Company Merger or Acquisition: Time to Move
Moving a company from one city to another is a major challenge. There is not only the inconvenience of moving an office to deal with, but also the problems that come with relocating people from place to place. In most cases some employees will move with the company and some won’t, and many businesses consider it unreasonable to ask individual members of staff to meet their own costs. In addition to covering the expenses associated with their own move, they also pick up the bill for their employee’s long distance movers.
The HR issues that surround mergers and acquisitions are difficult at the best of times, but moving cross-country introduces even more challenges. The staff that choose not to make the move will inevitably be lost, and of course, there may be a financial consequence there too. There is no doubt that shifting an entire company between cities is a difficult, expensive, and protracted process.
However, it can be done and there are plenty of companies out there who have successfully relocated. Mergers and acquisitions happen every day and a corporate move is often one of the results. Take one of the biggest mergers in US corporate history. Exxon and Mobil signed the $74 billion agreement to merge in 1998, but the process of moving assets, selling some, and buying others didn’t settle down for another two years. They divested themselves of no less than 340 individual stations, but as ExxonMobil is now one of the largest and more powerful publicly traded companies in the world, they would probably regard the difficulties as worthwhile.
More recently, the Oshkosh Corporation made the decision to bring all their subsidiary companies to Florida. Oshkosh Speciality Vehicles and Frontline Communications are due to merge, and the resulting business concern will work out of Frontline’s existing location in Clearwater. They also plan to merge MedTec Ambulances and Pierce Manufacturing and by moving their resources to Bradenton, also in Florida. In the midst of all this moving around about 200 new jobs should be created.
Even sports teams merge and get acquired. The Houston Oilers have become the Tennessee Titans, for example. They’re now based in Nashville rather than Houston, but like the ExxonMobil merger, it wasn’t a quick process. The team that are today known as the Titans quit the Houston Astrodome in 1997, played one season in a temporary home at Memphis’ Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium before moving on to Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville. Along the way they changed name from Houston Oilers to Tennessee Oilers to Tennessee Titans- it was a confusing couple of years for football fans.
They may not get the big publicity but smaller companies merge frequently. Take Algas and Sam Dick Industries (makers of fuel delivery systems and other gas-related products). They had to move an office to do it, shifting Algas resources and employees from Seattle, WA, to Dallas, TX. Unlike the ExxonMobil merger and the Oilers/Titans move, Algas-SDI came into being fairly quickly.
The smaller the company, the less complex the merger and relocation will be, so if your company is facing a merger or an acquisition, don’t despair. While the most famous examples might be complicated it is possible to relocate a business following merger or acquisition without endless difficulties. Many companies get through the process smoothly and swiftly.
