Reduce Competition Economies of Scale Spread overhead and serve the combined business with one back office, while creating logistical synergies and better negotiating leverage with suppliers. Expand TAM Moving into a tangential market allows for your salesforce to cross sell and upsell new products to both your existing customers and the target’s. Enter a New Geo Setting up a legal entity and cutting through bureaucratic red tape is a pain, with unique frustrations depending on what geography you are entering. Buy someone already there. Acquire a Rare Asset This strategy prioritizes the asset’s potential over the current company’s revenue or talent. Examples include customer lists, distributor agreements, land rights and intellectual property. Rollup Rolling up smaller companies in a fragmented industry in the same geo and consolidating them into a large company allows the larger firm to combine revenues and operational costs. Example #1 Example #2 Vertically Integrate Acquire Talent Accelerate Roadmap If you buy your competitors, they are not your competitors any longer. Become the only game in town by buying up all market share. Then control prices. Owning multiple layers of the product delivery cycle to extract value at more than one stage. Acquisition of a supplier is backward integration. Acq. of a distributor is forward integration. This is commonly referred to as an “acqui-hire”. In this case the employee’s skillsets are the asset, and any revenue the company generates is secondary. This is common for software devs. This is the “buy” outcome of the “build vs buy” decision. Many times tech firms will know what product they want to add to their platform, but either don’t have the time or team to execute. Strategy The "why" M&A Strategies mostlymetrics.com