Mastering the People Side of Deal-Driven Growth with Victoria Pelletier

Victoria Pelletier bought her first company at age twenty. It was the casting agency that represented her as a young actor, and when the two founders wanted to move back out west, she stepped in rather than watch everything they had built shut down. She paid around ten thousand dollars, brought in someone to run it, and sold the whole thing about eighteen months later. Most people spend decades working up the nerve to do their first deal. Victoria did hers before she finished university.

I invited Victoria on the podcast because she has seen deals from every angle. She is a keynote speaker, published author, board director, and transformational executive with more than twenty years of leadership experience, including roles at major companies such as IBM and American Express. She has been involved in over forty M&A transactions, plus joint ventures and her own acquisitions and exits. Whether you're planning your first acquisition, wrestling with a difficult integration, or wondering how to actually capture the value your deal promised, this conversation delivers lessons earned the hard way.

From Aspiring Lawyer to Twenty-Year-Old Business Owner

Victoria got a chuckle out of me with her childhood ambition. She wanted to be a lawyer, an aspiration she traces back to watching LA Law with her mom around age ten or eleven. She went to university thinking law school was next, but she had been working her way up through the ranks at a bank and ended up in the business world instead. As she joked with me, she has probably read as many contracts as she would have if she had gone down the legal path.

The casting agency purchase revealed something about how she thinks. She had already been helping the agency prepare newer background actors for set work, and she could see the business was, in her words, a bit of a cash cow. She has always been an entrepreneur at heart, even when working inside large global companies as more of an intrapreneur.

Six Acquisitions in Eighteen Months

The most intense stretch of Victoria's deal career came at a publicly traded corporate travel company. The company ended a joint venture with a competing partner, rebranded, went public, and then acquired six companies in eighteen months. Victoria was involved in everything from due diligence through integration, and a big part of her career since has been owning the outcomes after a company is acquired.

The personal cost was real. She spent 220 days on the road that year while her children were six and two. But the learning was significant, especially about the people side of value creation. Much of her career has been in professional services, where in many cases people are buying people.

Why Joint Ventures End

The joint venture story is a great example of something I talk about constantly on this podcast. There are all types of deal structures beyond M&A, and sometimes a JV, strategic alliance, licensing deal, or distribution deal is exactly the right move. In this case, two companies doing the same thing with strong presence in different parts of the world came together to offer clients global delivery neither could provide alone.

When the JV ended, it wasn't because anything went sour. The goals, shareholders, and stakeholders simply changed in terms of the growth and direction each company wanted. Victoria's company was heavy in Europe and light in North America, while its JV partner was strong in the US. So when the partnership ended, her company went on that US acquisition spree to rebuild the presence it had lost, and Victoria relocated to the US in 2006 as part of it. Sometimes a deal simply runs its course, and recognizing that is its own form of deal wisdom.

The Quarter-Billion-Dollar Relationship She Almost Cut

Victoria shared one of the best integration stories I've heard on this podcast. During that acquisition streak, her CEO kept pushing her to find synergy savings through restructuring after restructuring. At some point she had to tell him directly that death by a thousand cuts does not work.

One of the people she could easily have restructured out was a tough New York woman thirty years her senior who ran a 250 million dollar client portfolio. Victoria was a twenty-something Canadian who was newer to the industry and had just been moved to New York. If she had not spent time with the client and understood the dynamic between that woman and the account, she could have made a huge mistake in exiting her. Instead, it took almost a year of building trust to get her fully on side. By the time the last of the six acquisitions came through, that same woman had become one of Victoria's biggest cheerleaders and helped bring others along.

The lesson applies to any acquirer at any size. Understand who is really important and what the implications of a quick personnel decision are before you make it.

The 10-20-70 Rule of Value Creation

Victoria pointed to a research paper from BCG about where the value of AI comes from. Only 10 percent comes from the algorithms themselves, 20 percent from the data and supporting technology, and 70 percent from people and process. When she read it, she immediately recognized how applicable it is to business transformations and deals in general.

She sees that ratio play out constantly in large-scale transformations and particularly in deals. Not enough time gets spent up front on the people aspect. Culture, in her view, is an outcome of many things, and a fancy vision, mission, and values statement on the wall stays aspirational unless the leadership, language, actions, and behaviors align with it.

She gave a great example from her time at IBM when it acquired Red Hat. The cultures were very much in opposition, and Red Hatters were worried about what joining Big Blue would mean. The smart move was keeping them somewhat separate within the organization and letting them run.

When Due Diligence Fails

Not every deal in Victoria's career worked out. The third company she bought and sold went poorly because the woman she bought it from misrepresented things through due diligence. Victoria had to sue her, and while she came out of it, the experience made her reflect on what she could have done differently.

Her takeaway is one I see proven over and over in my own deal practice. A great deal of what goes wrong in deals traces back to due diligence, and far too much gets missed. This connects to the conversation I had with Sunny Vanderbeck about how the diligence process reveals whether the people across the table are who they say they are.

Who Owns the Value After Closing

Victoria raised a failure point that doesn't get enough attention. A value case gets built for a deal, the CEO or board or corporate development team orchestrates it, and then leadership moves on and lets someone else run behind it. Later everyone wonders why the value isn't being realized. Her question cuts right to it. Who is accountable for it?

