10 Signs Your Company Is For Sale You’re not supposed to know. But you sense the difference. There are whispers everywhere. Why doesn’t management replace people who depart? Why are they always huddling together behind closed doors? And why do they keep delaying purchases and decisions? Of course, someone will ask your CEO if the company is on the block. He’ll deny it, before sneaking in a qualifier about being willing to listen. And everyone sees right through him. You’re not surprised. Years ago, the company was full of possibilities. Employees considered themselves among family. But the culture shifted to churn-and-burn. Now, you hold your breath when the company doles out pink slips before the holidays. Deep inside, you know that’s your fate. The higher-ups may be knotted up in guilt, but that doesn’t change reality. Once the sale closes, you’ll get the boot and they’ll get a parachute. In most roles, employees aren’t privy to their company’s inner workings. In uncertain times, they’ll look for hidden meanings in leadership’s words and actions. Think your company is up for sale? Look for these signs: 1) Hyperbole: Get ready for a PR blitz. Your CEO will tout the market you serve as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He’ll write op-eds, laden with terms like “market demand”, “rapid expansion”, and “perfectly positioned to…” Like Stepfords on uppers, your leaders will echo his sunny outlook. You almost miss those dire warnings of “tipping points” from years past. Despite the feel-good rhetoric, you still wonder why candidates keep turning down key positions at your company. It just sharpens the cognitive dissonance. Of course, silence will eventually replace management’s bravado. By that time, your leadership will have insulated themselves, comforted by knowing someone else will clean up their mess. 2) Cost Controls: You’re going lean, so get ready. You’ll see your budget slashed, pay frozen, training ignored, and travel moratoriums issued. Holiday and off site meetings are scaled back – and the latest downsizing is perfectly calibrated to avoid paying big salaries and bonuses. All the while, management outsources more work, fights product returns, and delays vendor payments. In this atmosphere, you’ll pinball through a maze of approvals, as management tracks everything. It’s all about the short-term and bottom line now. For all you know, your people may not be pulling the strings anymore. 3) Sales Pushed: Sales is the only department hiring. That probably means the higher-ups are desperate to move inventory and goose cash flow. Behind the scenes, they’re pressuring the sales force to ram prospects through the funnel, slash prices, secure longer contracts, and push for early payment. And why not – most of your executives won’t have to live with those deals. 4) New Faces: Your office has visitors, but you don’t know who. They don’t sign into the guest log – or interact with you. Maybe they’re potential clients. But they could also represent your future boss. Naturally, you imagine who they are. Is it a competitor who’ll ride in like a conqueror? Or, could it be a VC firm hell bent on stripping you down even more? Either way, you don’t know if they’ll respect what you’ve accomplished – and that scares you. At the same time, expect senior management to add an advisor to the org chart. If you dig through this Obi-Won’s record, you’ll find a merger or acquisition, guaranteed. 5) Key Defections: When senior leaders – particularly from sales, finance, and human resources – start jumping ship, the A players start scrounging for gossip. With uncertainty comes fear. So watch the social media profiles of your leaders and top performers. If they’re joining associations, collecting references, and networking with competitors and recruiters, they’re on the prowl. If you track recent connection patterns on Linkedin, you may even unmask your mystery buyer. 6) Murmurs: Your competition starts warning key accounts that you won’t be around in six months. The local chamber guy pops off after a few drinks. A former executive makes cryptic tweets. And the office grapevine fields calls from all corners. Consider these people to be your Greek chorus. They are a reminder that the clock is ticking – and your résumé needs work. 7) Questions: It’s like a scene from the movie Office Space. Suddenly, the higher-ups care more about process than about results. They’ll suffocate you with new policies. And have you outline what you do – and how – so they can train a peer. If you’re deemed trustworthy, they may even sidle up and ask for your personal stack rankings. They’re making up lists and checking them twice. And nothing good ever comes from that 8) Poor Performance: This should be a dead giveaway, but many employees are oblivious (or in denial). Imagine your company misses another quarterly sales goal. Worse, they barely cover margins after their best sales year ever. The stock price keeps dropping and the competition just pole vaulted over you. If this happens, your bosses will assemble the bankers. It’s only a matter of time before the vultures start circling. 9) Holding Pattern: Everything has grown real quiet. For once, big changes aren’t stampeding towards you. Instead, you feel adrift. You’ve experienced slumps, but operations have seemingly stopped. Reviews and sales goals have been pushed back. Your website and marketing collateral haven’t been updated in eons. There’s no buzz, no initiatives, no investments… or evidently no plan. And there’s a prevailing sense that the company has grown tired, if not irrelevant. You’re in wait-and-see mode. And everyone is starting to ask the same question: Is all this really worth it? 10) Worst Instincts: You’re doing so much with so little – and it’s wearing on people. Your culture has taken on a Lord of the Flies feel. Nothing seems to get done and no one takes responsibility. Everyone is positioning themselves and re-writing history to look good. Even your CEO chimes in about doing what’s right…even if it costs your job. It’s all self-serving. Sure, some fear seeing their salaries or roles diluted (or a new team nosing around their fiefdoms). Most likely, they’ve already witnessed what happens when a company is sold: The new owners gut departments and systematically weed out survivors over time. And you’re powerless to stop it. All you can do is to hope for the best…and start planning for the worst.
