There is no doubt that M&A is a great way for businesses of all sizes around the world to speed up their growth. However, the process is rife with potential pitfalls that could cause acquired businesses to lose their value. The following four steps can help you avoid common pitfalls in acquisitions and help you make your next acquisition an efficient strategy to grow.

1. Plan your acquisitions.

Inadequate planning is among the primary reasons for failing acquisitions. If you create an acquisition plan from the beginning, you will ensure that your company is maximizing its value and is on the right path with your M&A goals.

Typically, this involves establishing an initial list of M&A companies to target and then narrowing the list by the use of search criteria. This could include factors like industry sector size, deal size market share, deal size and operational scale. Corporate development teams can rely on diverse resources to pinpoint M&A targets, including online sources such as DealRoom and LinkedIn trade journals, trade publications and industry associations, as dataroomplace.blog/top-10-finance-bloggers/ well as the databases of investment banks as well as private equity companies.

2. Create a team to oversee the M&A process.

It’s important for management teams to create an executive team headed by a senior executive that will supervise the M&A process from start to the end. This is critical to ensure that the strategic intent of the acquisition isn’t lost along the way and that the process of integration runs smoothly. It’s also important to have experts in human capital on the M&A team to estimate compensation and benefits expenses, as well as quantify the actuarial value of pensions and other financial liabilities.