Seventeen years spent inside some of the world’s most complex transactions will give you a particular view of what M&A actually is – and what it isn’t. For Melissa Almasi, it has never been about the deal itself. It has always been about what comes next.
Melissa Almasi most recently led the post-merger integration of JustPark and US-based ParkHub – a cross-Atlantic undertaking that speaks to the kind of work she has built her career around. Over nearly two decades, she has delivered more than 70 international engagements spanning strategy, post-merger integration, carve-outs, value creation and performance improvement across industries as varied as education, big tech and travel. She has worked as a consultant and in-house across Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. And she began, rather unexpectedly, writing code.
What she finds rewarding about her work, Melissa says, is not the financial architecture of a deal – it’s the moment a business case stops being theoretical.
“You’ve got a strategy or a thesis, and the question is how do you practically bring that to life and get it as close as possible to the original plan – or find solutions that get you there by a different route,” she said.
“But things are never black and white. Something will always come up that you didn’t forecast. And I think that’s what I really enjoy – you’ve got a business case, you have to deliver on it, but then how do you make it sustainable and scalable while dealing with the challenges and bringing people along the journey?”
Melissa got her start in corporate Australia with an internship at Macquarie Bank, within the IT solutions team, supporting the equity markets group. She had studied engineering and commerce – a combination that gave her a valuable lens on business problems –, but she quickly realised that writing code was not what made her lean in.
“I could code quite well, but it wasn’t my passion. I enjoyed the conversations with the business side far more than actually writing the code.”
That realisation led her to Macquarie Capital Advisors, where she joined the M&A advisory team covering technology, media and telecommunications. It was 2008 –Macquarie’s heyday – and then, almost immediately, the global financial crisis hit. She worked on some of the earliest iterations of what would become Australia’s national broadband network, advising on consortium structures and potential acquirers. And although the work was intellectually stimulating, for Melissa, it was not enough.
“With M&A advisory… there’s a lot of financial engineering, and then the deal closes, and you walk away. You never get to see the business case put into implementation. And that’s the part I really wanted to be involved in.”
So, she pivoted into consulting – specifically into EY-Parthenon’s Strategy & Transactions practice, where she was part of a team providing end-to-end support on M&A implementations.
Melissa said the years at EY were formative in ways that went well beyond the technical. Working across buy-side and sell-side mandates – from strategy formulation and commercial due diligence through to integration planning and post-close execution – she developed an impressive breadth of expertise. She worked on government privatisations, mining and resources projects in Australia, and was seconded to Singapore as part of a high-performance program, the first person from the Oceania region to do so.
A later secondment brought her to EY’s global office in London, an experience that clarified her career ambitions. Becoming a partner, she realised, would mean moving progressively away from implementation and towards sales. She wanted to remain hands-on.
And so, Melissa moved into industry, joining Nord Anglia Education, a private equity-backed operator of premium international schools, where she led transaction delivery and post-merger integration across a rapidly expanding global portfolio – from Latin America and Asia to Europe and the UK.
Later, she moved to Amazon as Senior Integration Manager in their EMEA corporate development team, before leading integrations in the travel industry with Awaze and then JustPark.
With this broad-based experience behind her, Melissa has a deep understanding of what markets often underestimate about integration.
First, she said, is the need for honest communication – not grand announcements, but consistent, transparent updates – because “in the absence of any communications, a vacuum forms, and people start to create their own narratives and truths”.
“Sometimes just saying ‘we’re working on it, and we’ll let you know’ is so much better than saying nothing at all.”
Second is resourcing. Integration work lands on top of people who already have full-time jobs, and organisations consistently underestimate the cost of asking them to absorb both.
“If you want to achieve X in a compressed timeframe, you either have to bring down your baseline expectation – because there’s only twenty-four hours in a day and people are already maxed out – or you think seriously about interim resources and backfill. Extending the timeline is never good because people get deal fatigue. It costs money, but in the long run, backfilling usually pays dividends because you free up the best people to do the job.”
The third is the need to manage resistance to change – a factor she regards as one of the most underrated forces in any integration.
“We are inherently creatures of habit. Any change freaks people out, or they simply don’t want to do it. You need champions of change at every level – not just coming from the top, but people from the lower levels who can bring people up the mountain. Because if there’s a window of opportunity for someone not to do something, they won’t.”
And finally, there’s the need to respect the culture of the environment you’re working in. While it’s feasible to “rip the Band-Aid off” and accelerate change within some companies, this will quickly erode the trust of the stakeholders in many. And once you erode trust, Melissa said, “you're already five, 10, 15 steps behind and you're not going to achieve your ultimate goal”.
“You have to be very mindful of the consequences, positive and negative, that will come with it.”
The metrics that matter most to Melissa when she finishes a project are not the financials; they are softer, and in her view, more telling.
“The first thing I look at is whether the team in place can run with the combined entity without me: Have I made myself redundant?
“The second is whether we’ve retained the key people. Retention bonuses keep people in their seats temporarily, but are they still there when you look back a year later?
“And the third is the broader cultural pulse of the organisation – has it trended positive?”
“Change and integrations are driven by the people. If they’re not bought in, you can do whatever financial modelling you like – but you’ve essentially thrown money out the window. You might get the uptick for six or twelve months, but three years down the track, the growth potential simply won’t be there.”
Having worked internationally for ten years, Melissa now has her sights set on returning to Australia and is excited by the prospect of applying her depth of experience to private equity-backed businesses here.
Her sweet spot, she says, is companies in that pivotal growth phase – businesses that are levelling up in sophistication and need someone who can bridge the gap between the deal thesis and what actually gets built on the ground.
“For me, the excitement is not just in the execution, it’s about being able to really influence the strategy, to scale an organisation, and to make it materially stronger.”