Case study
A business the morning after a private equity transaction completed. Same desk, same team, same numbers on the screen — and new owners on the shareholder register, a board pack expected to somebody else’s schedule, and a message in the inbox asking for the 100-day plan.
Nothing had broken. That is what makes this period dangerous. Nobody is shouting and nobody is panicking, but the clock has been reset, and the question hanging over the first few months is not being asked out loud: can this management team deliver, or does it need changing? A hundred days is how long you have to answer it, whether or not anybody says so.
The common mistake is treating the 100-day plan as a fresh planning exercise — blank whiteboard, three-year vision, big strategic themes. That is not what the first hundred days are for, and it is not what new owners are asking for.
The plan does not start from a blank page. It starts from the diligence files.
Every due diligence report produced during the sale process — financial, commercial, operational, often tax and legal too — is full of findings. Weak month-end processes. Revenue recognition that needs tightening. A customer concentration nobody has addressed. A finance system held together with spreadsheets for three years too long. During the deal those findings sat in an appendix, were skimmed by lawyers and priced into the terms somewhere. The day the deal completes, they become the action list.
So the first move, every time, is to pull together every diligence report available and build one register of every finding, every gap, every “management should address” comment. Then rank it: urgent, important but not urgent, nice to have. That register is the 100-day plan. It is not a document somebody invented; it is the new owners’ own advisers telling you what they found, and it is the only version of the plan they will already believe.
New owners are not watching what management says in the first hundred days. They are watching what management fixes.
Take a real example of how this goes wrong. Diligence flags that the business is underinsured for business interruption. Management had assessed that risk and consciously paid a lower premium — a defensible decision, made on the numbers. It now has to be fixed anyway, because it was flagged. Leave it and one of two things is true: either the reports were not read properly, or they were read and ignored. Neither is a good answer, and the liability for the decision has quietly moved.
That is the mindset shift worth taking from this: the sale process is not finished when the deal completes. Acting on what diligence found is how those fees get justified, and it is where the new relationship is either established or damaged. There is no template, and that is deliberate — the work is the register and the ranking, not the document.
What this would cost as a Fraci brief — a worked example
3 days a week for the first 4 weeks, then 2 days a week for 10 weeks — 32 days
£1,000–£1,200 a day
£32,000 – £38,400
For the period in which a management team’s credibility with its new owners is decided. This is an example, not a quote. Rates vary by band, sector and urgency, and every engagement is scoped and priced before it starts.
Tell us the problem, the days and the timeframe. We will come back with people who have done it before.
This is exactly what we read a CV for. Free to join, and always free to the Fraci.