If you want to grow something, you need to be sure conditions are right, then tend them closely over time. This principle applies as much to business as to barley, and it’s one that a US-based agribusiness had successfully applied over decades of production, diversification, and vertical integration. Then recently, in a bid to stay ahead of climate-induced shifts in agriculture, company leaders sought growth beyond their borders.
The seed for that growth: acquiring a foreign agricultural retailer (a provider of products and services to growers). This retailer was geographically remote and organizationally small but had a significant footprint in a strategically important region. The conditions for the growth to be successful: integrating the retailer’s people, processes, and customers into a much larger organization.
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are complicated enough; they’re even more so when different governments, laws, regulatory bodies, currencies—even units of measure—are involved. The upsides were clear: …