Any of this sound familiar? https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/08/09/10-signs-your-company-is-for-sale/#5a2562e840b4
Prepare Your Career; 16 Signs YOUR Company Is Up for Sale! So what does a possible sale or even a purchase of another company mean for you and your career? Well first of all, do not panic! Even if your company is sold tomorrow it could take some time for them to complete the merger depending on how large the company or division. I have been involved in billion dollar mergers that take up to a year to settle out. Smaller purchases, like a large company buying a company under 30 million in sales or smaller, could be a shorter period of time depending on the product and market synergies between the two companies. Let’s just say that after the purchase, you have anywhere from 3 months to a year before changes are felt in the field! But let’s direct our attention to actually gaming the situation well before a company is known to be up for sale! Understanding how to do that FIRST will prevent you from panicking and actually put you in a place where you can take advantage of being sold! Your company or division has not been hitting the numbers for 3 years or more. Unforced movement at the top (departure of the CEO, Presidents, VP’s and etc. or worse, a revolving door of those levels for the past 10 years…forced or unforced). Higher levels know when a division is doomed and will leave BEFORE it happens unless they have a nice umbrella package where they walk away with a huge chunk of change if they stay. Forced movement at the top (same level of people listed in no. 2 people are being blown out, especially repeatedly within the past 10 years). Typically the board or the CEO is trying to find the right people to turn the company around and it is still considered “a people/leadership problem” that can be fixed. Plus it will typically save a CEO’s job for awhile firing people beneath him (same for a President, who will begin firing the VP to save their job for awhile or a VP firing a Regional VP level….it is easier to blame lower levels of management and it just may be a leadership issue UNLESS for years multiple new leaders can’t turn it around!). Regardless, the cascade can start at lower levels of firing and actually work its way uphill until the CEO or Board says, “Enough! Get rid of the people at the very top who are developing the vision and the overall strategy….because it must not be the people underneath them…it has got to be the person developing the strategy and leading the company (CEO or President Level)!” As you can well imagine, this trickle up theory can take years to unfold or as little as two or three years in a highly visible company, but the common denominator is the company or division is NOT PERFORMING against their competitors, losing market share or growth numbers BELOW the national (and/or overseas) market segment growth. Merely go to Yahoo Finance, if you work for a publicly held company, they do all the financial work for you (the answer is in the numbers!). Whipping boy mentality begins to take hold in a feeble attempt to get the sales force to hit quota and produce numbers. Typically the quota numbers are ridiculously high compared to last year sales and not within the market share reality of the company or even perhaps the overall market segment they are within! Management is trying to save their jobs and promising BIG NUMBERS to the big boy’s/gal’s above them….now they gotta whip YOU to try to hit those stupid numbers and pay you less on an unrealistic commission plan built off those quota numbers (which also helps the bottom line!). Loading year end numbers into dealer’s where possible to boost the number to the inside sales number (yes, there are two numbers, the quota numbers for the sales force as reported by dealer re-sale numbers and the true internal profit and loss number that counts for upper managements bonus: that’s ALL sales baby! NOT just traced sales from dealer to hospital). National Accounts people know when they are pounded to load the dealers to hit that internal number for management, listen when you hear this being done! Listen real hard if this is done year after year; they are banking on one of those years to catch the sales up with “real INCREASED sales to the end users; hospitals, physicians, clinics, home health and etc.” Stupid..right? It is like paying off a credit card with an advance off another brand new credit card and the result is always the same; one is digging a bigger hole to fall into! Expense budgets are cut even to the point of declaring no air travel or pre-approved only overnight business trips (helping to improve the bottom line). Shifting of products to different buckets and/or creating new divisions. This is usually when smart first line managers and sales representative start getting nervous, if signs no. 1 through 6 above have been happening for awhile and nothing is turning around, then BEWARE, this could be the preparation to sell all or segments of the company! They may be creating a new division to dump their basket of unwanted products, sticking a bow on it and putting it up for sale. They may even take an existing division that is underperforming, but has some products they don’t want to lose, and strip those valued products out and place them into a “keeper” division. This can also happen when a group of products are not in synergy with the core product line of the company or the products or division is not part of the overall strategic forward plans of the company; think of a Bristol-Myers Squibb (a pharma company) selling Convatec (a medical disposable and device unit). In addition, a business catastrophic event can also spur a sale of a division immediately to raise funds to get themselves out of a mess: think Fen-Phen Dietary Drug Lawsuits and Wyeth (now Pfizer, a pharma company) selling Sherwood Davis & Geck (a medical disposable company) to raise money for the legal battle or a pharma company who’s top anticipated drug for the pipeline DOES NOT get FDA approval. I was an AVP with Sherwood Davis & Geck when that happened and I knew the minute the news hit the airways (and internet) that my division would be sacrificed