A Conversation With Kison Patel of M&A Science

Talking with someone who really understands an industry is always a pleasure. You may not think of company acquisitions and company mergers as an industry, but Kison Patel does — in fact, to him it's a science. It's a fascinating notion! Kison shared many of the lessons he's learned from countless M&A events — not all of them successful. Among these — human issues, emotions, and culture are (it turns out) pivotal. M&A is not just a spreadsheet undertaking. Kison's books on M&A distill all of this for further reading. Of course, with the value of email as a company asset, email marketing and email lists are a part of the fun.

[00:00:00]

[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: This is Dr. Matthew Dunn hosted the future of email marketing. My guest today is Kisano Patel of DealRoom and M&A Science Kison apologies for being late, but welcome to the show.

[00:00:21] Kison Patel: Thanks for

[00:00:21] Matthew Dunn: having me. Yeah, I was, I was envying his mic set up if you're listening to this and you notice to be sounds fantastic.

[00:00:28] I was in being his, uh, his mic set up. You, you, uh, you're a frequent. Guest on podcasts. Do you run one of your own

[00:00:35] Kison Patel: as well? I do. I have two podcasts that I host one about mergers and acquisitions. And they're about the leadership about leadership?

[00:00:43] Matthew Dunn: Both, both, uh, both are topics that, uh, I was hoping we could, uh, learn a bit from you about, uh, give people a Highline about your, your company's plural.

[00:00:58] Kison Patel: I'd say M&A Sciencee is where everything fits under a compromise of several business lines that fall into either education or technology. Um, our business originally started with a product called DealRoom where it's a project management product for managing mergers and acquisitions started with this focus on the due diligence part of M and a.

[00:01:20] When you go look to buy a company and you need. Get in there and check all this information. Make sure what's represented is accurate. Identify the risks, be able to start planning for what you're going to do after you buy the company. And that was all typically done in Excel, highly inefficient people would use these virtual data rooms in conjunction with those Excel trackers.

[00:01:44] We brought it all together, made it a lot more efficient that produce better results. Uh, and then as we evolved, we started managing more of the integration, excuse me, the post-close activities, and then the pipeline. So it really become a full life cycle management solution. And probably about five years ago, a friend of mine marketing came to me one day and said, Hey man, why don't you do a podcast?

[00:02:08] And I was like, what the hell is a podcast? And he's like, don't worry about it. It's going to be next big thing. You just got to do it. So at the time too, I was really. Contemplating this bigger problem I noticed in the industry where the industry itself was very siloed and lacked best practices. Every time we worked with a new client, they had such a unique way of looking at M and a and how to approach it.

[00:02:32] I thought why isn't 30 standardization on any of this stuff? Why where's the evidence on how we're supposed to do M and a. And so Mary, the idea of using a podcast as a platform to interview practitioners and learn from their lessons, learn from their experience. And in turn, identify some of the patterns, identify the trends, what are the proven techniques and the industry that actually work.

[00:02:58] And over time we started documenting it. We started building our own frameworks around it, uh, built, uh, published a couple of books, tons of blogs, eBooks. We run summits every quarter where we have practitioners teach all these best practices. And today we operate an online school and an academy. So others can, can learn, uh, and make that education more accessible.

[00:03:21] Now it's a virtuous cycle because we'll take a lot of these best practices, then build software products or solutions around it. Hence the combination of education and technology that go hand in hand, particularly an industry that's as antiquated ours. Yeah.

[00:03:36] Matthew Dunn: And by industry, you're talking about M and a as an industry.

[00:03:41] That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. And wow. The notion of the notion of trying to find a or derive the, the, the science and, and the, the what works in the patterns. That's, that's a heck of a lift like, wow.

[00:03:54] Kison Patel: Oh, w what makes it unique is that it's not like a lot of, when you think of finance technology, we always think.

[00:04:01] A lot of quantitative data that we're analyzing a bunch of data and patterns and things are finding ways to optimize with technology tools, M and a is not like that at all. We're doing, I mean, we're talking about the largest transactions in the world, but they're ultimately driven by people working together and the problems you encounter on those transactions are people, transactions, people not being able to work together.

