The First 100 Days in a Newly Acquired Company

A sponsor closes on a founder-led business. The diligence is done, the value creation plan is written, and the finance function that comes with the company was built to serve exactly one stakeholder: the owner, who knew the business well enough that formal reporting was largely unnecessary.

Now there is a board, a lender with covenants, a monthly reporting package with a due date, and a plan that assumes decisions can be made from data. The gap between those requirements and the inherited function is the first hundred days’ work.

Week one to three: find out what you actually have

Resist the urge to change anything yet. The first weeks are for understanding, and the questions worth answering are narrow.

Can this team close the books? Not quickly — accurately. If the balance sheet does not reconcile, nothing built on top of it will be reliable, and that has to be fixed before anything else.

Where does the reporting actually come from? Trace the monthly package back to its sources. In a founder-led business, a surprising amount is typically assembled by hand by one long-tenured person. Identify who that is immediately, because they are simultaneously your most valuable resource and your largest single point of failure.

What does the system genuinely do? Companies of this size are frequently on QuickBooks with several disconnected point solutions, or on an ERP configured years ago by someone who has since left. Find out which, because it determines whether the first year involves a system replacement.

What are the covenants, and how close are they? This is urgent. Covenant compliance is not something to discover at the first quarterly test.

Week four to eight: stabilize the close

Nothing else is possible until the monthly close is reliable and lands on a predictable date.

The usual work is unglamorous: establish a close calendar with owners and due dates, enforce subledger cutoffs, standardize reconciliations, and stop treating unexplained balances as a monthly research project. In a business that never had external reporting deadlines, this is often the first time the close has had a schedule at all.

Set a realistic target. If the close currently takes four weeks, aim for ten business days, not five. Overreaching produces a rushed close with errors, and errors in the first reporting package to a new board are expensive in a way that a slightly later delivery is not.

Week six to ten: build the reporting package

The sponsor and lender packages can be built in parallel with the close work, because they are largely a presentation and definition exercise rather than an accounting one.

What matters is agreeing the definitions once, in writing. Adjusted EBITDA is the obvious example — there is a definition in the credit agreement, there may be a different one in the sponsor’s model, and management may have used a third historically. Reconciling those and documenting the result prevents a year of low-grade confusion.

Build the package to be produced the same way every month. A package assembled differently each period cannot be trusted for trend analysis, which is most of what a board reads it for.

Week eight to fourteen: get a forecast in place

Most founder-led businesses do not forecast in any structured way. The owner had a feel for the business that worked, and often worked well — but it does not transfer, and it does not scale to a sponsor’s requirements.

Start with a driver-based annual plan built with department owners rather than derived from last year plus a percentage. Then add a monthly rolling update and, if there is any liquidity pressure, a 13-week cash forecast.

The first forecast will be wrong. That is expected and not a problem. What matters is establishing the monthly review that compares forecast to actual and asks which assumption missed — that review loop helps the team assess and improve forecast usefulness over time.

What to deliberately leave alone

The instinct after close is to fix everything. That instinct is worth resisting in three areas.

Avoid committing to an ERP replacement in the first hundred days before requirements are understood. You do not yet understand the business well enough to specify requirements, and an implementation running concurrently with a stabilization effort will consume the team entirely. If the system genuinely needs replacing — and often it does — that decision belongs in months six to twelve.

Do not restructure the team immediately. The long-tenured people who hold undocumented process knowledge are load-bearing. Document what they know before making changes to the structure around them.

Do not impose reporting nobody will use. There is a temptation to require every metric from the sponsor’s template on day one. Reporting that has no consumer inside the business gets produced grudgingly and inaccurately. Start with what the board and lender genuinely need, and add operational reporting as the business demonstrates it will act on it.

What good looks like at day one hundred

The close is reliable and lands on a known date. The monthly package goes out on a fixed calendar in a consistent format. Covenant compliance is tracked continuously rather than discovered quarterly. There is a forecast, and a monthly meeting where it gets compared to actual results.

That is not a transformed finance function. It is a stable one — and stability is the platform everything in the value creation plan depends on.