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In aerospace and defense M&A deals, it’s common to plan for factors such as asset utilization, process efficiency, and material procurement leverage in great detail. Rarely considered, however, are differences between the two companies’ business models—and that’s a mistake.
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US aerospace and defense (A&D) companies, facing flat US defense budgets and competitive pressures from non-traditional entrants, are seeking to grow sales and profits via diversification—from defense to commercial, from products to services, from domestic to international. This search for growth is leading many to explore activities outside their traditional core businesses. Both commercial and defense contractors are aiming to increase revenue and profit by capturing a greater allocation of aftermarket value, as well as by extending into services and other new portions of the platform value chain. And as incumbent “integrator” roles start to lose significance due to the disaggregation of major military programs, companies that have historically filled these roles are making forays into new territory as well.
Efforts to diversify may make sense in the abstract, as can efforts to leverage or monetize current assets (or value propositions) into new areas. However, decisions about entering new markets should be considered in the context of a company’s ability to support those markets—specifically, the ability to employ the right business model(s) to serve new markets. More than the general truism that failing to properly design for business models can destroy value, failure to consider business model compatibility can be especially harmful to companies engaging in inorganic growth—which many A&D companies have made a cornerstone of their diversification efforts. Missteps in inorganic growth can destroy value far faster than organic pursuits, due to the significant capital outlays that happen all at once in an M&A transaction.
Our research suggests that business model compatibility—that is to say, the extent to which either an acquirer’s business model is similar to the target’s, or accommodations have been made for the differences—is a fundamental fork in the road for A&D companies pursuing M&A. In fact, business model compatibility can often be a more important consideration than many other, more commonly discussed levers of M&A value, such as asset utilization, process efficiency, and material procurement leverage.
We are not saying that A&D companies should not acquire, or cannot successfully acquire, companies whose business models differ from their own. But deals involving incompatible business models, as our research shows, carry a high risk of failure. Given this, business model compatibility should be addressed in a disciplined manner, not only as an ongoing part of a company’s strategic planning process, but also, and especially, when evaluating and executing M&A deals.
A business model is defined, broadly speaking, as the way a company seeks to win in a market. Business model elements include:
Most A&D companies’ portfolio businesses adopt one of the six business models depicted in figure 1, with some variations.
Business models, in turn, are supported by operating models, which include elements such as organizational structure and methods of program and product governance. Metaphorically speaking, an operating model is how a business chooses to assemble the building blocks in order to successfully deliver the value proposition specified by the business model.
A company can, of course, choose to engage in multiple businesses with different business models—and many do. However, in the A&D industry, it is often difficult for a company to execute two or more distinct business models or operating models well—and the further apart they are on the spectrum shown in figure 1, the more difficult it can be. More often, the company’s core business model exerts a “pull” on those of the subsidiary businesses, so that the model employed by the main business, or inconsiderably different variants of it, are applied to markets across the board.
Examples of how this phenomenon can play out in A&D include:
These and similar situations can arise when an A&D company engages in accretive diversification beyond a company’s main business through M&A. Success in such efforts requires a willingness to find an equilibrium between the acquirer’s and the target’s business models—one that achieves a good fit between the markets pursued and the business models employed.
One frequent driver of business model incompatibility in A&D industry mergers is the differences between compliance with government cost accounting standards (CAS) and commercial business dynamics, summarized in figure 2.
Virtually all functions within an A&D company affect and are affected by these differences, which call for substantial differences in the business model to accommodate effectively. Contrast the way a company’s finance organization typically handles cost accounting under CAS versus in a commercial enterprise. CAS-compliant defense systems usually focus on accurately tracking costs incurred on a contract, whereas commercial systems focus on tracking the standard (average) cost of a product line or service. These two methods produce very different management information. Yet the CAS method is a prerequisite for being able to bill on many government contracts, whereas the commercial method is critical if a company needs to understand product costs and their drivers.
In addition, the CAS method is very expensive to administer because of the need to constantly reconcile between “forward pricing” commitments and actual expenditures along the way. We have seen an administrative cost difference of 25 to 35 percent between CAS and commercial accounting approaches.1 (This is one reason that new entrants to the A&D industry have dramatically lower cost structures and thus are able to offer dramatically lower prices.) Therefore, CAS methods are typically only employed in cases where the customer is willing to pay for the administrative cost of complying.
Often, the incompatibility between CAS and commercial accounting methods comes to a head during financial integration efforts, when leaders attempt to bring the combined company onto the same ERP architecture. In such cases, the post-merger business architecture may be largely determined by an IT implementation team. This architecture can have substantial strategic and operational consequences.
Why should the extent of similarity between an acquirer’s and a target’s business models play a large role in M&A outcomes? Those unfamiliar with M&A might think that, if each company operated effectively in its respective market before the deal, each should be able to operate effectively and maintain its performance after the deal—or, as most M&A transactions aim to do, even improve. But this doesn’t always happen. A target’s pre-deal business model may work well in its chosen market, but after a target is acquired by another company, its business model is rarely left alone. And in many cases, the acquirer’s integration efforts unintentionally change the target’s business model in ways that may sabotage the latter’s marketplace effectiveness.