[00:04:25] They're budding heads, cultural differences, things of that. Uh, and that's where it requires doing these qualitative interviews, where you talk to practitioners and understand more about this and those specific, those kinds of challenges. And how do you overcome? Cause you do large transaction. The result of doing that transaction leads to a large magnitude of change management.

[00:04:52] And in fact, the largest magnitude change management that organization's going to go through. Once you acquire the business, you need. Do several things to capture the value in 10, which oftentimes involves integrating that company into your business, which you're essentially peeling the business back layer by layer and reattach it to your parent organization.

[00:05:14] And that's the hardest it's again, against people, all people related challenges in getting them aligned, focused on priorities and working together.

[00:05:20] Matthew Dunn: Th th the, for lack of a better word convention. Wisdom about acquisitions is that there is frequently unsuccessful in the long run as, as successful. And it sounds like you've made some real strides in, in, in helping reverse that conventional.

[00:05:37] Kison Patel: That's what's trending. We've seen a big shift from a finance focus in M and a to a people focus more. We continue that track. We can change some of those, those, um, uh, those metrics that we've had in the past. Great

[00:05:51] Matthew Dunn: coincidence. The, the, uh, the agenda I had on for a conversation yesterday, friend of mine, Elliott Ross from, uh, dialed in from London.

[00:06:00] And he is on the backside of. Acquired his company taxi for email, um, uh, not super big, but wonderful in their niche got acquired and their acquire got acquired like literally a month later. So he's living in this, uh, he's living in this nested Russian doll of, of company structures and grappling with, I'm not an entrepreneur running my relatively small SAS.

[00:06:29] I'm now part of a good size organization based in Amsterdam. W through the company in the U S that acquired us and he had some, he had some great insights. Uh, you know, it's some of it's good, some of it's bad, but it's the people issues. Um, and the culture issues, which are people issues that, that he was, uh, focusing on.

[00:06:47] As we talked about that, how do you get a handle on culture and people issues in a science way?

[00:06:56] Kison Patel: Um, some of the stuff. Bringing about these conversations really early in trying to get alignment. So thinking of what the end state you're looking to achieve from doing the acquisition and what that's going to look like, bringing that to the very front end of the deal process so that you can gather executives from both sides to align and identify.

[00:07:21] What it's going to take to get there and achieve it, uh, outlined that go to market because ultimately each organization, respectively is there to serve their customers as best they can. Sure, sure. I mean together, what is that going to look like? How are we going to do that? What's that going to look like for the customer?

[00:07:37] So that that's the objective component. When we look at each organizations respected cultures. Yeah. It starts with the values. And I think if each executive CEO. Bring that to the discussion where we can talk about our organization values and talking about detail. Sometimes we use some pretty vague terms when we describe our values, but if we can expand on them, that leads to a better understanding of culture and leadership approaches, where we can identify with each other.

[00:08:10] What's uniquely different, where we have some commonalities where we may have some stark differences. Could create some friction and may even warrant for us not to even pursue the deal because of that.

[00:08:23] Matthew Dunn: I'm gonna ask you about that. Do you end up saying, you know, based on the science, this is probably not good.

[00:08:30] Kison Patel: I say the more of the seasoned executives can realize that, especially if you bring in your HR folks early in the process, um, w w what's key, when we look at today's businesses, it's all about the people we're not buying factories and things that hard assets anymore, right. We're buying these hot technology companies that we want are looking to acquire some unique capability that we can bring about, uh, an extract value from.

[00:08:59] There are some pretty sophisticated, intelligent folks behind that unique technology. And it's their way of working that ultimately you're acquiring and you need to be able to preserve that. So the people's extremely important and the more you can put considerations, having an understanding of their culture, of the people, what drives them?

[00:09:17] What incentivizes them, how are you going to retain them? Those things are really important and to get understanding of earlier, the better that's a,

[00:09:26] Matthew Dunn: that's incredibly refreshing. To hear, I have to say because, uh, most of my, uh, most of my, uh, decades of work have been around software in some way, shape or form software, large complex systems.

