Mergers and Acquisitions – What does it mean for platforms and teams?

From working as a Communications and Information systems technician at the Royal New Zealand Airforce, to stewarding on superyachts owned by the billionaire who invented Polly Pocket, Nadia Herriott has had a long and interesting career. 

“I wasn’t a dumb teenager, but I didn’t have a whole lot of motivation. I wanted to become a pilot but I broke my neck at age 16 and ruled that out. I went into a different part of the Air Force but ended up hitting a glass ceiling after 6 years. I decided to spread my wings and began working in the Mediterranean on superyachts.” 

Before you ask – the answer is yes. You are still reading a Platform Diaries recap. But this week’s guest has had a less than conventional journey into the platform space. 

Nadia had one more job, a Passenger Products Executive at Auckland International Airport, before she began looking after the Salesforce platform at Trustpower, a New Zealand retailer of energy, broadband, and more recently, mobile services.

If the name sounds familiar, it is because Trustpower has recently been making headlines. The business has sold its retail arm to larger retailer, Mercury. While Nadia has recently been given the task of Separation Stream Lead, and ensuring the merger goes to plan, that wasn’t always her role at Trustpower. Initially, she was charged with taking over the company’s Salesforce platform. 

“When I first started in the role, a major challenge was that we had stretched the designs to such an extent that when we were trying to introduce new elements, we were compromising the reliability of the platform to deliver,” Nadia tells me. “There hadn’t been a consideration of technical debt, so I wanted to make sure there was a renewed consideration for solutions design.” 

Fast forwarding to the core of this week’s topic and Nadia’s current role, I wanted to learn more from her as a leader in a company going through a merger. 

“Interestingly, the current CEO of Mercury was previously the CEO of Trustpower, so he has made sure of creating a very collaborative culture. The messaging from Mercury was always really clear: we're not coming in to take over and get you to adhere to our ways of working, we're gonna be two businesses working together, running in parallel for the short term.”

The acquisition of Trustpower by Mercury is portrayed by Nadia to feel more like a merger than a takeover. I wondered how this approach would be implemented. Is it a fast, ‘rip the band aid off’ process, or is it slow and considered? Nadia shared how they were going about this overwhelming business change. 

“Very much the latter,” Nadia shares. “We wanted to approach the merger with an open mind. We wanted to acknowledge both businesses previous practises and ways of thinking and go into together to make a great future for both organisations.” 

Working with clients who have gone through acquisitions, I offered to Nadia that usually, the people-problems that arise are the most difficult to sort out. 

“It was important to create a picture, or an anchor, that people can continue to go back to that helps them understand what we are at the moment trying to achieve,” she tells me. “We tried to minimise change from day one, as this merger occurred following a year of disruption due to Covid.”

It was refreshing to listen to someone who was in the depths of a large project and to hear the real time challenges that their business was facing. I wanted to get a sense of the platform landscape that Trustpower and Nadia were having to rationalise. 

“Like any good large corporate organisation, we've got a ton of legacy applications that are part of our retail platform group. We've had to continue to deal with the ongoing maintenance and upgrading of some of these platforms. We're just hoping that all things go well for the final hurdle that we need to jump over in November so that we can give this across the line in February.”

To get such a large project done, time is of the essence. Nadia and I discussed how decision fatigue, or when making a choice freezes a team can delay the entire process.

“Prioritise making those decisions. Unblock the project deliverables - it is really important to get the information in front of people as early as possible.” 

Overall, when tackling a big project like this, Nadia urges leaders to communicate with their team. Nothing induces stress and anxiety like radio silence. While apprehension to share plans and roadmaps may occur due to the propensity for plans to change, people become more nervous. 

Have you embarked on a large project and kept your team in the dark? Or perhaps you have struggled to communicate the overall goals to your team.