We have prepared 100-day go-to-market plans for nine lower-middle-market private equity firms, covering manufacturing, field services, software and healthcare businesses. The companies were different. The plans converged on the same sequence, and on one rule that runs through all of it: diagnose before you redesign.
The most common mistake after close is acting on the story in the investment memo: a new sales leader hired, the org chart redrawn, targets set, all before anyone has measured where revenue actually comes from. The first 100 days are for finding that out.
Days 0 to 30: freeze the picture
Change nothing yet. Make the current state visible.
- Pull the revenue record. Every invoice and quote from the last 24 months, sorted by customer, service line and how the customer was won. The quotes that were lost or went unanswered say more about the business than any management presentation.
- Map every revenue relationship by name. Not by segment. Who is the buyer, what did they buy, when did they last renew, and who at the company personally owns the relationship.
- Talk to the people who actually close. Not only the owner. Ask them to walk through the last five deals that closed and the last three that didn't. The gap between the two is the real sales process.
- Ask what would make the top customers leave. The answer says more about retention risk than any churn model.
- Find the founder's one number. Ask which metric tells them whether a month is going well. It shows how the business actually runs.
- Write down the informal system before replacing it. How proposals start, how bids are tracked (often a whiteboard, an inbox or someone's memory), and how long a deal takes.
- Tell customers one thing: continuity. No rebrand, no reorganisation, no announcement.
Days 31 to 60: score it and steady it
- Install the smallest tracking layer that works. A shared pipeline log with each deal's decision-maker, expected close date, value and outcome. Not a CRM rollout; visibility first.
- Pressure-test the pipeline. Every open deal needs a real decision-maker, a real date and a real reason the customer is buying now. Remove anything that fails all three.
- Check the plan against history. Apply the conversion rates you measured in the first 30 days to today's pipeline. If the result doesn't support the board plan, say so now, not at month nine.
- Name the dependencies. If the founder is still the main closer, or a few customers carry most of the revenue, put a named owner and a date against each risk.
- Pick one or two places to grow. The services or customers where a cross-sell is most likely, each with a person, an account and a next step. Not a campaign.
Days 61 to 100: prove it and make it repeatable
- Reconcile forecast against reality. Compare what closed against what the Day-30 pipeline said would close. That gap is your forecast-accuracy baseline.
- Test the deal-model assumptions. By now there is enough post-close data to see whether customer relationships transferred as expected.
- Give the board one page. Where the company started on Day 1, where it is now, the two or three gaps that carry the most revenue risk, and who owns each.
- Set the rhythm. A monthly pipeline review and a quarterly re-score, using the same measures every time.
- Write down what diligence missed. Add it to the playbook for the next acquisition.
Why the same measures matter
The value is not the score at any one company. It is being able to compare every company in the portfolio on the same terms, so the operating team can see where go-to-market risk sits and show the board how it is moving.