The hidden tax of separating shared services, and how to budget for it honestly.
There's a number that comes up consistently in our work and never quite makes it into the deal models: about three quarters of operating momentum is lost between announcement and close in the average carve-out we see. It's almost never about the strategic logic. It's about how operationally entangled the carved-out unit was with the parent.
IT separation is the obvious one — but it's usually planned. The unplanned costs are subtler: regulatory cover, corporate-development capacity, shared treasury, even the parent's brand of legal counsel.