Guide · Private Equity
The first 100 days, built to ship.
Cheap leverage and multiple expansion are gone. The return now has to be built out of operations, and the build starts on day one. Here is the operator's 100-day plan for a portfolio company: what to diagnose, what to decide, and what to get into the P&L before day 100.
This guide, in 7 parts
The return now comes from operations, not the cap table.
Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report calls it "12 is the new 5". In the cheap-money decade, a typical deal needed about 5% annual EBITDA growth to clear a 2.5x return over five years. With borrowing costs at 8-9%, leverage down to 30-40% and multiples flat, the same deal now needs closer to 10-12%. The lift that used to come from cheap debt and an expanding multiple is gone, and it is not coming back this cycle.
That moves the work. Margin expansion is no longer an upside case, it is the mandate, and it has to start on day one, because the average hold is already at seven years and IRR stagnates around there. The first 100 days are where you stop financing the return and start building it. This is the plan we run when we are the operators on the bridge.
« You can no longer buy the return. You have to build it, and the build starts on day one. »
A 100-day plan is not the thesis with dates on it.
The deal model is a hypothesis built from the outside. A plan that ships is what survives contact with the operating reality, narrowed to the few moves that actually carry the EBITDA bridge and staffed to land.
The two things that kill a 100-day plan are the same every time: too many initiatives, so attention spreads and nothing reaches cash, and a plan that only ever lived in the model, so its wrong assumptions surface in month four when there is no runway to fix them.
So the discipline is subtraction and proof. Cut to the moves that move the number, give each a single owner with a date, and get one of them into the P&L before day 100. We have written EBITDA bridges and stood behind them, so the rest of this guide is what we actually do, in sequence.
Diagnose, decide, ship.
Three phases, in order. The first two earn the right to the third. The point of the whole thing is one cashed win by day 100, not a finished deck.
- Days 0-30Diagnose
Find the truth, not the thesis.
The deal model is a hypothesis, not a plan. Spend the first month confirming what is actually true: the real margin bridge, where revenue concentrates, which costs are structural and which are habit, and which systems can carry growth and which will break at 1.5x volume.
Sit with the people who run the work, read the data they run it from, and write down the gap between the diligence story and the operating reality. You are not deciding yet. You are removing the assumptions that would have killed the plan in month four.
By the end of the phase A one-page truth: the bridge that has to be built, in EBITDA, with the few facts that move it.
- Days 30-60Decide
Pick the few moves that carry the bridge.
Now you choose. Most 100-day decks list fifteen initiatives because nobody wanted to cut one. That is the failure mode. Rank every candidate by EBITDA impact against time-to-cash and certainty, then keep the three or four that clear the bar and kill the rest out loud, so the org knows what it is not doing.
Name an owner for each, with a number and a date, not a workstream and a steering committee. Decide the build-vs-buy and team-vs-fractional calls here, while there is still runway to staff them. A plan nobody can hold in their head does not ship.
By the end of the phase Three or four moves, each with one owner, one number, one date. Everything else parked on the record.
- Days 60-100Ship
Get one move to cash before day 100.
The back forty is for landing, not planning. Pick the move with the fastest payback, usually a commercial or pricing one, and take it all the way into the P&L, not into a pilot. Wire it to the real systems and the real data, put it in front of the people who run it, and measure the result the deal cares about, not activity.
One shipped, cashed, defensible win by day 100 changes every later conversation with the board and the management team. It proves the bridge is buildable, and it earns the right to the slower structural moves that pay off in years two and three.
By the end of the phase One lever live in the P&L, measured, with a runbook the team owns. The rest sequenced behind it.
The three levers worth chasing in a 3-5 year hold.
Not because nothing else matters, but because in a 100-day window these are the ones that reliably reach the P&L and compound across the hold. The order is deliberate: pull the fast commercial win first, then the structural moves it buys you time for.
Commercial and pricing
The fastest cash in the building, and the most under-touched. Few portfolio companies have ever run a disciplined pricing transformation, yet for a typical mid-size company a 1% pricing improvement lifts profit far more than a 1% cut to variable or fixed cost.
It needs no platform and no eighteen-month program: discounting discipline, price realisation, and win-back are weeks of work that show up in the next quarter's P&L. Chase this first because it is the move most likely to cash inside the 100 days.
Why this one Reaches cash fastest, needs no new system, and is almost always left on the table.
