I recently helped a company through a carve-out, and I was sitting on both sides of it at once: the company that stayed behind after part of it was sold, and the brand-new company that came out of the deal.
Most of what made it work was not complicated. It was just early. They kept marketing and communication alive the whole way through, while the hard work of repositioning one company and building another from nothing was happening in parallel. Most companies don't. They wait.
Costly? Probably. Cheaper than the alternative? Definitely.
Building a brand before there's ink on the paper
The frustrating part, and I'll be honest about it: you are shaping the identity of something that isn't fully real yet. No signatures, no certainty, and you are already choosing names, colours, words. It can feel like spending money on a maybe.
Here is why it's worth it anyway. The moment that ink dries, everything moves fast. Suddenly it's announcement day and the world is watching. And a website isn't built in a day. Neither is a logo. Neither are the colours, or the one headline that finally says who this company is.
So yes, you spend ahead of the deal, with no guarantee. But missing the moment costs far more than preparing for it.
Announcement day is a wave
Think about what actually happens on announcement day. You go public, and the second you do, everyone looks. Customers, competitors, partners, the press, your own employees, and the good hire you'd like to land one day. They all do the same thing: they search your name and they look you up on LinkedIn. They want to see who you are now and follow where you're going.
If there's nothing there, no site, an empty page, no story, all that attention hits a void and rolls straight past. You don't get that day back. A launch is a wave: you catch it or you miss it, and you can't start building the board once the wave has already arrived.
Two players, and the buyer can go two ways
In a carve-out there are really only two players: the company selling and the company buying. But the buyer can go one of two very different ways, and the marketing job changes completely depending on which.
The seller. Part of the business walks out the door, and what's left has to answer a hard question fast: who are we now? The seller often keeps its name and its history, but it still has to reposition around the gap and reassure the people watching that it is standing strong.
The buyer. Same player, two scenarios. Either fold the new part into an existing brand, which is absorption: moving people, customers and stories into an identity that already exists, without losing the thing that made the acquired piece worth buying in the first place. Or build a brand-new identity from scratch: new name, new look, new website, new voice, all from zero, all on a deadline.
In my case I was running the seller and the from-scratch version at the same time. Different jobs, opposite directions, the same clock ticking toward the same announcement.
Three things I'd tell you to be ready for
Do it in the right order. Strategy and market first. A strategy isn't built in a day either, and getting there takes hard conversations that are uncomfortable and necessary: who is this company for now, who does it stand for, where do we win. My job in those rooms isn't to hand over the answer. It's to get the right people sitting down and asking the right things. And don't reinvent the wheel. With the seller, most of the raw material was already there: decades of reference history, projects, relationships, proof. Start there. Answer "where do we win" and the branding and the go-to-market finally have something solid to stand on. Skip it and start with a logo, and you'll feel it later.
Find your anchor. Everything is in motion in a carve-out, which is exactly why things stall. There's nothing solid to push off from. So find the one thing that is solid and build out from it. For the seller it was the name, carrying years of trust. For the new company there was no name yet, so the anchor was the people: the team and the know-how that came across with the deal.
Don't go silent. The instinct is to wait until everything has settled before saying anything. That silence is the stall. Keep communicating through the change. The market doesn't pause just because you're busy.
Are you heading into a carve-out?
None of this is luck. The companies that come out of a carve-out with real momentum prepared the ground before the announcement, while everyone else was still treating marketing as a "later" problem. Yes, it's pricey, and yes, it's ahead of certainty. But missing launch day is the most expensive option of all.
So if you're heading into a carve-out, on either side of it, don't leave the marketing in the "later" pile. Have the conversation early, and have it with someone who has already sat on both sides: the seller holding steady, and the brand-new company being built from zero. If that's the table you're sitting at right now, let's talk before the ink dries. That's exactly when I can do the most for you.