New School Try

By the time he was 29, William Colvin had studied economics at Cornell and business administration at Colum bia; he had worked for three companies to get seasoning for a career in management. He was doing well at his latest job in the corporate planning department of Olivetti-Underwood Corp., where he was involved in efforts to ac quire new companies. Then, one morning, while staring moodily out the window of a New York Central commuter train, Colvin had an idea. Instead of making mergers himself, why not teach other people how to make them?

That inspired train ride has resulted in Corporate Seminars, Inc., a traveling school that instructs puzzled businessmen about the ABCs of mergers and acquisitions. Only one year old, Corporate Seminars has already graduated 700 students, and Colvin expects an enrollment of 2,000 pupils a year very shortly. Last week, following seminars in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta, Corporate Seminars held classes in Toronto for Canadian businessmen who have also been hit by the urge to merge.

The Right Partner. Colvin says that the basic idea for the school stems from his experiences at Olivetti. There he was involved in a frustrating assignment. Anxious to move rapidly into the lucrative field of office copying machines, Olivetti decided on a merger to speed up the process. Trouble was, the company found it all but impossible to locate the right partner. The more Colvin pondered this, the more he became convinced that other businessmen were also being held back by what he now calls "uncoordinated efforts." Still others lacked connections with knowledgeable investment-banking firms who could provide merger assistance. And some shied away from the expense of seeking outside help.

On the theory that such businessmen could be taught do-it-yourself merging, Colvin quit Olivetti and enrolled a part-time faculty for Corporate Seminars. His teachers are all experts. Royal Little, retired founder of Textron, Inc., counsels Colvin's students on the pitfalls of getting together. These include such dangers as whether the mergee's inventory is all he says it is and questions such as: How do you handle your own employee reaction if his pension plan is better than yours? Answer: Increase yours if the acquisition costs justify it. David Judelson, president of merger-minded Gulf & Western Corp., discusses financial techniques. Raytheon Chairman Charles Adams explains the most promising methods of making the first overture. Best way: try a direct telephone call to the proposed partner but keep the conversation vague at first. ("Let's see if we have something to talk about".)

Better than Real. Sessions end with "battle tests," in which students use Harvard Business School case studies and take both sides of a merger that other businessmen have already consummated. "The deals arrived at in the work shops," says Columbia Professor Samuel Hayes, who referees the battle tests, "are consistently much better than they were in real life."

Students pay up to $500 tuition for two to five days of courses, and Colvin expects a profit of $100,000 this year, much of which he will put back into the venture to keep it growing.

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