR Director of M&A with more than a decade of people-integration experience across deals ranging from single-employee acqui-hires to acquisitions involving thousands of people.
In this episode, Kim shares how to avoid integration debt, what to do when trust and operating rhythms start to break down, and the stories that shaped her approach, including a CEO who delayed his own close and a butterscotch Life Savers incident that sparked an employee uprising.
What You'll Learn
Why experienced leaders still need onboarding after an acquisition
What creates integration debt before the deal even closes
How to define "you'll run independently" before it becomes a source of friction
The retention question Kim asks before deciding where to spend retention dollars
Why integration planning should start around LOI, not Day One
How to spot the people who actually hold influence, even when the org chart doesn't show it
What buyers should preserve from the target before replacing its operating rhythms
If you're planning an integration and trying to get leadership aligned before close, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, gives you practitioner-built guidance for the decisions that shape Day One and what comes after.
The Seller's Power Shift: How to Defend Valuation After the LOI
Signing the LOI can feel like you've won. For the seller, it may actually be the moment when the balance of power starts moving the other way.
Praveen Ghanta learned that firsthand while selling HiddenLevers. A key enterprise contract slipped during diligence, the valuation story changed, and just before the diligence period expired, the buyer came back asking to reprice the deal by nearly 50%. What followed was a tense negotiation over how much to concede, what to protect, and when walking away becomes the better option.
What You'll Learn
Why seller leverage changes after signing an LOI
What should be defined before entering exclusivity
How to think about your walkaway number
What diligence feels like from the seller's side
Where buyers can unintentionally destroy what made an acquisition valuable
What Praveen would do differently after going through the process himself
When diligence changes the deal, the hardest question is knowing what to defend and what to give up. DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the deal frameworks and negotiation playbooks practitioners have used to make that call themselves.
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This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
51% of corp dev teams are already using AI in their deals.
We surveyed 230+ practitioners on where AI is showing up across sourcing, diligence, integration, and internal workflows, what's working, what's holding teams back, and where the biggest opportunity is over the next 12 to 24 months.
Episode Chapters
The Discount Is the Wrong Question in Private Equity Secondaries
Secondary deals are often judged by a single metric: the discount. Richard Chow thinks that's the wrong place to start.
After spending most of his career investing in and advising on secondaries, Richard has seen what happens when investors focus too heavily on price and miss what is actually driving the transaction. Richard and Kison walk through the decisions behind LP-led deals, continuation vehicles, private-market liquidity, and some of the assumptions buyers routinely get wrong.
They also get into Richard's own investing mistakes, including a SpaceX opportunity he passed on, and what it taught him about underwriting assets whose real upside may sit well beyond the typical investment horizon.
What You'll Learn
Why the discount can be the wrong starting point in a secondary deal
What separates LP-led and GP-led secondary transactions
How continuation vehicles change the liquidity equation
Where IRR can create the wrong impression of investment performance
Why Richard believes buyers often approach diligence too narrowly
What passing on SpaceX taught him about underwriting long-term compounders
If you're evaluating a secondary opportunity and defaulting to "what's the discount," DealPilot's Buyer-Led M&A™ Certification is built on that instinct: stop taking the other side's framing and drive your own evaluation instead.
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This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
Episode Chapters
How to Finance Acquisitions Without Giving Up Equity
How do you keep buying companies without eventually losing control of the company you built?
SS&C Technologies founder and CEO Bill Stone has spent four decades avoiding exactly that. Rather than treating each acquisition as an isolated transaction, SS&C built a system around protecting ownership, using debt when the economics make sense, paying it down quickly, and creating enough value after close to preserve capacity for the next deal.
Bill walks through the decisions behind acquisitions including FMC, GlobeOp, and Blue Prism, his experience taking SS&C private with Carlyle, and the discipline that has allowed the company to keep acquiring across changing markets.
