What attracted you to Crossover, professionally or personally?
I work for Crossover’s client Trilogy, which acquires companies at a really rapid pace. At Trilogy, I have found that I have much closer involvement in the most interesting aspects of the M&A due diligence, not just the “grunt work” that many people are limited to in other companies. I have worked at large technology companies that were involved in M&A in the past, but had never gotten the same kind of day-to-day exposure to M&A processes. Here, I have day-to-day involvement in activities that are at the intersection of finance, marketing, sales, services, support, and engineering. Now, I am able to add value to the M&A processes from a much closer vantage point than I have had at any other company. I have been able to broaden and deepen my expertise with additional skills like M&A due diligence, import and integration work, and deployment of lean management practices using continuous process innovation.
Tell us about a specific project you are working on at Crossover that you find especially interesting.
My team carves out service processes from acquired companies that can be centralized and performed more efficiently at scale in the central factory. When we run critical technology components as shared services in a central factory model, we are able to make the processes leaner and more productive. Right now, we are in the middle of a large multi-million dollar acquisition, and I am working on the services import and integration processes. This newly acquired company has over a dozen products and customers across the globe, which is a big challenge. Most of the services we work on are enterprise software products that are already deployed at Fortune 1000 companies.
What are your goals for the next couple of years at Crossover?
Our company direction is to acquire more and more SaaS companies. My challenge is to be ready to improve and scale the processes to keep up with the pace of acquisitions. Every step of the process - starting from data ask all the way to integration - has to be lean, high-quality, and able to cope with the pace. I am looking forward to taking on these challenges.