[00:09:40] And it's not a mature, it's not a mature field, right? If you're, if you're acquiring a company with a software prolapsed, former service, it's not all perfectly bolted together, documented to the aunt's degree, best practices, the people who've got. Are going to be invaluable in making it actually be part of another organization.

[00:10:01] And if they go away, it's probably going to fall on its butt

[00:10:05] Kison Patel: time. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:08] Matthew Dunn: And so we're, we're, we're back to the we're back to, or maybe more, more about the Emma dynamics is what you're saying now than, uh, the sort of mechanical and financial, uh, uh, vectors in that, that job of merging companies. Huh?

[00:10:26] Yeah. And, and how, how did you get here? Like how did you end up in this field?

[00:10:34] Kison Patel: I started probably when I was like 10 years old, my dad would complain. He's like this. Kid's, uh, always talking about big numbers. He's talking about everything in millions and billions. I used to draw at these fancy cars and put lasers and rocket boosters on them and put a price tag.

[00:10:49] Here's this $10 million car and whatnot. He thought something was wrong with me. And then. I don't know. I guess I, when I do a one of these big interviews or we close a big deal with a large corporation, I always go back. I, you know, I think last year we had a $2.6 billion deal done on our software platform and an 11 billion, $11 billion deal done with a fortune 500 company.

[00:11:13] So they called dad up and said, Hey dad, we're in the billions. You know, so there was that interest. I actually, uh, started by failing out of under. I that having that short attention span got to me, I struggled with these lecture-based classes failed at undergrad. Find my way into real estate career, or I wasn't successful at it.

[00:11:34] I couldn't connect with the real estate sale as it was more of an emotional sale. And I was always interested in business and I was fortunate enough to find a gentleman, the only person in our company that was actually selling commercial real. And we're talking to him. I got enough inspiration to find a role in his little boutique MNA advisory practice with a couple of guys that were just starting out.

[00:11:57] And it was, they, they gave me a shot. I got my feet grounded there. I loved looking at numbers. I like taking PNLs and building a story on where the opportunity is in those businesses, helping folks understand the numbers better and then ended up selling a few small businesses the first year. Uh, didn't feel compelled to stay with the firm because I didn't believe they had a concrete strategy in place when it started my own practice at an early age.

[00:12:24] I think it was about 22 years old, started consulting and selling. I think I was just selling gas stations in the early beginning. Cause I knew they had a real estate asset attached to it as moving me up from a few hundred thousand dollar businesses to the one to three. Then he got into hospitality. I did that started private businesses, went up to corporate, extended stay, Kimpton, extended stay America, uh, Lakita.

[00:12:46] And then I ended up working with small financial institutions, capital raise, buy side, sell side, and we're talking like community banks. Uh, and then, uh, the recession happened and that was where I was really interested in the tech space. Cause I was getting burnt out. I feel like I hit this glass ceiling or any boutique.

[00:13:04] Every time I got at bat with the large hundred million dollar deal. I always lost it. I thought this is not fun. He'd always lose it to a brand name firm. So I got involved, um, with this tech startup that led me to see how the industry worked and got intrigued by the way those software engineers were using project management tools to manage billing software.

[00:13:26] And that's what led to the inspiration for starting DealRoom in 2000.

[00:13:31] Matthew Dunn: Wow. Okay. Wow. You really, you really came into that. You, you came into it from, from the field itself and, and, and now you're systematizing it, which is a, that's probably a better way to do it, right? Because you've really got an understanding how the, how the, uh, the dynamics of M and a, the people dynamics, the financial dynamics function.

[00:13:52] So automated. Streamlining yet systematizing it, science sizing. It, um, is, is legitimately grounded in experience. You're not just looking from outside saying, I think we can make a platform for this.

[00:14:05] Kison Patel: It's fun. It's what we can do. We can get better and better at it and we can apply it at scale.

[00:14:12] Matthew Dunn: Nice. Nice, fascinating.