Digital that removes a real cost
Not a transformation, a specific cost or constraint with a number on it: an order-to-cash that leaks margin, a manual process that caps throughput, a quote turnaround that loses deals. Replatform or rebuild only the part that pays back inside the hold, sequence the rest, and never migrate everything at once into a peak season.
Digital earns its place in the 100-day plan when it removes a named cost, not when it modernises the stack for its own sake.
Why this one Compounds across the hold, but only when scoped to a costed constraint, not a stack rebuild.
AI that ships into production
AI is now a lens every sponsor applies to the portfolio, and it is real margin when it reaches production. Most of it does not: the model gets the attention, the workflow gets none, and it dies in the demo.
The version that lands is narrow, wired to the systems that hold the work, governed from the first workflow, and owned by the team that runs it. Pick one process with a measurable cost, ship it for real, then extend. A pilot that wowed the room and never cashed is not a lever, it is a line item. See our guide on getting AI from pilot to production.
Why this one A genuine margin lever, but only the version that reaches production and is owned, not demoed.
Note on the pricing math: the finding that a 1% price move beats a 1% cost cut on profit is McKinsey's, from Pricing: the next frontier of value creation in private equity (2019). Older than the rest of our sources, still the cleanest statement of why this lever pays back fastest.
What ships, and what only looks good in the deck.
Both columns show up in real 100-day plans. One side cashes. The other survives the year-one board on the strength of the slide alone.
Where to put a real team, and where fractional is enough.
Fractional and interim talent suits a defined, time-boxed job with a clean end: a pricing reset, the diagnostic itself, a carve-out IT separation that finishes when the TSA exits. You want the expertise, not the permanence, and renting it is the right call. The risk is using a fractional model for the move that has to ship and then keep running, because the value walks out the door the day the engagement ends.
Put a real, embedded team on the lever that becomes a capability: the AI shipped into production, the commercial engine that has to run every quarter, the digital rebuild the business now depends on. The honest test is the handover. If what you build has to live in the company after day 100, staff it to be owned, not rented. We build embedded and stay until it holds, then hand it to the management team to run without us.
Frequently asked.
What actually changed, and why does it land on the first 100 days?
Cheap leverage and rising multiples used to carry a deal. Bain's 2026 report puts borrowing costs at 8-9%, leverage at 30-40% and multiples flat, so a deal that once needed about 5% annual EBITDA growth now needs closer to 10-12% for the same 2.5x return.
That growth has to come from operations, and it has to start early, because IRR stagnates around year seven and the average hold is already there. The first 100 days are where you stop financing returns and start building them.
Should the 100-day plan be the deal thesis with dates on it?
No. The thesis is a hypothesis built from outside the company. The first thirty days exist to test it against operating reality, and some of it will not survive contact. Use days 0-30 to find the truth, days 30-60 to decide the few moves that carry the bridge, and days 60-100 to ship one of them into the P&L.
A plan that simply restates the model with deadlines tends to discover its wrong assumptions in month four, when there is no time left to fix them.
How many initiatives should a 100-day plan have?
Three or four that you will actually land, not fifteen that look thorough. The common failure is a value-creation map nobody wanted to trim, so attention spreads and nothing reaches cash. Rank by EBITDA impact against time-to-cash and certainty, keep the few that clear the bar, give each one owner with a number and a date, and kill the rest on the record. A plan you can hold in your head is a plan that ships.
Which lever should we pull first?
Usually commercial or pricing, because it reaches cash fastest and needs no new platform. Most portfolio companies have never run a disciplined pricing effort, and for a typical mid-size company a 1% pricing improvement moves profit far more than a 1% cost cut.
Digital and AI matter, but they pay back over the hold and only when scoped to a named cost and shipped into production. Land the fast commercial win inside 100 days, then sequence the structural moves behind it.
When do we put a real team on it versus a fractional one?
Fractional or interim suits a defined, time-boxed job with a clear end: a pricing reset, a diagnostic, a carve-out IT separation. Put a real, embedded team on the move that has to ship and then keep running, where the value is lost the day the advisor leaves. The test is the handover. If the capability has to live in the company after 100 days, staff it to be owned, not rented.
An operating partner can run most of this. Bring us in when a value-creation plan has to become shipped EBITDA, not another deck: when a move has stalled between pilot and production, when the bridge depends on digital or AI that has to land inside the hold, or when you need operators embedded fast without a permanent hire. We build, we ship into the P&L, and we hand it to the team to run.
A bridge that has to be built?
No deck, no gate. A working session on the real plan, with the operators who would get a move into the P&L.