Companies often struggle to capture the full value of a separation. Here’s how to do better.
Most divestitures start with a strategic decision that a company is no longer the best owner of one of its businesses. ... Indeed, past McKinsey research has shown that companies that more frequently reallocate capital generate higher returns than their peers.1
But once a company decides to sell, problems can arise. Managers devote their attention to finding a buyer but seldom scope deals from a potential buyer’s point of view, even as they struggle to figure out exactly what should be included in the sale, apart from the productive assets that are its centerpiece. ... Management and the board can get so caught up in the sale that the core business begins to suffer from neglect. All in all, divestiture turns out to be no panacea: sellers can take up to three years to recover from the experience (exhibit). Indeed, some companies are so wary of these pitfalls that they decide to muddle through with businesses of which they are not the natural owners—another unsatisfactory result, as research suggests that these sales can produce significant returns for both the parent company and the divested or spun-off business.2
In our experience, even highly complex divestitures can work well, provided companies follow proven practices, especially in three areas: scoping the deal in detail, addressing the so-called stranded costs left behind when the revenue-generating assets are sold, and managing the expectations and concerns of employees.
... Getting started on these activities quickly, in parallel with the search for a buyer, can unlock enormous value for buyer and seller alike.
Taking the buyer’s point of view
... Admittedly, it’s a bit impractical to define exact deal boundaries before the identity of the buyer and its preferences are known.
To get around that problem, smart sellers define a number of different deal packages—of assets, people, and services—configured to attract interest from a broad spectrum of buyers. These packages not only broaden the field of potential buyers, often in ways that companies cannot envision at the outset, but also help the company cope with the tough questions that buyers inevitably have about what’s in scope, how to separate, the transitional services they can count on, and the financials of the business. ...
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| English: Diagram of private equity fund structure for Private equity, Private equity fund, Private equity firm (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
... And there may also be buyers interested in cherry-picking parts of the core business instead of taking all of it—which, while probably not ideal, should not be discounted out of hand. Sale packages include pro forma financial statements tailored to represent the package being offered to each buyer or class of buyer that highlight the true value of the business, separation and transition plans, and details on proposed management and talent assignments.
Rooting out stranded costs
One of the most challenging aspects of a major divestiture is that even sellers that control expenses well are inevitably left with some corporate costs associated with the business but not sold with it. ... Stranded costs essentially can be any type of cost that does not automatically disappear with the transaction, ... . Some of these are fixed, such as the IT system, and cannot be readily reduced regardless of the size of the divestiture. Others are more variable and can contract, for example, with a lower head count—but they can still take years to unwind unless explicitly planned as part of the divestiture. ...
We see three strong practices to reduce overhead. First, ... defining the precise boundaries of potential deal packages early in the deal brings to light the full extent of the subsidiary’s sales, general, and administrative costs. The parent company can make a better attribution of resources to the parent and the subsidiary. That benefits both companies.
Second, successful sellers often use the momentum generated by the divestiture as a catalyst to reduce stranded costs—and to improve the performance of any bloated or inefficient corporate-center activities revealed by the divestiture. (This mirrors a similar effect of transformational acquisitions, in which buyers take advantage of the circumstances of an acquisition as a catalyst to restructure costs more broadly.3) ...
Rooting out stranded costs takes a separation manager with the foresight to rethink the parent company’s cost base and the authority to make it happen—the third good practice. ...
Companies of this size often face a special problem in rooting out stranded costs. For many large multinational companies organized by matrix, the only pragmatic method is for senior management to lead a cross-functional initiative to tackle cross-cutting opportunities such as shared-service and outsourcing operations, as well as the change programs required to support the cost transformations.
Managing employee expectations
The challenges of talent management in a divestiture start at the moment companies begin defining the boundaries of different sale packages and continue right through to the close of the deal. First and foremost, managers struggle to figure out what to say to the people involved. ... Sometimes company leaders will choose to keep plans for the deal confidential up until signing— as one global CEO and seasoned divestiture veteran told us, “I just deny everything until the deal is signed. It’s easier that way.” This may be true, but it creates a communication challenge. Many employees inevitably will know about the deal because of the massive preparation work that is impossible to conceal. But if management officially denies the reports, it becomes very difficult to put in place communication plans and other measures to minimize the concerns that always arise in such situations—all employees want to know, “What happens to me?”
Some form of short announcement is essential. Once managers make an announcement, they should clearly define and communicate the selection process to keep employees motivated while they wait for news of their fate. ... Ideally, the communication plan should be part of a compelling story that shows not only employees but also investors, analysts, and customers why the divestiture will leave both buyer and seller better off.
Once the word is out, other challenges begin. ... Given the role the exiting managers will play in communicating the business’s value to potential buyers, delay in informing them is undesirable. But once they are informed, they immediately become another party at the negotiating table, bargaining for the talent, assets, and contracts they feel they’ll need to be successful and trying to avoid the ones they don’t want.
Failing to manage the tension between the two groups can be damaging. When a global industrial company divested a multibillion-dollar division, for example, it began to receive a lot of applications for transfers from the entity to be divested back into the parent company—so many, ... that the company was at risk of visibly depleting the divested company ... potentially affecting its value. To discourage the transfers, it aligned the incentives of people in the departing unit to the characteristics of the sale. It decided to reward managers based on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA)—a critical negotiating point with the private-equity firm that ultimately bought it. The emphasis on EBITDA motivated exiting managers to minimize the overhead they took with them; it also reduced transfer requests.
This approach did leave more overhead for parent-company managers to deal with, ... But they made a conscious choice to accept this, believing that the right way to deal with broader cost issues was, ... as part of a thorough change process in the wake of the divestiture. Parent-company managers often lack the incentives that would compel them to take care of the departing entity. ... In our experience, it is important to define and implement a set of performance measures and rewards aligned with value maximization, and to use these with all key people involved in the divestiture process. The most obvious rewards are monetary, but research shows that other incentives (such as recognition and promotions) can be equally if not more important determinants of performance.
Negotiations over talent are particularly sensitive. The first inclination of parent-company managers is to keep the best performers and send the rest with the divested business. That’s not practical, ... the divestor has a moral ... and ... legal [obligation] to make sure the business is a going concern. ... At the same time, the parent company must retain critical resources, and quite often, the exiting managers have the very skills they need. Thus, successful divestors will address the issue of talent early in the process and start building or acquiring the skills needed in both the parent organization and the business to be sold.
Much of the value of a divestiture depends on the effectiveness of the separation process. Defining the right deal, managing talent uncertainty, and rooting out stranded costs can make the difference between a deal that succeeds and one that destroys value. And skill in divestiture is comparatively rare; doing it well can help companies get a competitive edge.
About the Authors
David Fubini is a partner in McKinsey’s Boston office, Michael Park is a partner in the New York office, and Kim Thomas is a senior expert in the Copenhagen office.
Notes
1 Stephen Hall, Dan Lovallo, and Reinier Musters, “How to put your money where your strategy is,” mckinseyquarterly.com, March 2012.
2 Bill Huyett and Tim Koller, “Finding the courage to shrink,” mckinseyquarterly.com, August 2011.
3 Marc Goedhart, Tim Koller, and David Wessels, “The five types of successful acquisitions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, July 2010.
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