You’ve successfully executed a merger transaction with a SPAC—now what? We’ve gathered first-hand insights from two CFOs who have successfully completed the transaction.
Meet the CFOs:
Liyuan Woo – Chief Financial Officer at the HydraFacial Company
Jon Campagna – Former Chief Financial Officer at Virgin Galactic
1. Hire Tall
Liyuan: “Hiring tall. I cannot emphasize that enough. You got to understand what you need and make sure the mindset is consistent to exactly what you need. To me, that’s number one. The most important is your human capital and who you have as players.”
2. Focus On One KPI and Deliver
Liyuan: “You got to be very grounded and understand how you predict your business. And keep it simple. You want to keep it simple for yourself and you also want to keep it simple for the investors… In our business, I’ll say, Just look at how many delivery systems I’m going to roll out because then it’s very much guaranteed recurring revenue stream from that point on. So don’t ask me 12 different KPIs. Let’s just focus on one. Then I’ll guarantee we’re going to deliver results.”
3. Have Actionable Data
Liyuan: “Make sure your teams are actually business partners first and not just sharing data but give them an actionable summary of data. What did you actually learn? Out of what you learned, what action can they take? What outcome? This whole micro excellence—the idea of we measure success based on outcome and milestone.”
4. Proactively and Consistently Communicate
Jon: “You certainly don’t want to get ahead of yourself. And I think you just have to be very thoughtful around what you tell the market, having that balance of showing that there is a true value proposition.”
Liyuan: “So you got to make sure that message is consistent. Then just always being proactive. Think 10 steps ahead. Heading down the road…having the full prices management planned out, knowing how you want to communicate if anything goes wrong?”
5. Engage With Analysts and Investors
Jon: “ I think the investor and analyst engagement is important and getting feedback from them. A lot of times we’ll hear from analysts, what are you thinking? You just have to ask them the question too, right? What are you hearing from your investors about the company? And then you can craft that into your earnings reports, so you’re actually telling the story that you want to control, as opposed to having to answer something in Q&A per se.”
How MorganFranklin Can Help
MorganFranklin has a proven methodology to assist companies in successfully entering the public markets through acquisition by a SPAC (“blank check company”). By focusing on both the SEC reporting requirements, and public company readiness, our services will enable a company to complete its transaction on time and to be prepared for life as a public company.
