Behind the market boilerplate are real people

The acquisition of HomeServe plc by Brookfield structure looked pretty smooth from the outside. Our corporate brokerage team managed shareholder communications really well. For the first time in my career, I let go and let them take the strain with the merger arbitrage community. It was a good decision, to be recommended.

Internal comms was another matter.

The shareholder circular contained the inevitable boilerplate about the risk of job losses at head office. It has to be there, of course, for disclosure purposes, but it made life difficult for a good six months for the 70 people whose livelihoods were apparently at risk. Once the transaction completed, internal communication ground to a halt while organisational and operating details were finalised. And yes, everything the comms playbook tells you will happen started to happen: engagement levels dipped and people started to fill the vacuum with speculation. What saved us was the goodwill we had accumulated over years of clear, prompt communication, and great engagement from our new owners. People were patient, job losses were minimal in with the benefit of hindsight, the fog cleared pretty quickly. But our experience at the time proved that yes, comms do matter.