Exploiting growth opportunities through successful transactions 

Having already selected this theme of growth through transactions as one of their top three business priorities, then I guess it is unsurprising to see that survey respondents proceeded to rank ‘overall deal strategy’ as their leading sub-priority.

Overall deal strategy is a pretty broad church and its popularity directly relates to that. All the usual factors apply – such as who to bid for and when to bid or whether to stay close to home or head abroad.

However, how do you also account for continued euro-zone uncertainty, the possibility of sovereign defaults or even the fact that stockmarkets appear –counter-intuitively – to be heading up rather than down?

What is a surprise though is the lowly ranking given to ‘communication with stakeholders’; which only 11 percent chose as their number one priority.

Historically, stakeholder approval of a deal was virtually taken for granted. Today’s investors appear to have far more of an activist mindset. Their approval cannot be guaranteed.

Indeed, a number of proposed mergers have recently foundered because of a lack of shareholder approval.

I wouldn’t expect to see communication emerging as the number one pick but I would have expected to see it ascribed more importance by the survey base.

‘Securing deal financing’ is the second most popular priority area for respondents but I imagine there is a big demographic split at play here.

There are plenty of large corporates out there, with healthy cash balances, who have no financing issues. At the other end of the spectrum are plenty of smaller businesses whose financing requirements are so small as to not cause investors too many sleepless nights.

Trapped in the middle is a massive swathe of middle market companies and smaller national firms who continue to struggle to access finance. It is these who will likely make up the majority of the 16 percent recorded by our survey.