Guy Taubin

A CEO who has raised capital ten times may still lack the relevant experience and knowledge necessary to carry out a successful M&A transaction. The two situations may look similar from the outside. Both involve investors, valuation, term sheets, and lawyers. But the skills are different, the risks are different, and the traps are different.

MIT Sloan Management Review finds that 46% of all M&A deals are ultimately undone, with an average time from acquisition to divestiture of a full decade. The deal closes. The value leaks out over years.

Guy Taubin has watched this from both sides. He is CEO and founding partner at EvE, an advisory firm built around partners who have sat in the operator's seat, not just the adviser's seat. The problem he explains is not a lack of intelligence or preparation. It is a category error. CEOs who know how to raise money assume they know how to buy or sell a company, and the two are not the same game.

"With an investor, you sign a quarterly report," Taubin says. "With an acquisition, you get a partner you will be beside every day for years. It is more like a marriage than a transaction, and too many founders only realise that after the paperwork is signed."

Shmuel M. Ginat, EvE's Founding partner and CBO, draws the same distinction from the finance side. "With an investor, you get a report once a quarter," Ginat says. "In M&A, this is someone that you are supposed to run with. It is not just an investor you see every couple of months. This is the very definition of a partner, a person who is running with you, who is down in the trenches with you, and celebrating side by side with you when all that work comes to fruition."

That distinction matters because the cost of getting it wrong is not abstract. The press release goes out. The celebration happens. Everyone assumes the work is done. In reality, the work has just started, and the damage tends to happen after the dotted line, not before it.

The financial structure alone should give founders pause. SRS Acquiom reports that sellers are collecting only 21 cents on the dollar, meaning founders are receiving only one in five dollars. Signing for a headline number is not the same as receiving it. The reality is that milestones slip, boardrooms scramble, and the bank balance falls short.

The post-merger integration phase is where the deepest failures sit. WTW finds that 70% to 90% of deals fail to achieve intended value, and that culture is cited as the single biggest integration challenge. The company being acquired has its own people, its own habits, its own loyalty ladder. Those do not transfer with the paperwork.

That is why Taubin argues the process is not a one-time event. A sophisticated founder walking into a structured deal with a sophisticated buyer is not in a negotiation of equals. One side lives and breathes this world. The others' experiences lie elsewhere. The asymmetry is not solved by enthusiasm or by a good lawyer. It is solved by having access to those who have run the gauntlet in both worlds.

In Berger's framing, what is often missing is the value of scars. Some mistakes can only be learned by making them, but not every mistake must be felt by the executives themselves.

EvE's approach is built around the argument that this experience can rarely be hired from a textbook. Taubin, Ginat, and Founding partner and CRO Ronen Berger come from different backgrounds: operations, business development, finance, angel investing, and government. The point is not that one partner knows one thing and another knows another. It is that they come at a problem from different angles and support each other's knowledge with their own. A situation that looks like an operations problem to one partner may ignite a capital structure problem to another, and the combination produces a creative solution no single adviser would reach.

Berger describes the approach through a case where two clients were each struggling separately to raise funds. "What if it wasn't two clients?" Berger says. "What if this was one client?" The result was a merger offer neither company had considered, and a structure no single adviser from a single background would have proposed.

"There is a glass ceiling," Taubin says. "A CEO who built a company to 40 people is not the same CEO who can lead it to 4,000. The same is true on the M&A side. Raising funds ten times does not prepare you for the first time you sign a deal."

The industry has been slow to adapt to that reality. Investment banks have run the same process for decades, often staffing deals with analysts who know the M&A manual by heart but have never sat in the C-suite boardroom. The CEO's they advise have changed. A 30-year-old founder today is not the same as a 30-year-old founder thirty years ago, and a process built for one generation does not translate cleanly to the next. The words are the same. The culture is not.

The broader lesson is about how professional services adapt to a market that has already changed. The M&A process that worked for a generation of founders is not the process that works for the generation now experiencing mergers and acquisitions. The deal structures are more complex, the buyers are more sophisticated, and the human cost of getting it wrong is higher. If the process has not evolved in a hundred years, how can it possibly help the people and markets that did?