The Challenge

When a large company acquires a much smaller organization, what they’re often buying is talent. The key to a successful transition is retaining the best people – both new and existing – and merging them into a cohesive team.

For our San Diego-based client, the goal was to bring onboard a group of 20 employees from a newly acquired company in Florida. With a critical product design underway, there was no margin for error during the first 100 days.

The Solution

The Center Group provided a comprehensive program that included:

> Executive coaching on internal communications, with talking points for both current and new employees

> Compensation analysis of market-based salaries from a lower to higher cost-of-living area

> A partner employment assistance program to aid in relocating the new employees to San Diego

> A retention program for existing employees, who knew that the process would end with a reduction in force (RIF)

Honesty was the key component of our strategy, which required a strong foundation of trust in a period of doubt and turbulence.

The result? Every single existing employee – 100 percent – stayed onboard through the transition period, and over 90 percent of the new employees were recruited and relocated to San Diego.