[00:14:14] Um, I've read a few. Books over the years on, on, on culture, business, culture, company culture, and the, the challenges of that and the role that, the important role that plays in it's been fascinating. Watch culture become not just a, not just a fuzzy, fuzzy background word, but, but really a pivotal thing that people recognize about success and failure.

[00:14:39] You know, some companies are very good at acquisition and they've got the culture stuff dialed in others that. It seemed to flop at it. And I think in part, because, because they ignore that, have you run into companies that are like, that you really like working with, like when they're involved in an M and a deal, you know, the long-term successes.

[00:15:01] Kison Patel: Uh, it's almost like we're at a point where we choose our clients based on our compatibility with their culture. Good for you. When, when we, when we feel aligned, we, we, we kind of, there's things that we even look up to them. Like we're modeling, we're learning from them. We're inspired by them. Yeah. Uh, I mean, I think we had one, we usually do like a pitch deck to accompany and we always have our little tagline.

[00:15:22] Yeah. Well, we pitched a company where like, their tagline is better than ours. So we changed our tagline for that presentation, told them that it's like, look, we're doing this because you're, you know, we changed it because yours is better and we want to use yours because we identify with it. Um, and so I, I liked that when you can actually really work with an organization that you can identify with, and I think early days you gotta do what you gotta do.

[00:15:46] You're going to work and try to get any account you can. And that's a part of the. Well, but once you get to that point, you really find where you created your capabilities of building value. Uh, then you can be more selective about those companies you work with. Yeah. Even thinking about that, Ben, when you align around that, then, you know, there's common beliefs, especially for us, like we're big about agile and organizations that strives, maybe they may be traditional, but they're actively striving to move to more of an agile based approach that works really well.

[00:16:18] We were able to help them there. Uh, you know, they may have some components of it. No, we understand that maybe they're, uh, at a certain point where they're getting a level of success for deals, but at least we know we're part of that journey to help them improve. Um, and I think there, there's definitely a big learning curve in doing M and a, like the first couple of deals.

[00:16:37] You're probably going to screw some major things up. Uh, but you know, so the maturity, I think is a big factor. I think coupling that with, have they really evolved when we. Being a change oriented. Do they have that culture of continuous improvement? Are they at being adaptive? Are they trying new things?

[00:16:56] There's organizations that may have been very mature. They've been around really brand big brand names you've heard of, but they've done the same thing that they did 20 years ago. And that's for us, it's like a, a tough, tough one, especially when we know that change is going to be extremely difficult, uh, when they don't have that, that buy-in across the organization to, to make those.

[00:17:18] Yeah,

[00:17:19] Matthew Dunn: and it's becoming, I think it's harder and harder to do the same thing for 20 years, right? Uh, the pace of the pace of change being what it is.

[00:17:28] Kison Patel: And I got to change their hearts. It gets really hard to be optimistic about the results

[00:17:33] Matthew Dunn: that's, uh, yeah, that, that, that that's gotta be a pit of the stomach sensation when you can observe that and say, man, I don't know if that's gonna work.

[00:17:43] Uh, I hate to see that. Um, I'm curious if I'm curious about something. It's a bit of a meta question, but marketing of your own company, is it mostly word of mouth inside the world of M and a at this point based on your success?

[00:18:00] Kison Patel: You know, I, I always thought word of mouth. I thought we had some virtual vitality built into our product because if we host an M and a.

[00:18:10] There's going to be a hundred couple of, you know, two, a couple of hundred people involved, right. I'm selling my company and I got bankers in their consultants, in their lawyers in there, the other party in there. And I always thought, oh, well, if they get the exposure to the product, they're going to want to use it for one of the other deals that did not happen did not happen the way I thought.

[00:18:30] Wow. Um, you know, that word of mouth that did not happen the way. I we see it now, you know, we're talking 10 years in the business. Five first years were very stagnant. It took a lot. Our industry is very conservative. Uh, so it takes a while to really build trust and the traction and really builds security properly.

[00:18:50] There's a lot of things that go into that. So the first five years is a big R and D period, the last five years when we started building traction. Um, but he, we started seeing the last couple of years. We're now we're starting to see that. So it really took a long time. You have to have a level of some market penetration before that, that starts coming in play.

