The 100-day plan: turning the deal thesis into a working plan

What the 100-day plan is for

A 100-day plan makes the first months after closing count. It tells the management team and the new owner what will be done, by whom and by when; it sets the reporting rhythm between them; and it shows early whether the thesis is holding. The hundred days are a convention, not a law. Some plans run to six months; what matters is that the period is short enough to keep urgency and long enough to change something real.

It is not the full value-creation plan for the holding period, and it is not an integration plan for a strategic acquirer, though it often feeds both.

Start before signing

The best 100-day plans are drafted during diligence. By signing, the deal team knows what the model assumes, what diligence found, and what management has said it can do. Turning that into a draft plan forces three useful conversations before the price is fixed:

• Which findings change the price, and which are post-close work.
• What the plan will cost, including one-off spend that the model must carry.
• Whether the current management team can deliver it, or who must be added.

The structure

Governance

A small steering group (the deal partner, the chief executive, the chief financial officer, and an operating partner if the firm has one) meets weekly in the first months. A light project office keeps the plan, the issue log and the reporting. Each workstream has one named owner on the management team.

Value-creation workstreams

Three to six workstreams drawn directly from the thesis: pricing, sales effectiveness, procurement, working capital, product, add-on acquisitions. Each one has a baseline, a target, a measure and a date.

Foundations

The workstreams that make the rest possible, and that diligence usually shows are weaker than they look:

• Financial reporting: a monthly pack the board can rely on, with a close that does not take three weeks.
• KPIs: the handful of measures that show whether the thesis is working.
• People: management assessment, gaps filled, incentives aligned with the plan.
• Technology and security: remediation of what diligence found, and the basics that protect the value being created.

A one-page view

The plan should fit on a page for the board, with detail underneath for the owners:

The example is illustrative. The rows should come from your own thesis and diligence.

Technology and cyber in the 100-day plan

Technology diligence produces a list of findings; the 100-day plan decides what happens to each of them. A workable approach is to sort them into three groups:

• Fix now (first 30 days): anything that exposes the business to an incident today. Administrator credentials held by people who have left, missing multi-factor authentication on remote access, backups that have never been restored, internet-facing systems with known vulnerabilities.
• Fund and schedule (by day 100): findings that need budget and time. End-of-life operating systems or databases, licences that need to be regularised, a missing incident response plan, single points of failure in the people who run critical systems.
• Decide (by day 100): structural questions. Rebuild or keep a platform, move to a different cloud arrangement, consolidate onto the owner's or a platform company's systems.

Each finding gets an owner, a cost estimate and a date. If the deal model did not carry the cost, that is worth knowing early. Our articles on hidden technical debt and cybersecurity gaps in PE portfolio companies describe the findings that most often end up here.

Measuring progress

• Weekly: workstream status against milestones, the issue log, cash.
• Monthly: the KPI pack and the financial pack, against the deal model.
• At day 100: a review of what was delivered, what slipped and why, and the plan for the next period.

Status reports that are always green are a warning sign. Ask each owner what is at risk and what they need.

The management team

Most 100-day plans contain a judgement about people, whether it is written down or not. Make it explicit:

• Assess early. By day 30, the owner and the chief executive should agree whether the team can deliver the plan, and which roles need to be added or changed. A finance function that cannot produce a reliable monthly pack and an IT function run by one person are the most common gaps.
• Align incentives. Management equity and bonuses should reward the outcomes the plan targets, on a timetable the team believes in.
• Protect capacity. The same managers run the business. Use interim specialists for one-off projects rather than loading the team with them.

Quick wins that count

Quick wins build credibility for the plan, but only if they are real. A useful test: a quick win changes a number the board tracks within the 100 days, needs no new system, and does not borrow from later. Pricing corrections on clearly under-priced contracts, procurement savings on contracts up for renewal and stopping obvious waste usually qualify. Announcing a reorganisation does not.

An illustrative example: from finding to plan item

Suppose technology diligence on a software business reported three findings. This is how each might appear in the plan. The example is illustrative, not a benchmark.

Preparing a platform for add-ons

If the thesis includes buy-and-build, the 100-day plan has to make the platform ready to absorb acquisitions: a finance function that can consolidate new entities, an identity and email set-up that new companies can join, security standards that an add-on can be brought up to, and someone who owns the integration playbook. Platforms that skip this step find that each add-on is integrated differently and the group never runs as one.

When the thesis looks wrong

Sometimes the first months show that an assumption in the model was wrong: customers less loyal than they seemed, a product harder to sell, a system that has to be rebuilt. The plan's job is to surface that early. Re-forecast honestly, decide what changes in the plan, and tell the board. A plan that hides a broken assumption until the year-end budget has failed at its main purpose.

Common failures

• Too many workstreams. Twenty initiatives with the same five managers means none of them get done.
• No owners, or the wrong owners. A plan owned by the deal team rather than management is a report, not a plan.
• Foundations skipped. Value creation on top of unreliable reporting cannot be measured.
• Technology treated as overhead. Findings from diligence that are not funded become the next buyer's price reduction.
• Plan written after closing. By then, the momentum of the deal has gone.

Checklist

• Draft plan written during diligence and reviewed before signing.
• Three to six value-creation workstreams, each with baseline, target, measure and owner.
• Foundations covered: reporting, KPIs, people, technology and security.
• Every diligence finding assigned: fix now, fund and schedule, or decide.
• One-off costs of the plan reflected in the deal model.
• Weekly steering rhythm and a monthly KPI pack agreed with management.
• Day-100 review in the calendar.