Merger Costs These fell into two categories: opportunity costs and real costs. Opportunity costs are the amount of time that was spent managing/working on the merger by staff. I have no way of costing this in any scientific way. I know that I was effectively full time (in my part time role) on this for 6 months, which is a cost of £12,000. Allowing an estimate for the other three Chief Officers at about the same amount, plus the odd bit of other time, I think it is save to say that the cost of lost time would easily be £25,000. In terms of real costs the main cost was the legal and financial advice. Overall this came in at around £25,000 (this includes HR, TUPE, and pension advice along with the legal work and financial due diligence). Other costs incurred were the board facilitator £1,500, recruitment for the CE £5,000, meetings/refreshments/room hire etc £1,000. There were some other costs charged to the merger as well and I think the total costs incurred were £35,000.
Savings A tricky area to explain. At a level it is fair to say that we are yet to identify and realize efficiencies arising from the merger – for example we will not save rental costs as we continued with all existing properties. (However the Board has agreed to close one of the offices which will save £12,000pa in rental costs). You could also argue that the consolidated budget for the non-merged organisations showed a £70,000 deficit whilst the consolidated budget for the merged organisation is breakeven. At this level there has been a benefit of £70,000 from the merger – which was effectively realized through the staff redeployment exercise where we reduced the number of staff by 4 posts, which was around 2.8ftes.
If doing it again then what would we advise – safeguards etc?