[00:19:10] Um, most of our business we generate, we do generate a lot of inbound business, but it's coming because this podcast that we started five years ago has truly evolved into. Immediate business of its own. I mean, we have over 350 published blogs, eBooks. A lot of, it's just the art of there by, well, I guess you would say our best science of the way you repurpose your content from a podcast.

[00:19:35] Yeah, we transcribe it. Yep. We've been able to do a lot of creative things with it, pull out, highlights, things of that sort of, um, you know, uh, but we published the book and I always look at the book, like maybe there's a hundred people in the world that read this book. Uh, but there's probably about a hundred thousand people I know about it.

[00:19:51] For the longest time, we were just take snippets of it, posted on LinkedIn and get a whole discussion thread going off of that. Or we kept doing that over and over for a full year. And if you've added up all those views, I mean, we've accumulated so many different engagements, views, comments, likes, and so forth.

[00:20:09] Uh, so it's, you know, the, the way you have a content strategy built, built out to your overall marketing. I think that that's what really drove a lot of the awareness and interest into our various.

[00:20:21] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, everyone's, everyone's a publisher, right? I mean, in a, in a, in a fundamental sense, now everyone's a publisher and, and, and I would bet there's also been, they've also been like speaking in public exposure opportunities on the back of the book from people who haven't necessarily read it.

[00:20:40] Kison Patel: The republishing a book is good. It gives you a lot of credibility. We published it early twenties. Okay. We published this book and, you know, COVID lockdown happened shortly after. Uh, but you know, coming out of it, I remember a second half a year, I got invitations to go speak at a lot of large companies.

[00:20:59] IBM's the 3m Ciscos. And, uh, so it's, it's nice. It, it does give you credibility a lot. Like it's you speaking engagements. There's not a lot of conferences going on, but it does make it a lot easier to apply and get submitted for. Uh, speaking at various events, but then we have organizations reach out and saying, Hey, we need help with this problem.

[00:21:21] And you've wrote a book about this problem,

[00:21:25] Matthew Dunn: right? Yeah. I think I, I've got, I've got a book about writing a book, uh, Dan Kennedy, um, in a coauthor, I believe have ever, you know, like, look, you really need to do this. And the speaking side of it kind of amuses me because I I've seen any number of people who will take what they wrote in an entire book.

[00:21:44] And, and basically try and do it in a half an hour to an hour for the people who wouldn't sit down and read the book, you know, like, let me give you the highlights since it didn't, you probably didn't sit down and flip the pages and read the thing and then lather, rinse, repeat, do that over, uh, over and over.

[00:22:00] Well, that's fascinating that to hear a content strategy play out so coherently and, and particularly to hear that podcasts. Has played an integral role in that? Not everybody jumped on that bandwagon as early as you did. I think

[00:22:16] Kison Patel: we're fortunate in our industry. I think there was only about five podcasts about M and a when we started now there's over 50 and we're ranked right at the top.

[00:22:25] Matthew Dunn: Are you nice? Nice. Well, I mean, that's not just because you started early, it's obviously a quality thing, um, as well. Cause I suspect you, you wouldn't be at the top if you weren't doing a great job at it, but. I talked with a gent the other day, who runs a podcast for the new home building industry. And he had much the same, much the same impact for his business.

[00:22:50] He's like people know me because we've been doing this for a long time and they, you know, they're starting to come to us and they know who I am when I, you know, when I reach out to them and so on. So is it getting saturated? The podcast.

[00:23:05] Kison Patel: I it's tough starting a podcast. Now I started a personal podcast earlier.

[00:23:11] Well, my middle of last year, and it's a, it's a passion project for me. I have three young children and I'm interested in exposing them to leadership lessons early. Uh, and I thought, well, if I'm doing it for my kids, why not just record the content and share it with others. But then also with my daughter, I always preach my principal.