At her last company, she rebranded the transformation office into a value realization office, combining a strategic PMO with reporting on all the pieces that contribute to value, including the less tangible ones between the top and bottom lines. Seeing a deal through end to end is where she watches many companies fall short, whether it's an acquisition, a new technology rollout, a reorganization, or a new go-to-market plan.

Selling the Passion Project

Between the corporate roles, Victoria built a second business that started in her own kitchen. She had a personal interest in natural soaps and creams, and as she pointed out, you don't make a single bar of soap, you make a loaf you cut into ten or twelve. She ended up with so much product that she built Christmas baskets for friends, family, and neighbors, and it was so popular she realized she might have something.

So there she was, corporate executive by day, building a natural bath and body company by night in the early days of online retail. It exploded, with her ex, her stepdaughter, and her nanny all working on the business. She eventually sold the assets, inventory, and proprietary recipes to an external buyer, a retailer who had been purchasing a lot of the products, while keeping the name. The business could have kept growing, but she was on the road constantly and raising young children. She made the decision that was right for balancing all that is life, which is a form of deal clarity I wish more entrepreneurs had.

Deals Are Relationships

One thread ran through this entire conversation. People do business with people. Victoria builds relationships from a place of strategy and intention, but never transactionally. She referenced Keith Ferrazzi's book Never Eat Alone and a line that has always stayed with her about building relationships from a place of generosity and not greed.

I shared a story from speaking at the EO Women Summit, where I talked about how deal making carries this perception of masculine, hard-negotiating energy. My message there was that the best deals are the start or continuation of a great relationship. As a lawyer, I know I can draft the greatest contract in the world, and the deal will still work out or not based on the relationship. The contract creates clarity on everyone's roles and gives you legal rights if things go wrong, but the relationship is where the deal is actually built. For a number of the women in that room, reframing deals as relationships was a genuine breakthrough.

Those themes run through her books as well. Book four came out earlier this year and book five arrives later this year, with two of them focused on personal branding, the what and the how, and the others covering leadership, culture, and career transitions. Her writing on transitions looks at pivoting with a lens on the people you choose to work with, not just the work itself.

Victoria also spoke candidly about her own experience as a woman in leadership. She stepped into her first executive role at 24 as the only woman in the room and the youngest by about two decades. Years later at IBM, she led a strategy session as the most senior woman in a boardroom with 40 men and only one other woman. She talked about the different vernacular applied to women with the same traits as their male counterparts, aggressive versus assertive, and about earning the nickname Iron Maiden in her mid-twenties before realizing that persona wasn't who she really is. Her real nickname now is the turtle. Extremely resilient and tough on the outside, a marshmallow who cries at commercials on the inside. I told her I'm the same way.

The AI Reality Check and What Comes Next

Before we wrapped, I asked Victoria what's piquing her interest right now, and she went straight to AI. She has been working in the professional services and technology space for a while, and she's seeing a lot of failure among both companies implementing AI and AI startups because of product market fit and speed to market. The deeper failure goes back to that BCG 10-20-70 stat.

She's having conversations with companies about how they will even fund AI. Many assume they'll take costs out of the business, but they don't have large-scale adoption yet. She's working to re-architect whole org structures and the jobs themselves in part to fund the AI initiatives companies want to pursue. Her frank assessment is that no one is truly doing AI at scale yet, and she hasn't seen anyone move well past proof of concept to enterprise-level AI. This echoes themes from my conversation with Jodi Hume about how leaders make sound decisions when everything around them is moving fast.

On the personal front, Victoria made a decision to leave the tech company where she had been working to explore the next bigger and better things. She's looking at CEO or number two roles, doing work with AI companies, advising on the people side, some executive coaching, and a ton of public speaking. Her filter is simple. She does not do things, personally or professionally, that don't bring her joy or value.

When I asked my final question about freedom, her answer fit perfectly. Freedom for her is choice. How she spends her time, her money, and the confidence to say no to things that don't bring joy or value. And as she joked when she met her husband, life is too short to drink crappy wine. She and I are fully aligned on that one.

Tune in to hear Victoria share the full stories behind buying a company at twenty, integrating six acquisitions in eighteen months, and why 70 percent of deal value lives in people and process. If the psychology behind big business decisions interests you, my conversations with Dave Hersh on the inner work behind exits and Jodi Hume on founder decision-making pair well with this episode.

Listen to the full episode of DealQuest Podcast with Victoria Pelletier: [Available on all major podcast platforms]

FOR MORE ON VICTORIA PELLETIER
www.victoria-pelletier.com
https://youtu.be/xFpknOCFMOg

FOR MORE ON COREY KUPFER
https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreykupfer/ 
https://www.coreykupfer.com/

Corey Kupfer is an expert strategist, negotiator, and dealmaker. He has more than 35 years of professional deal-making and negotiating experience. Corey is a successful entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, author, and professional speaker. He is deeply passionate about deal-driven growth. He is also the creator and host of the DealQuest Podcast.

Get deal-ready with the DealQuest Podcast with Corey Kupfer, where like-minded entrepreneurs and business leaders converge, share insights and challenges, and success stories. Equip yourself with the tools, resources, and support necessary to navigate the complex yet rewarding world of dealmaking. Dive into the world of deal-driven growth today!