One reason this can happen is that most traditional post-merger integration (PMI) programs do not specifically aim to tailor business models to fit the markets in which each business plays. At A&D companies, as in other industries, most PMI work focuses on “Day 1 readiness.” While an essential part of the process, the readiness effort often fails to follow through by making the hard choices necessary to prepare the combined entity for success. Despite talk of applying “best practices” from both sides, for instance, the acquiring company’s compliance position (or that of the party with the most stringent compliance requirements) may become the default position for all businesses in its portfolio—even for units with less-stringent requirements.
On an operational level, our experience suggests that the fault often lies in the power dynamics of PMI execution. The senior executives who make portfolio choices (sometimes with the help of consultants and bankers) usually delegate the job of designing and implementing the combined entity’s business model(s) and infrastructure to those at lower organizational levels. This is where things typically go wrong. While presumably well-intentioned, the people in charge of implementation may:
In cases where both companies serve similar markets, the acquirer’s business model’s “pull” upon the target’s may not prove very harmful. But if the markets are very different, the acquirer’s influence on the target’s business model—whether deliberate or unintentional—may change some of the very elements that helped the target succeed in its chosen market, with consequences that can range from mild to devastating.
Services are considered an attractive growth area in A&D, with the opportunities mostly seen in the two areas of mission services and sustainment. Many OEMs are investing in services with the hope of capitalizing on untapped platform and systems intellectual property, selling their products as services (for example, through “power by the hour” contracts), and/or taking advantage of special capabilities that they have developed and that may be underleveraged.
However, aligning business models appropriately is just as important in selling services as in selling products. Selling mission or sustainment services on a “value” basis requires a fundamentally different business model than the kind of time and materials contract that most defense contractors are used to. Because of this, it is nearly impossible for an OEM platform design production company to profitably compete on many portions of the sustainment value chain (such as aftermarket support, competitive MRO, or distribution) using the same business model that they used to design and produce the platform.
Recent marketplace activity suggests that some OEMs, realizing the difficulty of competing in services with a product-focused business model, are starting to take a new approach. Specifically, these companies are launching new functions (and in some cases, organizations) to accommodate mission services and sustainment, setting them up with business processes and cost structures that are outside of the core OEM framework.
To what extent does a correlation between business model compatibility and M&A outcomes actually exist, independently of the aforementioned reasoning and our anecdotal observations? To find out, we examined 228 M&A deals in the A&D industry over the past 10-plus years (2007 through March 2017). These 228 deals represented all industry M&A transactions in this timeframe where:
We classified these deals into five categories according to our evaluation of the acquirer’s “strategic intent” (figure 3).3 These categories were specifically designed to represent a range of degrees of business model compatibility.
We evaluated each deal’s “success” based on a combination of growth in revenue, margin, and market share in the acquired company’s business base pre- and post-merger. Finally, as shown in figure 5, we compared success rates across deal types.
As expected, acquisition success rates among the 228 deals analyzed were highly related to strategic intent—which, in our classification, indicates the extent to which the acquirer’s and target’s business models were compatible pre-deal. Other factors (e.g., lawsuits, oil prices, defense budgets) also had an impact, but no other factor showed as strong a relationship with deal success as business model compatibility.
This analysis shows that business model compatibility—or at least the recognition that business models need to be considered—is a major factor in whether or not a combination is successful. The more compatible the business models of the two companies, the higher the success rate. Conversely, the greater the gap between the business models, the lower the success rate. For example, diversification through acquisition is inherently difficult, as many of these deals by nature involve buying a company with a fundamentally different business model. Proprietary rollups and core scaling deals, on the other hand, are usually made specifically to capitalize on high business model compatibility, and they are almost always successful. In the middle of the spectrum, value chain extensions, which seek to move the acquirer into new roles in its value chain, display mixed success. When a company is alert to the business model differences and supports the new value chain position with the proper metrics and governance, these deals tend to go well. However, the assumption that one business model (and one type of manager) will work for a broad range of the value chain is usually a bad one that can potentially destroy value.
International sales are one area where US A&D companies may stumble due to business model incompatibility. Most US defense companies are well versed in “foreign military sales” (FMS), which are effectively sales to the US government under slightly different terms and conditions. But while FMS is a natural extension of what OEMs regularly do, direct commercial sales (DCS), where an OEM sells directly to a foreign military customer, have proved problematic for many. One reason for the difficulty is that DCS, because it involves “commercial-like” transactions, exposes the seller to risks that are not of significant concern for US government suppliers (such as political context, contractual terms, operational disruption, offsets, payments, and so on). That said, both FMS and DCS can be extremely productive growth areas, as long as an OEM clearly understands the differences between them and the different business models required to engage effectively in each.
To help manage the risks posed by business model incompatibility, A&D companies seeking to grow and diversify should consider the following steps:
To reiterate: We are not suggesting that A&D companies should always avoid acquiring businesses with different business models from the core organizations. Successful A&D companies work to optimize the market segment/business model equation on an ongoing basis, and this is especially critical when placing bets on M&A deals. The path to business model equilibrium lies in understanding what business models are needed to effectively serve the markets in which one chooses to compete—and then deliberately designing each business model to fit its market. Those who do not take these important steps potentially risk destroying value in their inorganic growth pursuits.