[00:23:33] I thought, you know, dad, doesn't maybe he doesn't know all this stuff. Why don't we make a point to go interview other people and you can learn from them. But now it's, it's been fun. It's been a little series. I do. She's got a little jewelry business. We're starting to get speakers about from the industry and I'm teaching her how to network and do all these other little fun things that, uh,

[00:23:51] Matthew Dunn: yeah.

[00:23:52] Future entrepreneur, uh, in the making there, it sounds like.

[00:23:57] Kison Patel: Yeah, she's uh, she's doing good. Start with the little lemonade stand. I think when she was six years old, there you go. At first, I wasn't, I wasn't into it. I just said, you know, I don't know. I know. And then I thought about, I was like, you know, this is actually an opportunity to teach you a lot of the principles.

[00:24:15] Sorry, honey. I don't know if you've chose the right dad to do this lemonade stand with, but we're not taking any shortcuts. Right? We're going to Costco. We're getting real. Right. It gets, you started hand squeezing on then like our after awhile I realized like we were located, uh, relatively close to Wrigley field in Chicago.

[00:24:33] So she sells lemonade on a game day. I mean, she's making a couple hundred bucks.

[00:24:37] Matthew Dunn: That's

[00:24:37] Kison Patel: awesome. Next thing you know, I got commercial juicer there got her brothers is like little contract employees running back and forth to get 11 days.

[00:24:47] Matthew Dunn: That's wonderful. And I mean, eliminates the answer. It's a cliche, but that's a full business.

[00:24:52] You got supply supply chain issues, you know, finance, like. It's a complete little micro business.

[00:24:59] Kison Patel: You know what trips me, I was, how many people knew about that lemonade stand. I would go meet people through business networking, and I would mention it like, wait a minute. Hi, Paul lemonade from there. Uh, or even I met the police officer at one time and he was like, I fought lemonade from

[00:25:12] Matthew Dunn: there.

[00:25:13] And that's wonderful. That is really great. So funny, she'll be telling that story, the rest of her life to

[00:25:20] Kison Patel: hopefully she remembers, but she had a little kind of like a bar cart. We turned into the lemonade stand. Big giant rainbow colored umbrella. That was it. It said

[00:25:30] Matthew Dunn: disability and, and, and, and the, uh, it's, it's the cliche.

[00:25:35] I forget the book. I think at the a hundred million dollar deal that I read recently, it's like, look, sell, sell to a thirsty crowd. Um, that's principle, number one, whatever you're selling. If you've got a thirsty. It's a lot easier. And she's got a thirsty crowd, especially on

[00:25:49] Kison Patel: game day. She came to me after COVID happened and she's like, dad, dad, what am I going to do?

[00:25:54] Like, I can't do the lemonade stand. They cancel the games and, and whatnot. And I said, honey, you gotta do just like the rest of the world. You got to refocus on your digital distribution model. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so today she, uh, has her own brand. And she sells handmade jewelry online. Wow. She, she, she, she took a tick on it.

[00:26:15] Um, I don't get much of her time now when I ask her for help, because she used to record commercials from my podcast. There's no time

[00:26:22] Matthew Dunn: for me. She's busy. I was going to say, but my, my, my mental note is here. I think I'm going to have to get in touch with Keystone and say, can I get your daughter on as a guest?

[00:26:31] It sounds fascinating. And. You know, probably more adept at social media than folks of our generation.

[00:26:41] Kison Patel: Yeah. She's working on it. She's got tick-tock, she's definitely getting the views and likes, but now we're, we're talking about conversion. Um, but she's very much she's at 11. So she's got the, starting to hit the teenage where you don't need to tell me what to do.

[00:26:55] I got. Uh, so I don't know. She'll figure it out.

[00:26:58] Matthew Dunn: I'll be, you'll have to drop me, drop me a note, like tell her you were on a podcast about email marketing and see if she rolls her eyes because, um, the younger, they are, the more they go, uh, email, and then there's a certain threshold where they start realizing, oh, you can keep control of that.

[00:27:15] That's a direct relationship. That's actually invaluable.

