Whether you are just building your M&A team or you are scaling it, there will come a point where you will have to consider onboarding freelancers into your team. Several reasons might trigger this decision, which we will examine shortly.
However, a roadblock you might experience is how to hire effective freelancers who know their onions. Secondly, how can you facilitate your communications well enough to leverage them in your M&A team?
In this short piece, we will answer these questions and provide you with practical tips to keep in mind when your M&A team wants to hire and work with freelancers.
When do you need M&A Freelancers?
Many M&A team leads aren’t familiar at all with working with freelancers. But there are legit reasons why many top M&A teams leverage freelancers. Let’s point out a few of them.
Budget
Freelancers are not cheap. But the flexibility they provide makes it easy to fit them into a budget. This is important when your team is in its early stages, and you don’t have excessive bucks to throw around.
Most times, the contracts of M&A freelancers don’t include 401k benefits, parental leave, merch, and other remunerations. With this, you can cut unnecessary costs early on.
Thus, if you have a humble budget and you need talents fast, you should have M&A freelancers on your team.
Commitment and Flexibility
Although you want to set up your team, are you ready to manage it? Are you ready to deal with the management overhead and processes that arise when building a full-time internal team? If the answer is no, that’s fine.
It means you need a freelancer – no commitment pressure. You don’t need full-time workers, and neither do they want full-time jobs. Both of you can come together only when you have an M&A deal to work on, and freelancers can often start immediately.
That’s a win-win for both parties.
Technical Expertise
The scope of a merger deal can sometimes be beyond what your team is conversant with. For instance, emerging industries such as blockchain can be extremely technical to understand.
Practical Tips for Hiring and Working with M&A Freelancers
Without the right setup, onboarding freelancers on your team won’t work. Working with freelancers successfully means providing a framework and a work environment where they can leverage their skills effectively.
Valentin Rivas Vera, Strategy Director at Lyntia, has been using M&A freelancers for their teams for years.
His 3 golden rules to make M&A freelancers successful:
1. Every freelancer is tasked with a specific goal in mind. It’s crystal-clear why they are supporting the team.
2. There is a pool of freelancers that they have already worked with, so the quality is crazy high and onboarding is short.
3. The team is used to the hybrid approach and knows how to work with freelancers.
Finding and interviewing the right-fit M&A freelancer
Now that you have followed the golden rules, your freelancer is already set up for success. But when it comes to finding the right fit for your team, you can still make some easy mistakes. Here’s how to avoid them.
Check Their Experience and Portfolio
Action, they say, speaks louder than words. Thus, the only way to know if you can trust an M&A freelancer with your work is to see the works they have done for others. A deal sheet is of course the format of choice here.
Check their litigation status
In M&A, a high degree of ethical work practices and confidentiality are extremely important. You don’t want to forget to check the litigation status of a potential freelancer.
In our experience, punctuality in meetings is an extremely important denominator for finding diligent freelancers as well. If they show up late, be warned.
Clear communication
Once you have onboarded the freelancers into your team, it’s vital to be extremely clear and set up a clear communication schedule. This includes deadlines and deliverables.
While a good freelancer will manage expectations with you, it’s crucial to set expectations from your end.
When you hire M&A freelancers through Fintalent, you’re lucky – we will take care of vetting and connecting you to freelancers that can definitely execute your projects.
Bottom Line
M&A freelancers will turbo-charge the productivity of your team and help you scale faster.
If you want to take a step forward on this discourse, we recommend listening to our short podcast with Valentin Rivas Vera – the Director of Strategy at Lyntia.
