Who Can You Ask When Your Company Is Being Acquired?

After the all-hands, the questions start, and you go looking for someone to ask. Your manager says they don’t know yet, and they may mean it. HR points you back to the FAQ. The coworker who went through a deal at her last company tells you how hers went, which may have nothing to do with yours. The group chat has theories.

It can feel like being stonewalled. Mostly it isn’t. The people at your company who know the most about the deal are working inside limits that are easy to miss.

HR and the stock plan team can usually tell you what the documents say happens to your equity, and when. What you should do about it, given your own taxes and your own life, is usually outside their job. The company’s lawyers work for the company. When your interests and the company’s pull apart, over a retention letter or a release you’re asked to sign, the company is still their client.

The executives closest to the deal may know things they aren’t allowed to share yet. The insider trading rules reach the person who passes along a tip, not only the person who trades on it. And your manager may not know either. Until closing, the two companies are still separate businesses, and the buyer generally can’t start running yours. Some of the answers about your team may not exist yet.

None of that is bad faith. Everyone at the company has a job, and right now a big part of that job is the deal. None of them works for you.

That splits the question in two. Ask the company for facts, and ask your own people for advice.

The company is the best source for the facts. The dates, which plan covers which grant, what happens to the ESPP and when the trading window opens all live there. When an answer matters, ask for it in writing and ask which document it comes from, because a friendly answer in the hallway usually doesn’t change what the documents say.

Advice has to start from your whole situation, and you’re the only one standing in all of it. The tax math belongs with a CPA. Anything new you’re asked to sign belongs in front of an employment attorney before you sign it. And because those answers tend to run into each other, it helps to have someone looking at all of it at once, someone whose only job in the room is you.

Good help costs money. But the decisions in a deal tend to come with dates, and some options can close before the deal does. Whoever you bring in needs time to read your documents before the first of those dates arrives.

The question worth asking this week isn’t only what happens to your equity. It’s who you’re asking, and who they work for.

This is the fourth letter in a short series on what a deal does to your money. Friday is about a tax that reaches only some people in a deal, and why the time to find out if it reaches you is before closing.

Talk Friday.

Mateo

P.S. If your company is in the middle of a deal right now, there’s a deal checklist at bfawealth.com/deals.