TLG Managing Partner Jeff Tenenbaum Quoted in CEO Update Article, “Association Merger Activity on the Increase in Recent Years”

TLG Managing Partner Jeff Tenenbaum was quoted in the CEO Update article, “Association merger activity on the increase in recent years: Experts advise bringing in outside strategic, legal advice early in process to boost chances of success; CEO shares merger criteria.”

“We’ve never had so much association M&A activity as we have in the last few years,” Jeff Tenenbaum, managing partner of Tenenbaum Law Group, told CEO Update. “We’re working on six to eight right now in different forms. Not just straight-up mergers but all different sorts of combinations,” such as consolidating annual events or association publications.

“I always encourage my clients to bring me in from the outset to make sure they understand the various options,” Tenenbaum said. “Sometimes these mergers and other combi nations don’t work because the leaders involved don’t understand the various different ways that you can bring two associations together,” he said. “They may think it’s a full-on merger with one merging into the other. They don’t realize there are lots of other ways that you can have two associations do things together. Maybe initially they get used to each other, start living together before they get married. You can have joint conferences, joint publications, joint membership categories, joint committees, things like that,” Tenenbaum said. “Then sometimes that gets the two organizations, the staff and the volunteer leaders, used to each other. You could have a joint board retreat, and then, over time, that can facilitate a greater combination between the two.”