[00:27:19] Kison Patel: Um, I think she's getting a little bit of it because her is on Shopify. And Shopify will have your sort of recovery campaigns that they built up pretty much out of the box. Yep. Um, so I think that's probably the next thing, you know, email marketing is an interesting one to chat about too, because I feel like we, we, we had an interesting experience with it where I got, you know, what my early consulting practice is, what made it was.

[00:27:48] We were so early. I mean, we, I started back in 2003. So, you know, I mean, back then you were doing facts. I don't know if you remember the fax email, you didn't get a program to like mass fax people. That's how we were doing. So I ran a newsletter through fax that, and then I remember migrating it to. And bad back then everybody checked.

[00:28:10] Everybody checked email, everybody's like a 70 plus percent open rate. I don't think the first email tools you could actually track, they didn't even have tracking on it. But you knew you just had a high, high open rate on those things. Yeah. Um, that was a consult starting this tech company. I knew email was going to be important.

[00:28:27] I wanted to do a newsletter and started doing that. Um, but you know, it wasn't like the kosher thing. Like today, I, it blows my mind how many times I have to hit unsubscribe every time I check my inbox, at least six to 10 times a day, I'm hitting unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.

[00:28:46] Matthew Dunn: Do you scan by who it's from and then delete without reading as well?

[00:28:51] Kison Patel: Yeah, absolutely. It just, whatever it is. I don't know. Unsubscribe delete. If I can't, I hate the worst is when it's like reply to me to opt out and it's like, you're getting the. And then span done. Um, so in that now I kind of learned like, you, you really gotta be organic about it. Cause even that first list, we were sort of just throwing people in there doing that, you know, they bought 10 years ago and we got away with it.

[00:29:17] I think back then we got our brand out there, but we really didn't have a car. Uh, distinction on what we actually did. Yeah. So it, you know, it ended up being a big overhead. We're doing all these interviews adjacent with it and stuff, and I ended up stopped doing it, but now we rebuilt it and did it in a very organic way.

[00:29:40] Um, now it becomes like a really, once you do organic, it's just so much valuable. Like it's so now realizing it from actually doing it. We, I think we peaked out at 38,000 subscribers. But now I run a newsletter with 3000 and it's way more powerful and more

[00:29:54] Matthew Dunn: powerful because they're really interested in what you have to say.

[00:29:57] Kison Patel: Oh yeah, you, you could send like a call to action for something specific and then boom, you get a significant, like higher than what we had from you in 38,000 people that are actually responding to it. In fact, when people sign up, we get information quite a bit of information to really understand what they're looking to get out of that newsletter and that, and that helps to.

[00:30:16] I think the thing we learned is, you know, don't look at it as lead gen. Like I got this person and they send their information. I'm going to call them right away. If you have a direct call to action and it's a direct request for a call it great, fine. But somebody say I have a newsletter, don't do that. Uh, but I think when you wait a couple of months and they've, they've really understood your content, then they, they, that's probably when the time is you can actually reach out.

[00:30:36] Especially if you capture that information of, you know, what are you trying to get out of? And then you can follow up. It's like, Hey, you mentioned that you're looking to get this out of the newsletter. Are we doing that? You know, how can we get better? Let's get feedback. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about some of your challenges and you know, how can we help you with some of those things?

[00:30:55] Um, it's interesting. I'm wondering where email is going to go because I liked the resurgence. When we seen some of these millennial publications are geared towards millennials like the hustle and morning brew. Did the right thing, you know, they kind of taken it and we've seen traditional print media tried to go digital and really struggle with it.

[00:31:16] But they're like, you just got to have a good voice and you got to have concise information that people can get up to speed about what's going on in the world in a short amount of time. Uh, and that's done really well, but yeah, I'm kind of curious on your, your perception, where do you see it going?

[00:31:31] Because it's still, it is the direction. But as it's getting very noisy, it's very noisy. Um, I think that's an opportunity for an entrepreneur. Somebody could solve that. Somebody can clear my inbox from all the garbage. I would pay a couple hundred bucks at this point. I would pay maybe even up to 500 bucks a month for that, because I have somebody manually doing it.

