Why I built AtlanticM&A
AtlanticM&A5 min read
I am Richard Parry, the founder of AtlanticM&A, the Agentic Transformation OS, and I have been delivering M&A and transformation work since 1998. This is the short version of how that career ended up as software. The longer one is on the About page.
The part that never got easier
My career has been the work that changes how a business runs: value creation programmes, carve-outs, post-merger integration, and operating-model and technology transformation. I did it at Deloitte, at IBM and at mars & co, and independently since.
Every one of those programmes used the same four artefacts. I maintained them by hand, engagement after engagement, for over a decade. The method held up every time. Rebuilding the artefacts by hand did not scale.
If you have run a programme you will know where the hours go. The thinking is done early and done well. What follows is weeks of keeping the documents in step with a programme that moves faster than they do. The plan was never the problem. Keeping the plan current was the problem.
My first M&A project was software
It started the other way round. My first M&A project was in 1998. I was a young engineer at IMI plc, and somebody had to work out which of two overlapping product ranges to keep. So I pulled the sales and cost data out of both companies' systems and wrote the application that answered it.
My first M&A project was building software to model a merger. Here we are again.
Written down before it was built
The ideas in this product are not new to me, and they have been argued in public. I have published on them since 2011. Two pieces appeared in London Business School's Business Strategy Review: "A better way to merge companies? M&A project teams" in 2011, on why the missing piece in most M&A programmes is capability rather than process, and "A better way to grow?" in 2014.
My Sloan Fellowship thesis at London Business School, supervised by Professor Eli Talmor, worked out where the value in the £1.9bn leveraged buyout of Debenhams actually came from, separating financial engineering from operational improvement. It earned a distinction and was contributed as a case study to International Private Equity (Wiley).
Working out which part of a return came from operating improvement and which from leverage is exactly what the value bridge in AtlanticM&A does. That feature, Atlantic Deal Value, is in early access. I wrote the long-hand version twenty years ago.
Two years as Chief Transformation Officer
Most recently I spent two years as Chief Transformation Officer of a private-equity-backed life sciences platform. We ran nine acquisitions and the transformation around them across three continents, with a team of eighty and six more deals coming. It all ran on a dashboard I designed and built myself.
It worked. The programme delivered. What it cost was people, and that is the reason this software exists.
What I built this time
AtlanticM&A is built for the people who run the work, not the people who buy the software. Every screen assumes you already know what a Day 1 readiness gate is, what a TSA exit involves, and why a charter has to tie back to a work plan. None of it was translated from a consulting framework, because none of it started as one.
It covers six project types: integration, divestiture, value creation, transformation, agentic transformation and cloud migration. It is a system of work rather than only being a system of record. The plan is built and kept current where the work is done, so the reporting comes out of the work instead of being bolted on afterwards.
The film below runs two minutes fifteen seconds. It shows a half-page brief becoming strategic direction, charters, a work plan and a roadmap, in a build that takes about four minutes, with Walk the Walls marking the critical path afterwards.
In 1998 I wrote software to answer one question about one merger. This time it is for the whole programme.
About AtlanticM&A
AtlanticM&A is the Agentic Transformation OS. Its agents work inside the programme, both augmenting and automating the work of the transformation team: work plans, governance, stakeholders and reporting in one place, with a live value bridge that moves as the work does. It is a system of work rather than only being a system of record: the charter is written in it and the plan is built in it. Meeting notes come back as proposed updates to the plan and the RAID log, the team decides what stands, and every change the AI makes carries an audit trail. The platform does the slide-building, status reporting and stakeholder briefings that usually keep a consulting pyramid busy, so a small senior team can run the programme more nimbly and for less.