M&A, corporate development & tax

Most acquisitions destroy value. Seventy percent of them, in fact. That statistic exists because too many finance leaders treat M&A as an event instead of a discipline. This block fixes that. You will learn to run corporate development like a repeatable machine, from the first strategic question to the last legal entity you rationalize.

Start with the choice that shapes everything: build, buy, or partner. You will estimate synergies with rigor instead of optimism, then structure deals with earnouts, representations, and price adjustments that protect the downside without killing the upside. This is where good CFOs stop overpaying.

Then you go deep on diligence and valuation. You will build the financial due diligence playbook that surfaces the risks sellers hope you miss, run LBO valuation and accretion dilution analysis that stands up to a board, and manage post-merger integration, the phase where the value you paid for is actually created or quietly lost.

Finally, tax. Global tax strategy is no longer optional homework. You will command transfer pricing, BEPS, and Pillar Two, structure deals as asset or share transactions with the tax consequences fully modeled, and negotiate tax warranties that hold. Legal entity rationalization ties it together by simplifying the corporate structure you inherit through growth and acquisition.

This is the CFO who owns the deal, not the CFO who signs off on someone else's. By the end you will speak the language of bankers and lawyers without deferring to them, challenge synergy assumptions before they reach the board, and know exactly where a transaction earns its return or bleeds it. Deals are won in the details. This block is those details.