[00:31:52] I literally,

[00:31:55] Matthew Dunn: I suspect. One of the probably job. Number one for, uh, for the virtual assistant industry has, you know, helped me sort out my inbox. Um, you know, you've got, you've got some monopoly monopoly players that are parked on the inbox piece of it. Um, Google being the really obvious one, apple being a secondary one, Yahoo as well.

[00:32:15] Um, they're trying to solve it with automation, but it's pretty much. Um, you know, I've got a couple of accounts that flow through Gmail. I watched what goes into the promotions tab versus the inbox versus elsewhere. I'm like, yeah, no, I like it. Nice try. But what matters to me isn't necessarily obvious to your AI.

[00:32:37] Okay. So I don't think, I don't think there's enough. Uh, I don't think there's enough, uh, discretion in smarts to automate that task yet.

[00:32:45] Kison Patel: Um, what about with email campaigns? Have you ever seen a tool. Ty's an email campaign with the placement ads and, you know, and I don't want to get into like the HubSpot or those kinds of automation tools because they feel like they're still really manual to do.

[00:33:01] They're like, you still gotta like, create your email thing and that's a separate thing. And then you go in there and you got work flow for putting ads up and it's separate, but something, somebody had a workflow that really tied it all together because I, I feel like that's such a powerful thing. I have some kind of a email campaign with a call to action, but then you had your re-targeting in conjunction with it.

[00:33:24] But you know, it tends to be a bit of siloed effort. Sometimes in our company, it's different people doing those things and then that real fluid continuity doesn't exist.

[00:33:35] Matthew Dunn: And one of the fundamental issues behind that, I think is that email itself as a, as an end-to-end digital chain. Has a very broken feedback mechanism.

[00:33:50] The, you know, the way, you know, whether or not an email campaign is getting engagement, are people opening this isn't actually an email mechanism. It's a web mechanism. It's a pixel being opened via HTTP. And now thanks to apple that's that's not accurate. As it used to be absent a Epson solution. We're bringing new markets.

[00:34:13] Doing that a signal noise, uh, feedback thing to refine what you send is very hard. I got an email the other day. I mentioned this to someone I got an email from litmus is a, that's a big tech company in the email space, specifically, the message from them had a big button that said, do you want to keep from hearing it, keep hearing from us essentially?

[00:34:34] And I clicked. Yes, but it was a bold move on. Their part. A lot of email marketers would make. Give you the opportunity to exit they're so desperate to hang on to those leads, you know, your 38,000 versus your 3000, you effectively called it down to the ones that really were engaged. However, you went about that 3000 is not a huge number, right?

[00:34:55] There's a lot of work you invested in getting down to those 3000. And a lot of that was not through the mechanisms of email itself. If that makes.

[00:35:05] Kison Patel: Yeah. It was really interesting.

[00:35:06] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It's a daunting lift. Um, man, Keyshawn I'm bummed. I hack actually got, somehow I got scheduled with another conversation in three minutes, so I have to wrap up hours.

[00:35:17] Um, but it's been a pleasure learning about the M and a world from you. Like I'd like, wow, I'm really impressed.

[00:35:25] Kison Patel: Hey, it's my pleasure. Happy to have the conversation. If

[00:35:28] Matthew Dunn: someone's listening, where do they, what's the best way for them to, to hunt down you are the company.

[00:35:33] Kison Patel: Interested in learning anything about M and a, they can visit M a science.com.

[00:35:38] We have tons of blogs, eBooks podcasts, all related to M and a just big advocates of getting exposure to the industry. There's tons of careers in M and a that are definitely more accessible than people think they are. You don't have to go to Ivy league school and get an MBA, a book by the way, agile.

[00:35:58] Matthew Dunn: Okay, got it.

[00:35:59] Got it. I'll have to, I'm going to have to put that in my, put that in my reading list and then maybe pick your brain afterwards. Thanks so much for making the time today. Hey, my

[00:36:08] Kison Patel: pleasure. Thanks for having

[00:36:09] Matthew Dunn: me back. All right. My guest has been Keshaun Patel of M&A Science and DealRoom. Thank you, sir.

[00:36:18]