What You'll Learn
How Bill Stone kept 15% of SS&C through 100 acquisitions
The exact revenue-per-head and EBITDA thresholds SS&C screens for
Why strategic buyers almost always outbid private equity
How to tell a motivated seller from one just fishing for a premium
When rollover equity can help retain the management team
How Carlyle overruled Stone's own unanimous board vote
The one rule that makes Stone walk from a deal every time
Every financing decision changes what you can do on the next deal. If you're financing an acquisition and don't have a hard leverage ceiling you actually stick to, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the deal guidance layer to help you set one before you're over-levered on the next deal.
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This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
Episode Chapters
Where AI Actually Helps and Fails in M&A Legal Work
AI can now draft, review, and benchmark deal documents in a fraction of the time it used to take, but knowing when to trust the output is a different skill entirely.
Aaron Binstock, a partner at Cooley with nearly 20 years of transactional experience, has seen both sides of that tradeoff firsthand.
Where does AI actually save time on a deal, and where does it create false confidence? What happened when a client's AI-generated tax step chart was built on the wrong assumption? How does reverse prompting produce a better first draft than a single one-shot prompt? And what's changing about how junior lawyers build judgment, and how firms bill for their time?
What You'll Learn
Where AI reliably speeds up NDA markups versus bespoke merger agreements
How reverse prompting turns a mediocre AI output into a usable first draft
The tax step chart mistake that nearly cost a client millions in consideration or tax
How cross-deal benchmarking pulls survival periods, caps, and baskets into one reference chart
Why some clients and counterparties are opting out of AI entirely, and how firms track it
What junior lawyer training looks like once document grinding stops teaching judgment
Why AI can produce a report but still can't own the result
If you're dealing with AI tools that sound confident but don't actually know M&A, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science experiential data, has guidance built from practitioners who've actually run the deal to help you catch what AI can't see coming.
Episode Chapters
The Back-Office Surprises Nobody Warned You About When Going Global
Due diligence covers deal terms, but it doesn't cover what happens once you're running payroll, benefits, and banking in a country you've never operated in before. A legal entity change can lock a company out of its own bank account overnight. Benefits plans get frozen in by local law. A language rollout can hit five systems on the same go-live day. And having handled one acquisition in a country doesn't guarantee the next one plays out the same way.
Jennifer Lipschultz has led integration on more than 20 acquisitions across the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and India for ECI Software Solutions, a PE-backed SMB software company operating in 80 countries.
If your next acquisition involves operating somewhere new, this is the walkthrough to have ready before you find yourself improvising in real time.
What You'll Learn
Why a legal entity change can freeze a company out of its own bank account
How Swedish per diem rules can turn expense reimbursements into taxable income
What actually goes into a change engagement session, and why managers get briefed first
How one go-live day can trigger a five-system language rollout
Why fluency in one acquisition doesn't guarantee the next
What belongs on a pre-close global integration checklist
If you're dealing with a cross-border acquisition where the back office keeps breaking in ways diligence never caught, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has integration playbooks pulled from practitioners running 20-plus deals, to help you build your pre-close checklist before the surprises hit instead of after.
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Episode Chapters
How to Structure an Acquihire Deal in the AI Talent Race
AI talent deals are no longer small acquihires built around a simple price per engineer. Some now carry billion-dollar price tags, forcing buyers to rethink deal structure, diligence, tax exposure, and retention.
Baker McKenzie's M&A Partner Derek Liu has personally signed over $110 billion in transactions from both sides of the table. That mismatch, old tools built for a different kind of deal, is what's forcing corp dev and legal teams to rework their playbook, and it's the throughline of this conversation.
What You'll Learn
The real cost difference between a stock purchase, an asset sale, and a sign and release
What acquirers are actually diligencing when the product isn't the point
Why a non-solicit clause outweighs a non-compete in California
How a 100 percent revest changes the conversation with a founder
Where HR becomes the bottleneck between LOI and close
If you're structuring retention for a talent-driven acquisition, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the deal guidance layer to help you get the revesting schedule and non-solicit right before you sign.
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This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
The Buyer-Led M&A™ Summit is back. August 18th, free and virtual. We're releasing the State of AI in M&A 2026 report live at the event before it goes public. Benchmark your program, hear from practitioners across the industry, and leave with a clearer picture of where dealmaking is headed. .
