Delivering Acquisition Synergies to Fuel Innovation

InMoment, a pioneering customer experience (CX) firm backed by Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP), was ready to accelerate its growth and disrupt the CX market with a bold acquisition. The company purchased MaritzCX, a subsidiary of Maritz Holdings, in a move to combine its innovative culture and technology with a world-class service model. Achieving this goal would require simultaneously separating MaritzCX from its parent company and integrating it with InMoment to create a united organization, both agile and scalable, running on consistent systems, processes and vision—all while maintaining world-class service to 2,000+ leading brands during a global pandemic. FCM guided the firm through this complex, delicate process.

Approach

Transaction Support

Starting with due diligence, FCM helped lay the groundwork for a successful acquisition. Our experts identified substantial cost productivity opportunities for the merged organization, leveraging three decades of experience with similar deals to provide InMoment with clarity and confidence in its investment strategy. We also led Transition Service Agreement (TSA) scoping and price negotiations, which defined key processes and systems that the seller would temporarily continue supporting to ensure MaritzCX’s business continuity during the carve-out. This effort delivered an immediate 20% savings compared to previous corporate allocations for the same services. Once the deal was signed, FCM led InMoment and MaritzCX in preparing for the ownership change. During a tight 30-day sign-to-close window, we drove 42 projects spanning areas like banking, insurance, payroll and communications to facilitate a smooth Day One transition. Thanks to this extraordinary sprint, both organizations continued operations uninterrupted on the day of the transaction close.

Separation

We then shifted focus to carving MaritzCX out of its parent company, aiming to transition all 97 TSA services as quickly as possible to clear the pathway for InMoment to become a CX powerhouse. Every separation activity needed to be balanced with a lens towards the concurrent integration of the two businesses. In order to drive this work, FCM launched an Integration Management Office that centrally coordinated and reported on over 40 ongoing projects to migrate the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Human Resources Information System (HRIS), technology end users, legacy hosting platforms, security, compliance and more. Using our unique hands-on governance structure, we embedded an experienced FCM leader with each pair of InMoment and MaritzCX functional leaders to tackle strategy and planning. This approach delivered independence from the seller well ahead of schedule, with the combined company exiting nearly three-quarters of TSA services in its first year post-closing and set to exit all services by month 19. And moving faster means spending less! Between driving favorable TSA negotiations and accelerating TSA exit projects, the business achieved a 64% total reduction in expenses from corporate allocations.

Productivity

With separation well underway, FCM also helped the new InMoment realize synergies across its organization structure, real estate footprint and third-party spending. Within 100 days of finalizing its acquisition, the business implemented an FCM-driven unified organizational design that improved line-of-sight accountability and decision-making, created functional alignment and allowed scalability for future growth, while simultaneously reducing compensation & benefits costs by 14%. We also helped rationalize the company’s location footprint to match its go-forward strategy, including consolidating separate Salt Lake City, Utah headquarters into a single hub. This work reduced real estate spending by 67%. Meanwhile, an effort to review sourcing approaches identified savings of 22% in vendor spending. InMoment surpassed its planned productivity targets less than six months into the acquisition, and ultimately achieved double its savings goal.

Operating Rhythms

To further boost the acquisition’s success, FCM led initiatives to create a foundation for InMoment’s future as a global CX leader. In partnership with company management, we developed relevant metrics and a review cadence to better manage Technology and Operations performance, built a structured business case process that added rigor to funding decisions and designed a streamlined supplier onboarding procedure, inclusive of vendor selection, risk review, contracting and financial approvals.

Impact

After successfully integrating a major acquisition during a worldwide pandemic, the new InMoment is exceeding its investment goals and earning its spot in MDP’s portfolio. With FCM’s support, the combined business has established a solid growth trajectory, harnessing acquisition synergies to fuel its next level of growth and differentiation.