My company’s being acquired: What will happen to me?
This is a question that I get asked repeatedly and often. I guess this is what should happen if I’ve written a book on how to survive when your company’s been acquired (Surviving M&A: Make the most of your company being acquired).
On this blog, I’ve also been conducting a poll. Granted, it is unscientific because only those who want to answer the poll have done so, some may have answered more than once (although unless they’ve been in more than one acquired company, I don’t know why they would have done this, and the poll itself should block repeated votes from the same computer) and there’s no way to determine who has answered it. Nevertheless, with several hundred votes, it’s time to look at the results. [Note, at any time you can go to the homepage of this blog and click on the ‘view results’ line on the poll.]
At this time, it looks like the following:
- 37%: Kept old job
- 34%: Fired / made redundant
- 21%: Promoted
- 7%: Demoted
What does this tell us? Well, it’s not as bad as you might have thought if your company is targeted for acquisition by another company.
Of course, a solid one-third were fired or made redundant, which is higher than our research would indicate (which should be closer to 10-12%!), but given the fact that people visiting this blog have probably done so because they’ve had problems keeping their jobs, perhaps not surprising. But note as well that more than 20% did better out of the acquisition than if it hadn’t occurred. Thus, there’s room for hope…
…And I’d like to think that the ones who were promoted were the ones who had read my book when they first heard their company was being acquired. One hopes.
Surviving M&A 
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