Your standard teaser tells a buyer everything about your company and nothing about why you fit their strategy right now. When sellers expect the buyer to figure out that alignment, the deal dies on the desk.
Andrew Morbitzer has led more than $2 billion in acquisitions at Intuit and GoDaddy, worked on the sell-side as an M&A advisor, and returned to the buy-side as VP of Corporate Development at Life360.
What You'll Learn
Why do corp dev teams default to no on inbound deals before the first conversation
How banker incentives and buyer incentives point in opposite directions
How to research a buyer's strategy and priorities using only public information
What a realistic projection signals to a corp dev leader versus what a hockey stick signals
How to apply Buyer-Led M&A™ thinking from the sell side
If you're advising on deals and want a framework for how buyers actually evaluate fit, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has Buyer-Led M&A™ frameworks to help you pitch into the buyer's strategy instead of handing them a data sheet.
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This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
DealRoom just launched the only MCP server built for Buyer-Led M&A™ — so your AI and your deal data finally work together. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot directly to DealRoom and let your AI read your pipeline, analyze due diligence documents, and automatically write findings back.
See for yourself:
Episode Chapters
220 Deals. One Playbook. How to Scale M&A Without Losing Control
If you scale the deal flow without the operating infrastructure to match it, things break fast. The playbook is a document nobody opens, closing weeks turn into fire drills, and the returns you modeled start to slip.
Shawn Rodricks, Head of M&A - Independent Consultant, built the infrastructure before the volume hit. He closed 220 acquisitions across two organizations, 37 at Rexall in pharmacy and 183 at Amerivet Veterinary Partners, by wiring in the operating system from the start.
What You'll Learn
The five-part operating model behind 220 acquisitions
How to hire for biz dev vs. corp dev roles in a lean M&A team
How to build a closing-week SWAT team and keep finance aligned on timing
Why qualitative diligence feeds directly into your forecast and purchase price
The pre-close vs. post-close integration framework
Why roll-ups that confuse acquisition with strategy fail
What Shawn got wrong in year one and how it shaped every program since
If you're scaling a deal function and want the operating framework behind Shawn's approach, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the Buyer-Led M&A™ Certification, built from 400+ practitioner interviews into a framework you can actually run.
____________________
This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.
DealRoom just automated Pipeline Management with AI so you can spend less time updating deals, and more time working them. Automatically push deal context from Outlook to DealRoom Pipeline and use AI to keep deal target data and tasks updated, so follow-ups never slip through the cracks. No manual logging. No stale pipeline data.
51% of corp dev teams are already using AI in their deals.
We surveyed 230+ practitioners surveyed on where AI is showing up across sourcing, diligence, integration, and internal workflows, what's working, what's holding teams back, and where the biggest opportunity is over the next 12 to 24 months.
DealRoom is the AI-powered operating system for Buyer-Led M&A™ — one connected system for pipeline, diligence, integration, and reporting. No tool-switching, no manual updates, no data gaps.
August 18th, free and virtual. We're releasing the State of AI in M&A 2026 report live at the event before it goes public. Benchmark your program, hear from practitioners across the industry, and leave with a clearer picture of where dealmaking is headed.
August 18th, free and virtual. We're releasing the State of AI in M&A 2026 report live at the event before it goes public. Benchmark your program, hear from practitioners across the industry, and leave with a clearer picture of where dealmaking is headed.
[06:02] The Operating Model for Serial Acquisitions
[09:40] Hiring: Biz Dev vs. Corp Dev
[13:03] Staffing as Deal Volume Scales
[15:08] What a Playbook Actually Is
[18:43] Managing Ebbs and Flows in Deal Volume
[22:12] Cash Flow and Finance Partnership
[23:44] The Underestimated Side of Diligence
[27:25] Key Person Risk and Pre-Close Retention
[31:41] Post-Close Monitoring and the First 90 Days
[35:17] Pre- vs. Post-Close Integration Priorities
[37:53] What Roll-Ups Mistake for Strategy
[39:21] Integration as the Conversion Engine
[42:48] The Year One Mistake That Bit Us
[44:12] When Deals Get Strange
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