How to support employees during mergers and acquisitions

Maxime Legardez Coquin makes the merger with another company sound like a stroll in the park.

His startup Everoad, a French forwarding company he founded in 2016, merged with the almost identical German company Sender in June 2020.

The process started six months earlier. “I remember it was Christmas Eve and I was in northern France with my family,” Coquin told Sifted. “I talked to David” [Nothacker, Sennder’s founder] on the phone and said, ‘Hey, Everoad is number one in the French market; Sender is number one in Germany and other markets too – with astonishing traction and a fair amount of money. ‘”

“Why don’t we merge and consolidate the European market?”

Mergers and acquisitions can be good for founders and investors: They help companies pool resources, win new customers and grow in size and visibility. The global online marketplace Etsy recently expanded Shopping app Depop for $ 1.6 billion to appeal to younger buyers. Meanwhile, last month, Sender announced the third acquisition of Cars & Cargo, a French company Freight and truck logistics provider to expand its network of commercial shippers and freight forwarders and expand its reach across Europe.

But while mergers and acquisitions can make good business sense, they can be disastrous for employees.

In some situations the culture of a startup can change dramatically, an employee of an acquired company told Sifted. Management is often “systematically replaced” by people from the purchaser and the existing teams are “classified” in other groups within the company of the purchaser.

“This creates the conditions for the acquirer culture to be more represented in any given group than the acquired businesses,” they said.

When this happens, employees can “feel isolated in a foreign culture” and are unable to “propose new or alternative perspectives or approaches”.

So, is Is there a way to make employees happy through a merger? Sifted spoke to three founders who have put their companies through an M&A process about what they are doing to support their employees.

Transparency first

Coquin, who went from CEO of Everoad to CEO of Sennder in Paris, says that being open and informed is the only way to allay employees’ fears of taking over a company.


Maxime Legardez Coquin, CEO of Sender France.

During Everoad’s merger with Sennder, employees had questions about how the merger would affect the company’s mission and work culture, whether it would affect their job or salary – and, in fact, whether or not they would be laid off, as it sometimes does the case is business combinations.

Everoad has been fully integrated into the “Sender Family” and operates under the name Sennder. The two teams have been merged, with employees now working from offices in Berlin and Paris. During the merger, 5% of Everoad’s team decided to leave.

At first it was not entirely clear how things would go after the merger – also for the management.

“Employees want to know what tomorrow will look like, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell right away.”

“Employees want to know what tomorrow will be like, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell them right away,” says Coquin. “But the key is to make that transparent and to communicate intensively with the team in every phase of the acquisition process.”

Stephen Weich, CEO of the German beverage delivery startup Bottle Post, which was founded in November last year by the family baked goods company Dr. Oetker, agrees: “Mergers mean an enormous cultural change for the employees, and a common mistake in these processes is a lack of communication. ”

Message in a bottle “tried not to fall into this trap” by constantly reporting to her staff and reassuring them.

“We organized a large town hall meeting to inform the employees about the next steps – always with the reason that message in a bottle is still in the growth phase and nobody is being laid off because we need everything we can get.”

“Anyone who is not transparent from the start immediately loses trust.”

Mixed cultures

The takeover of message in a bottle by Dr. Oetker was one of the largest tech exits Germany has ever seen, with a purported purchase price of 1 billion euros.

The idea was to have Dr. Oetker’s own beverage delivery service Durstexpress – essentially an imitator of Message in a Bottle – to be merged with the tech-savvy startup and to operate under the name of Bottle Post. This meant that Bottle Post gained 4,000 additional employees and now has a team of 13,5,000 employees in 32 warehouses serving 170 cities in Germany.


Message in a bottle was founded in 2016 in the small German town of Münster. It is now active in 170 cities across Germany.

In the course of the integration, some camps were replaced in favor of a “cheaper” neighboring infrastructure, ”says the company. However, it is said that the employees concerned have been given new job opportunities “as far as possible”.

Merging the two companies was not an easy task, says Weich, and the employees have had to go through a lot of changes.

The logistics, warehouse, employees and departments of Durstexpress – from personnel to marketing – are currently being relocated to Message in a Bottle. Durstexpress will also be integrated into the technology system from Bottle Post – including a navigation system and routing algorithm.

So how did Message in a Bottle help employees get along with their step-siblings from Durstexpress?

“We got together with our Durstexpress colleagues as early as possible so that both teams can interact personally and be involved in projects together,” says Weich.

In logistics, for example, Message in a Bottle has formed new mixed teams at the merged locations and defined new shift and team leaders with employees from Message in a Bottle and Durstexpress.

“We have also launched a new format called ‘Crew Camp’ ‘in order to enable the employees of the various organizations to get to know each other both on business and in private,” says Weich, the only way to really help the employees.

As part of the crew camp, employees took part in joint functional team meetings, private virtual chats, company-wide quiz games and other so-called “motivational events” throughout the integration process.

Sell ​​the vision

Before employees can support change in an organization, they need to understand the reasons behind it, says Coquin. Executives need to make it clear to their employees why the merger or acquisition is taking place and how it will strengthen the company.

“You have to convince your employees of the unbelievable chance of a merger and convey an idea of ​​togetherness.”

“In an M&A, the founder of the acquired startup becomes the most important ambassador for his team,” says Coquin. “You have to convince your employees of the unbelievable chance of a merger and convey an idea of ​​togetherness.”

Coquin tried to explain to his employees that Everoad and Sennder share the same DNA, mission and values ​​and that together they could build something “incredibly successful”.

“You have to communicate at the very beginning that the company you are merging with has a common goal,” says Weich. This is especially important if the two companies in question were previously competitors, as was the case with Durstexpress and Message in a Bottle.

“You have to overcome these limits and explain that you will be even more successful as a team. This is the basis for the definition of a unified, consolidated culture. “

Not every employee will participate in a massive organizational change.

Coquin says that some employees saw the merger announcement as a good time to leave the company and “do something different,” while others felt unsuitable for a large, “globally ambitious” organization.

This turnover, Coquin adds, is “natural” for mergers and cannot always be supported.

“But we are proud to see that it has inspired some colleagues to take an entrepreneurial journey.”

Be clear about the expectations

Priya Shah, co-founder of London-based video creation platform SauceVideo, says adjusting employee expectations during an M&A process is critical. Your startup was taken over from the cloud infrastructure platform Oracle in April 2020 and is now part of Oracle’s content management.

“The integration into a large corporation has certainly cost us a lot of time – there are a lot of things that need to be brought together, especially on the technology side,” says Shah.

“Your employees should expect that things will take a while – especially since running your company basically doubles your workload during the takeover.”

“Your employees should expect that things will take a while – especially since running your company basically doubles your workload during the takeover.”

It is also important to give your employees a realistic idea of ​​what it will look like after the merger. Shah says, for example, that startups that are acquired by a company will find out pretty quickly that decision-making is much slower.

“For example, if you make a decision about marketing or product development and then decide to do something else, it’s not that easy and quick to turn around. Decisions are made over the long term. As a startup, it can be tough. “


SauceVideo co-founder Priya Shah says it’s important to convey to employees that the M&A process doesn’t happen overnight.

Overall, it is important for managers to assure their employees that their startup will not simply be swallowed up by the corporation – and that their identity as a company will be preserved.

“Losing our culture – as well as the control over our product that we worked so hard to build – was definitely a problem for us with Sauce. Especially since we were a small team of nine people when we took over and Oracle is so big, ”says Shah.

“However, if you stand up, are authentic, confident, and encourage your employees to do the same, the relationship can work.”

Miriam Partington is Sifted’s Germany correspondent. She tweets from @mparts_

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