Accelerating Growth While Preserving Identity

How can entrepreneurs and founders know when it’s best to scale their businesses through partnerships and mergers? And how can they make sure they manage mergers & acquisitions without losing sight of the values that made their business successful in the first place? We talked with Sujay Saha, Founder of Cortico-X, a boutique strategy consulting firm, about what founders should look for as they consider inorganic growth. Cortico-X recently announced a merger with long-standing marketing insights and analytics firm The DRG. Here’s what Saha had to say about that merger and his advice for others contemplating bringing two companies together.

Let’s start with your recent merger: What made DRG the right partner for Cortico-X?  

DRG has been around for more than 50 years and Cortico-X for less than five. There is an enormous amount of synergy between the two companies, sharing much of the vision and many values. We started out by collaborating on a few client projects, and through those collaborations, it became clear that we weren’t just teaming up on a few projects; we were building something bigger — together!

Clients were asking for solutions that move seamlessly from insight to action, and both firms realized that by combining our complementary capabilities, we could deliver on that need in ways neither of us could deliver alone. DRG brings deep research expertise, operational excellence, and a long track record of turning customers, brands, and employee insights into clarity and action. Cortico-X brought bold strategy, transformation consulting, and design expertise, typically working with C-level executives to shape organizational direction and growth.

Together, we could close the long-standing gap across what customers say, what organizations know, and what leaders do about it. In addition to the shared values, complementary strengths, and cultural alignment, there was also a shared industry focus. Both organizations already served healthcare and financial services as priority markets, creating a natural alignment and crossover.

Mergers and acquisitions can sometimes dilute a company’s culture or purpose. How are you ensuring Cortico-X stays true to its human-centric values?

We are fortunate that our companies already have similar cultural constructs and values. At Cortico-X, we call them X-Factors: Win as one, Draw strength from empathy, Bring our edge, Deliver substance not smoke, Own it. This aligns well with DRG’s deep-rooted core values and what they wanted the organization to evolve into. In addition, the two companies share a common purpose built around driving human-centricity and accelerating that movement into the larger society. That said, we are taking a very methodical approach to integrating and bringing everyone together as we go along.

In your view, how can a founder know if scaling through a merger or partnership is the right next step?

Founders always want to be able to show growth and progress. While organic growth is great, it may not happen at the pace that is needed or that you desire. In this era, with so much that is changing across the board, there is a unique opportunity for founders to look to other companies that will complement their skill sets and capabilities. In that way, they can accelerate their growth with mergers and acquisitions as opposed to growing organically, which can take a long time. If done in a methodical way, inorganic growth can be a tremendous value booster. This merger has allowed Cortico-X [ significantly grow overnight because of the combined capabilities and integrated service offerings that can provide even more value to our expanded clientele. If we even look at it through the employee lenses, this transaction provides an opportunity for employees to expand their capabilities, scale the impact, and live a high-growth company momentum.

What are the biggest green flags—and red flags—when evaluating a potential business partner or acquisition target?  

There are a few green flags that I look for in evaluating deals beyond being clear about the rationale for the deal:

First, really strong and well-aligned fundamentals — both financial and operational. A well-aligned vision/purpose is the icing on the cake.

Second, complementary capabilities. In our recent merger, the service offerings snapped right into each other, making it a no-brainer.

Last but not the least, we look for a strong leadership team that stays engaged even after the deal. When the key executives are excited about the combined future and willing to commit long-term, it indicates a natural cultural alignment, reducing execution risk

Of course, the inverse of those green flags are going to be the red flags, but I would like to highlight the lack of cultural compatibility as the biggest red flag for me. While a lot of this compatibility could be assessed instinctively, I recommend taking a more structured approach to assess cultural values and the impact of those on customer/employee sentiments

What advice would you give to founders who are wary of sharing control or merging cultures—but still want to grow?

Change in general and relinquishing control in particular are hard. Reinventing or transforming the business in the case of mergers and acquisitions is even more challenging. While it’s ideal for any business to continue growing organically at a steady pace, the business does need strategic transactions to quickly amplify capabilities, move into new areas, or just scale the existing resources to capture market.

Founders should definitely evaluate these opportunities to stay true to the business’s growth aspirations and create appropriate structures needed to merge cultures. It’s definitely not easy to integrate businesses, so they should keep resources on the side to do it the right way. Even in our current merger with DRG, I’m excited not only for the business synergies around the expanded clientele, revenue, and capabilities but also that Cortico-X has appointed DRG’s previous CEO, Lanie Johnson, as our COO. Lanie has brought her seasoned operations team to Cortico-X, which has helped the combined company to immediately move into the next tier of business maturity, giving clients, employees, and investors even more confidence in the success of Cortico-X

If you had to distill one leadership lesson from your merger experience into advice for other founders, what would it be?  

Have the leadership teams of the two companies align very quickly, even as a part of the dealmaking process. Bringing two companies together can be a scary initiative, but a lot of the worries can be assuaged if the leaders of both companies understand the need to draw that alignment with their leadership teams.

That was key in our merger. We brought the Cortico-X and DRG leadership teams together to talk, not for politically right reasons, but to genuinely learn about each other, build relationships, and understand each other’s business philosophies. Once that alignment happened, everything else felt like a smooth run. We are potentially a living example of the success of such an approach — we closed the deal within four months of first talking about the merger opportunity and have already got two wins in the market post closure.

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