Unless the business is already separated totally, e.g. in an own legal entity the seller should appoint a separation lead to drive the separation work until it can be handed over to TSA (Transactional Services Agreement) Management or the buyer.

Ideally the separation lead is already appointed before the Due Diligence phase, it is strongly recommended that the separation lead is appointed before deal signing and it is absolutely latest acceptable point in time to appoint the separation lead when the deal is closed. Of course we recommend that the separation lead is highly involved in the separation design. The workload on the separation lead changes over time and in most critical phases the separation lead will need to have quite a team with workstream leaders for the different business workstreams (like e.g. Sales, Product Management, Operations, Supply, etc.) and the affected support functions (like HR, Finance, IT, etc.) and eventually a dedicated project office to this separation project – dependent on size and complexity. As a seller you should focus on  having workstream leads from your business for the business workstreams yourself, whereas the total lead and leading supporting workstreams as well as providing additional project management support can be outsourced to M&A experts like us.

We want to focus on your success in the separation and therefore we offer innovative business models when we take on the separation lead position and/or more in a divestment project. We can also provide those services based on the normal “time and material” model as all consultancy companies but we prefer to discuss with you a model that is generating value through a fixed price combined with bonus payments if targets are achieved or exceeded. We strongly believe in sharing the incentives as a differentiator and this justifies our claim to be “the change maker”.