I recently helped a company through a carve-out, and I was on both sides of it at once. The company that stayed behind after part of it was sold, and the brand-new company that was born out of the deal.
Here's what they did that most companies don't: they kept marketing and communication alive the whole way through, while the hard work of repositioning one company and building another from scratch was happening in parallel.
Costly? Maybe. But nowhere near as costly as the alternative. Let me tell you why.
The frustrating part (and I'll be honest, it is frustrating) is that you're building a brand before there's ink on the paper. You're shaping the identity of something that isn't fully real yet. No signatures, no certainty, and you're already choosing names, colours, words. It can feel like spending money on a maybe.
But here's the thing: the moment that ink dries, everything moves fast. Suddenly it's announcement day and the world is watching. And we all know 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're spending ahead of the deal, with no guarantee. But missing the moment costs far more than preparing for it.
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, the good hire you'd love to land one day. They all do the same thing: they search your name and they look for you 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's already arrived.
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.
Player one — the seller (let's call it Company A). Part of the business walks out the door, and what's left has to answer a hard question fast: who are we now? A often keeps its name and its history, but it still has to reposition around the gap and reassure the people watching that it's still standing strong.
Player two — the buyer. This is where it splits. Same player, two scenarios:
In this case, I was running Company A and Scenario C at the same time. Keeping the seller steady while standing up a whole new company beside it. Different jobs, opposite directions, the same clock ticking toward the same announcement.
Do it in the right order: strategy and market first. A strategy isn't built in a day either, and getting there takes some hard conversations. They're uncomfortable, and they're necessary: who is this company for now? Who does it stand for? My job here isn't to hand over the answer. It's to get people sitting down internally and asking the right things. And don't reinvent the wheel. With Company A, a lot of the raw material was already there: decades of reference history, projects, relationships, proof. That's where you look first. It all comes back to one simple question: where do we win? Answer that, 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's 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 Company A it was the name, carrying years of trust. For Scenario C 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's settled before saying anything. But that silence is the stall. Keep communicating through the change. The market doesn't pause just because you're busy.
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's 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. Book a free consultation here >>