Cfo Thought Leader

Looking back on his days with GoDaddy, Sam Kemp recalls a pivotal page in the domain registry giant’s strategic M&A playbook.As he prepared to present to the executive team his analysis of a recent acquisition, he included a simple slide to convey data that would challenge the company’s conventional thinking around acquisitions and how—free from the limitations of this thinking—GoDaddy’s newest acquisition could serve as a strategic lever for the company at large.This driver, Kemp tells us, would challenge the high regard in which GoDaddy’s management team held new “profit pools” and the transactions that triggered them.Recalls Kemp: “We decided to do a very counterintuitive thing: to not have a profit pool for the latest acquisition—in order to achieve faster adoption vis-à-vis price competition—and instead to use it to establish profit pools inside other categories that were related to it. This turned out to be a very successful strategy, and something that scaled really nicely.”As the somewhat revoluti