Practices
Our practice areas are designed to help investment firms realize the greatest possible ROI from their investments in acquired companies. Use the links to the right to learn more.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Traditional due diligence efforts are useful in quantifying the potential of merged or acquired businesses, but do not necessarily provide a detailed plan for getting there. As a result, many M&A efforts conclude with long-term confusion, substantial redundancy, and prized employees running for the hills. It is no wonder that 9 out of 10 M&A efforts fail.
Zwas Group conducts rigorous operational due diligence for mergers and acquisitions. We quantify the current state of operations and use our findings to develop informed targets for organizational structure, workflows, and technologies. Our detailed planning becomes the roadmap to an integrated set of operations and technologies that enable merged businesses to reach the height of investors' expectations.
Upon completion of analysis, Zwas Group typically establishes a project management office to execute the roadmap and to bridge the gap between acquisition teams and executive management. Our deep project management experience frees up executives to use their time wisely by stepping in only as needed for status updates and strategic decision-making.
Startups
Many young businesses are fueled by the enthusiasm and willpower of their founders, who often personally manage most tasks (from exec decisions to manning the phones) without any sort of formal policies or procedures.
At first, personality-based processes are good for keeping pace with rapid growth, but they eventually become too heavy for the people who support them. Star players begin to burn out and an environment is created where other employees are not enabled to help carry the load. The results are familiar: The business grows, but the quality of customer service dips, order fulfillment takes longer, and strategic vision becomes clouded.
Zwas Group are experts in nurturing young businesses with gradually increasing doses of structure. We collaborate with our clients to define the nature and timing of new positions, processes, and technologies. Organizational structure is defined for various stages of growth so that hiring searches can begin in advance of critical need, and operations manuals are built to enable seamless transition of responsibilities. Our planning adds structure as needed and frees up executives to focus on what they do best: making informed decisions regarding the strategic growth of the business.
Change Management
Change management is a cornerstone of successful internal corporate initiatives. Such initiatives include deployment of new technologies and policies, rollout of new services, corporate restructuring, and simply trying to “raise the bar”.
Zwas Group quantifies the business processes and responsibilities that overlap with such initiatives. Our analysis draws in a wide range of resources, from executives to the floor, to distill and capture requirements that might not be visible from a single point of view. These requirements bring the current and target operational states into sharp focus, helping executives to better understand the business' needs before making large technology investments or operational changes.
The end result is that target technologies and other improvements meet the requirements of the business, and not vice versa. From a deployment point of view, the “huh?” factor is kept to a bare minimum on go-live, and the business begins to reap the benefits of such investments from day one.
Hospitality
Zwas Group provides front office, revenue management, and distribution consulting for the hospitality industry. We use our palette of best practices and technologies to drive down the cost of reservation acquisition and daily operations. At the same time, we increase revenue by helping to drive up your occupancy and ADR. Zwas Group is an operations specialist for the merger & acquisition of hotels.
The combination of our operational and hospitality expertise allows us to provide services that have an effectiveness that is unique in the hospitality industry. Our detailed analysis and vendor selection tools ensure that products and practices match the specific needs of a given hotel. Once selected, systems and best practices are implemented with the surgical precision and detailed tracking that are the hallmark of projects run by Zwas Group.
Zwas Group has managed the successful deployment of central reservation systems (CRS), property management systems (PMS), group management systems, call centers (CRO), hotel websites, commission payment systems, and the business processes that these systems support. We have collaborated with resorts (The Boca Raton and El Conquistador), boutique hotels (the Luxury Resorts brand), and national chains (Extended Stay America and Homestead Hotels).