M&A Science
How Experienced Buyers Actually Make M&A Work with Carlos Cesta
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Carlos Cesta, Partner at Makanta Services
"Inexperienced teams design structures to win negotiations. Experienced teams design structures to make the business work after the deal closes."
Carlos Cesta has worked on about 125 deals across Verizon, Dentsu, Presidio, and NP Digital. Here he lays out the deal spiral: deal structure, diligence findings, and integration strategy, three spokes you keep revisiting as you learn more. A forecast you don't trust becomes an earn-out, and that earn-out changes how fast you can integrate.
He also explains reverse diligence. Put the real post-close changes on the table before you close, like system migrations and org chart changes, and watch how the seller reacts. Plus his 70/30 earn-out starting point, and why he renegotiates early when targets will miss.
Carlos's six-month postmortems with sellers kept landing on one point: they wanted to see the integration plan. So his teams started running integration workstreams in parallel with diligence. DealRoom Integration is built for that. Integration planning starts during diligence, and each finding carries an owner and links to the integration task that resolves it. See how it works: click here.