
With over 25 years of comprehensive experience spanning service, technology and supply chain roles, Gyner Ozgul, CEO of RAFTR Roofing + Exteriors (RAFTRx), is experienced in corporate and private equity-based leadership roles focused on operations and culture development. He specializes in building scalable, sustainable teams that build virtuous, long-term growth and foster positive experiences for customers and employees alike. Gyner recognizes that roofing is crucial for safeguarding individuals’ most valuable assets and the loved ones who make their house a home. That premise is why Gyner is excited about RAFTR Roofing + Exteriors and its ability to drive differentiated value in the marketplace.
Q: How do you prepare your leadership team for a transition post-acquisition?
I prepare the leadership team for the acquisition by helping them understand the business that we’re acquiring, the people that are important to that business and the culture that’s important to that business. I usually outline a couple of key areas, as I know and understand them walking into the room, that I want us to avoid creating a minefield for ourselves.
As we think about new acquisitions, we also need to think about how do we bring on board their existing talent and make sure they’re set up to succeed and grow with the business? How do we bring in best practices? These are important discussions I would approach with the leadership team.
Q: What is the most important thing to keep in mind during an acquisition?
The people you’re acquiring are the most important part of that acquisition, and sometimes we lose sight of that. We think it’s the customers, we think it’s some secret sauce to the way they sell; at the end of the day, it’s the people you’re acquiring that you need to think about.
By the way, there’s a paradigm shift occurring right now. If you were to talk to a CEO probably 10 years ago, success would have been about sales, EBITDA and revenue metrics. Now it’s about people retention because people have become more important in terms of experience, execution, knowledge and processes, because it seems like the pool of available talent is shrinking faster. Retaining people of good talent is becoming more important than it used to be.
Q: How do you address potential redundancies or role overlaps?
Personally, I don’t ascribe to the belief that redundancies or role overlaps are a problem the way most do. I prefer to look at people, the talent we have, and assess how we can leverage them to either build up that business to grow faster or how to take their best practices and roll them out across the organization. That redundancy is a new strength and muscle that I have access to because they’re now part of this new organization.
Q: How do you balance preserving the acquired company strengths, while also integrating that into your own operations?
For me, preserving an acquired company’s strengths starts in a pre-acquisition process. During that process, we outline what integration means for them as we assess the business with the ownership that’s there. We start to say here’s what integration will mean for you and your business for the first year. Here’s what it also doesn’t mean.
You must have those conversations because in doing so, you’re preserving the company’s unique strengths. The owner is going to be very open about if there’s an integration piece that might be weak in the company’s culture. We’ll know about it, and we can address it differently.
The flip side of that is, as we get into that organization, in the first 90 to 180 days, we usually find best practices that we have use for, and we ask them to bring it to the broader leadership team. How do we create a scalable version of that? If we all agree it’s important and the whole organization should do it, how do we create a scaled version of it?
Q: How do you approach managing and merging different corporate cultures?
The way I think about managing and merging cultures is that there’s no winner or loser. Instead, you have a base culture in the business, that’s the acquirer, and then you have the acquiree’s culture, and you’re bringing them together. The output of that is a new culture for both. Obviously, there’s more impact on the acquiree over time because, typically, they’re smaller than the acquirer, but it’s not a hard line.
Managing that well means creating clear checkpoints throughout the process and having clear accountabilities for all teams to report back regarding how that integration is going. What’s working? What isn’t working? What did we find out that we didn’t know about, and how does that impact some of our decisions going forward?
Q: What communication strategies are most effective in keeping teams engaged during the transition?
What I’ve found to be most effective is what I call ride-alongs. I like key members of our leadership team to go ride-along in the new business, spend time with their office people, their field personnel, the key stakeholders in that business and get to know them. The people side of the business is the most important and that relationship building, that opportunity to become relatable to them early on is going to be important when you get to those integration factors we’ve talked about already.
Q: How do you ensure transparency with employees, customers, and stakeholders throughout the process?
This is probably the hardest part about integration because, inevitably, you miss something. The best way to approach this is to set a cadence for communication, whether that be town halls or in-person meetings, or some combination thereof. But, more importantly, you also have to admit at times when you mess up, because you’re going to.
The vulnerability of that openness says something about the integrity of the management team and the integrity of the business. Many people sway away from it, or they don’t want to own the accountability, but it is more transparent. Integrity is better than transparency. To be quite frank, they have to feel confident that they’re getting kind an honest view from you of how things are going.
Q: How do you evaluate and implement operational synergies without disrupting service or productivity?
Well, I have a general rule of thumb that I don’t want to mess with the way they go to market in front of their respective customer for the first year at all. Instead, I want us to get educated on their business. How does it really run? How do the customers react? What’s their process really like?
So instead, the operational synergies I look at are more are the back-office synergies. For example, purchasing supplies at better prices, getting better software license deals, looking at our CRM software, our ERP software – improving how we operate as a whole. These are things that are more system and process driven that don’t impact the way they present themselves as a business as much.
Q: What challenges often arise as a leader when aligning the acquired company with your organization’s vision?
A lot of it has to do with the personality of local versus national. There’s always a little bit of a push and pull there – it’s like a little bit like a rubber band.
And there’s a real art in finding a balance between both, to preserve the local culture but bring in the operational efficiencies, the processes of the national one. You need to make sure you’re identifying when that tension between the two cultures is occurring and work to get them both to a new middle ground and establish a new, blended culture.
Q: What advice would you give to other CEOs, who are preparing to lead an organization through an acquisition?
There are three things I’d advise. The first is to be upfront in the acquisition process itself. Be very clear about what integration is or is not, even if a little may change after you close, and be very clear with the ownership. If that, if that means they need to bring in a smaller, broader group before closing, so that you can articulate the same thing, so be it right. You want to make sure you’re setting an expectation of what it really means to be acquired for them.
The second thing is, you need to make sure they understand the idea of “sacred cows,” and that goes both directions. Everyone wants to protect their sacred cows, and there are no sacred cows here. We’re going to do what’s best for the organization going forward.
The last is to let go of biases, because this one crops up on you. For instance, you may start to look at things and you start to say, “People here get paid too much,” but you don’t know the narrative of why. That’s a bias coming in. Instead, seize the opportunity to understand why that exists in the business and try to capitalize on it. Perhaps they have a very profitable, high-growth business with that model. What can you takeaway and bring back to how the larger business operates to achieve similar results?
Q: How do you measure the success of an acquisition?
I measure it with people, believe it or not. Some might use profit, revenue, or many other metrics, but that doesn’t work for me. A year or two from now, I will be looking at how many of the original group is still here. For the ones that left, why? That’s how I measure the success of the business. Honestly, if the original team sticks around, I promise you that the revenue and profit numbers aren’t be your problem. It all comes back to the people, how valued they feel and how they execute.