to raise the money for the legal battles that would go on for years, even though we were hitting the numbers. In that catastrophic scenario we still had 6 months before we were sold to Tyco (now Covidien). These are unusual events so we will stay with the original concept of a non-performing company/division, but I wanted to mention that scenario so you can recognize them when they happen and yes, my old division was less profitable than pharma and was really the stepchild of a large pharma company; it was easy to sacrafice us and we probably would have been sold down the road anyway. Top Management is now retained (think CEO, President, Director of Marketing, VP of Sales); they will be needed after the sale and they float them a stay clause for helping the buying company a smooth transition; they sign disclosure statements for maintaining secrecy from the masses. Now the drive is really on to do some quick fixes to make the company more profitable for sale (think of it as putting on a fresh coat of paint!). Second Line Management may be reduced (think Region Vice Presidents or Area Directors who have first line managers reporting to them). This level may be eliminated altogether. First line Sales managers are not backfilled and actually a few may be laid off. The First line Sales Managers who are left are flown mysteriously back to corporate for private meetings once or several times. They are helping top management realign territories and prepare for which individuals get laid off. They are often told, "It is just a needed restructuring because they are not hitting their numbers and the company needs to refocus their resources." The company does not backfill ALL vacancies just critical areas during this phase. Think of smaller territories not getting filled and maybe even absorbed by neighboring territories by a single representative. So in other words, territories at every level get larger with fewer people running them. Clinical Support position are not backfilled or actually eliminated Layoffs and downsizing’s begin with the sales force. Sales numbers are still away from the quota mark. Rumors on the street they are for sale…TRUST THE RUMORS even IF the CEO or board of the buying company or the company being sold deny it. It is acceptable in the business world for them to lie about this, and in fact it may be crucial (and perhaps a legal issue) if they say something that affects stockholder value until everything is official.
The 11th Reason to believe your company is for sale: Senior management not able to answer simple questions on a conference call, for example: Harvey: Does a car have 4 wheels or 2? Harvey's response: Casper slimy milk cow under the 20million cushions of your sofa in the front room. Melissa: How many runs does it take to win a baseball game? Melissa's response: You pathetic worm, everyone knows that answer, I've been to 40 baseball games. You have to take the total number of people that attended the game divide by the number of tickets that are sold then ask the parking lot attendant if you had lunch today then try to wash the hotdog down with a diet coke and we are all set on the answer now, right? OK, Thank you for your answers to the questions.
OC providing PA forms, wow what a great service! Don't you think the MA's already have the PA forms from all of the other branded drugs that also require a PA? Don't you thing the MA's know that when they had a denial after an appeal from the same insurance carrier that the second time will more than likely also be denied? And the third time and the fourth..... Melissa and Harvey should have been the ones fired not Jim.
So how and when will this all play out? Total shutdown? Headcount reduction? Expansion? Continue on as is?
Harvey loves to tell his accomplishments but none of it translates to the field or scripts! The guy is living off past successes and has NONE at Opko! Melissa is a waste of time and apparently not held accountable for a single thing. She's a waste of time and money and for some reason has a crappy attitude!
Sales numbers are still away from the quota mark. Rumors on the street they are for sale…TRUST THE RUMORS even IF the CEO or board of the buying company or the company being sold deny it. It is acceptable in the business world for them to lie about this, and in fact it may be crucial (and perhaps a legal issue) if they say something that affects stockholder value until everything is official.
Sound familiar? 7) Questions: It’s like a scene from the movie Office Space. Suddenly, the higher-ups care more about process than about results. They’ll suffocate you with new policies. And have you outline what you do – and how – so they can train a peer. If you’re deemed trustworthy, they may even sidle up and ask for your personal stack rankings. They’re making up lists and checking them twice. And nothing good ever comes from that 8) Poor Performance: This should be a dead giveaway, but many employees are oblivious (or in denial). Imagine your company misses another quarterly sales goal. Worse, they barely cover margins after their best sales year ever. The stock price keeps dropping and the competition just pole vaulted over you. If this happens, your bosses will assemble the bankers. It’s only a matter of time before the vultures start circling. 9) Holding Pattern: Everything has grown real quiet. For once, big changes aren’t stampeding towards you. Instead, you feel adrift. You’ve experienced slumps, but operations have seemingly stopped. Reviews and sales goals have been pushed back. Your website and marketing collateral haven’t been updated in eons. There’s no buzz, no initiatives, no investments… or evidently no plan. And there’s a prevailing sense that the company has grown tired, if not irrelevant. You’re in wait-and-see mode. And everyone is starting to ask the same question: Is all this really worth it?
Yes, you’re so right. A good process will never lead to good results. Let’s all commit to a bad process, and wait for the good results to roll in. Thank you for your leadership.
Don't forget the "new" bi-weekly car allowance. It will just it easier to cut people loose and no bickering about the 15th of the month or a proration. Thanks Frost.
