Being a realist, we all know acquisitions can be a gamble. As an optimist, I look at them as a game changer that can be an absolute launch point to long-term success. Of course, business history is riddled with stories of acquisitions that have gone wrong, but rarely do we reflect on the one’s that totally changed the landscape of a company for the better. The proverbial 1+1=3! You knew there would be a corny cliché in this piece and just wait, there are two more.
AgileBlue acquired the MDR business of Crowe LLP, on July 15, 2022. We are just a month in, and the first four weeks have been a pleasant whirlwind of why we completed this game changing acquisition. In my humble opinion, it always begins with the people who make businesses successful. Getting to meet the Crowe team has been a pleasure and learning how they ran the customer support side of their business has been totally beneficial. There are so many take-aways that will help us obsess more over our customers in the future.
Next, the customers. People always say customers are customers, true and another cliché, but when you acquire customers in healthcare, financial services, government, etc. from small and mid-size organizations these are good people who absolutely rely on our cyber services otherwise they will have a huge gap in securing their business and mitigating cyber risk. It is our job to shut up, listen, and understand how important our technology and 24×7 service is for them to make sure we do not put them at risk with our acquisition. They didn’t ask for this acquisition but are completely affected by it. And AgileBlue needs to work tirelessly to ensure there are zero gaps during their migration.
Finally, you have to work extremely hard to migrate these two businesses quickly but carefully, methodically yet with urgency. Every stakeholder at AgileBlue and Crowe is relying on us to make this acquisition successful for our combined customers, technology leading platform and for the future growth of our company. I will write another piece about this acquisition in about a month and I hope to report even better results. Until then onward and upward … yep, the third corny cliché!
