The Directors and Associates of Delaney Jones Gillett & Associates (DJG) have wide experience across most aspects of the operation of professional services companies.
Mergers and Acquisitions
The Directors and Associates of DJG have wide experience in all aspects of mergers and acquisitions.
Key areas of merger and acquisition due diligence particularly relating to professional services companies are:
- Backlog analysis
- Project % complete and analysis of work-in-progress analysis
- Review of over-due payments, particularly relating to technical conflicts
- Risk analysis of Go/No Go, project approval and other technical including peer review processes
- Competitor analysis
- Key personnel review including assistance with appointments to key positions
- Company, branch, office and team integration advice
The DJG team knows and understands that mergers and acquisitions do not generally fail because of poor due diligence. Those that fail generally do so because of poor staff and process integration after the merger or acquisition has actually taken place. Prioritising what needs to be done immediately after a merger or acquisition is critical and too often managers spend too much time dealing with lesser important issues than the critical aspects that are all associated with staff integration, staff retention and all other aspects relating to staff and their concerns.
The DJG team also has wide experience in a range of situations when a merger or acquisition is not the best way forward, such as, partial ownership, joint ventures, licensing, co-operation agreements, etc. Some of these options might be seen as a means for companies to understand each other better, with a merger or acquisition a possible future scenario.
Mentoring and Coaching
Using wise and experienced professionals and managers to pass on knowledge and wisdom is a critical part of developing a great professional services organisation. However, mentoring is one of those human resource areas that gets both good and bad press.
The worst mentoring situations are when an organisation decides that it is going to have a formal mentoring programme, and everyone is going to be involved, either as a mentor or a mentoree! Many of us been in, or seen as an external observer a number of situations where this has been attempted. There have been successful across-organisation mentoring programmes, but they are possibly few and far between.
Every instance of successful mentoring that the DJG Directors and Associates have been involved in has either been when someone more junior has asked a respected senior person to be their mentor, or when a senior peer or colleague has personally one of us to mentor or coach someone they consider would develop by being involved in such a relationship. Informal mentoring programmes such as between junior staff and more experienced staff or between developing managers and company leaders seem to occur in a widespread way across vibrant and growing organisations.
However, as staff become more senior and more experienced finding mentors and coaches becomes much harder. This is where the experience, the wisdom and in many respects the seniority of the DJG Directors and Associates can help.
