Preserving company culture after M&A: A CEO's guide
- May 13
- 5 min read
Acquisitions can put employees on edge and dilute the culture you've created. Learn how to ease minds and preserve your values from a founder who's been there.
If you're a Founder or CEO in the process of selling your company, or just thinking about your future exit strategy, you'll need to be intentional about preserving the company values that made it successful in the first place.
Company culture isn't just what's in your mission statement or posted on the wall; it's how your employees would describe their work life when you're not in the room. It's in lunchtime conversations and private Slack messages and work-from-home habits.
A positive culture with team cohesion and high employee engagement requires active maintenance, and a merger or acquisition can seriously threaten it if you're not careful.
Independent ad agency Exverus was built by 3 founders on the values of radical candor, work-life balance, passion, and service. So when we sold to Brainlabs (a much larger, but still independent agency); aligning company values was top priority.
Exverus Cofounder and Managing Partner Talia Arnold joined the AdvertisingWeek Agency Alchemy Podcast to discuss how we've maintained our people-first, flexible yet high-quality work culture post-acquisition.
Q&A about company culture
Let's go back to the origins of Exverus. What defined the culture and operating philosophy?
Well, the name Exverus is Latin for 'from the truth', and being founded by three partners who all came from larger agencies, we had a deep feeling that things could be done more directly, more straightforward without hiding.
This was back in the days before transparency was a major catchphrase in the advertising world. And the idea of starting an advertising agency all around the truth, at that time, was very novel. So, that has always been our foundational value: telling the truth in the work we do for clients, how we charge them, whether or not their results are good or bad or ugly, and how we all relate to each other.
We also have this big belief in radical candor, which is something that has not been written or talked about enough. How do you walk that line of telling the truth, even when it's uncomfortable, even when people don't want to hear it, while still being respectful and solution-oriented? That has always been our goal.
Acquisitions can often dilute what made an agency special to begin with. What specifically made Brainlabs feel like the right partner for that, vs. any other growth opportunity for the sake of growth?
It's something that any company that is thinking about selling will really have to search their souls to evaluate, because it depends on the reason you want to sell. A big part of the reason we wanted to sell was because we felt we were constrained by our ability to grow.
We wanted to keep doing what we were doing, what we still believed in, but within a larger support system. And so, when we met Brainlabs, it was very much complementary services:
They are very strong on performance, data, tech. They had developed a lot of their own proprietary tech, which we were desperate to take advantage of; and at the same time, we wanted to maintain our culture, our client relationships, the trust we built, our strategic value.
We're really a strategy-based agency, so being able to combine the strategic thinking with acting on many areas of our clients' business with data, technology, creative services, and so on -- it gave us the confidence that the partnership would be very symbiotic.
You've emphasized commitment to people, and the culture, and the service. How do those values actually show up in the day-to-day, and how do you protect them at scale?
When you start a company with three people and see it grow one by one, you see how literally every individual employee transforms a company.
And the way that plays out day to day is, we're very ownership-based, meaning employees feel a sense of ownership over their projects. They can come up with new revenue opportunities, new ideas, new solutions; and there's a lot of freedom to do that - there's not a lot of red tape or bureaucracy, still.
We still very much have a remote work culture where that makes sense and a lot of together time. Our annual company retreats, the way we celebrate each other's personal lives and accomplishments.
And my absolute favorite thing: We still have 3x week all-hands status meetings, and every Friday, we do shout-outs where individuals send gratitude to people on the team for their contributions that week. It's the most heartwarming thing ever.
There's a lot of talk right now about AI replacing people or driving efficiency through cuts. You've taken a different path by building technologies in-house. What's the philosophy behind that decision, and how has your team been impacted by it?
Like I spoke about earlier, the team has a lot of accountability and ownership over the work they do. We have basically individual labs where people can digitally develop their own tools using AI, to invite others to collaborate, to say, 'Here's a process we used to do, and I've created a program that automates it or evaluates it.' So, people are really excited about the opportunity to take control of not only the work, but how it gets done.
For other agency leaders perhaps considering an acquisition, what do you think is the biggest misconception about maintaining culture? What advice would you give?
The day one advice is, establish relationships with people as individuals. It's like any new relationship - dating, marriage - you've got to get to know each other and understand each other's values.
It's definitely a learning process for us, understanding What are the Brainlabs values? How do they like to work? How's it different, or what can we take from it?
For me, it was a bit like starting a new job, or the 'first day of school' kind of feeling. But at the same time, I had my family back home, my Exverus family where everything was consistent.
How do you see growth now and moving forward, say 12 months from now?
We've always seen growth as the power of the combined impact between both organizations.
We're really seeing the benefit of the full-funnel media approach that Exverus has always had and the deep category knowledge in CPG, entertainment, tech, health and wellness; combined with what Brainlabs has brought in B2B, travel, and tourism.
With those complementary skill sets, we can now to go market with so much more experience and credibility; that's the unlock.
Links to the full podcast interview on all streaming platforms are on advertisingweek.com
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