The first 100 days after you acquire

The clock starts the morning the money moves

The champagne's flat and now you own it. Whatever you do in the next hundred days sets the tone for everything that follows.

This is the window where value is either built or quietly destroyed. Move well and the team settles, the customers stay, and the two businesses start to feel like one. Drift, go quiet, wing it, and your best people update their CVs while your best customers take a call from a competitor. The first hundred days come down to one job. Don't break what you just paid for while you find your feet.

Have the plan ready before completion. Working it out afterwards, tired and stretched, is how good deals turn ordinary.

Days 1 to 7: be present and be honest

Week one is about one thing. Killing the silence.

Be in the building or on the call on day one. Not a memo. You, in person, saying who you are, why you bought the company, and what happens next. People have spent the run-up to the deal imagining the worst. Your job is to replace the horror film in their heads with a real, plain account of what's actually going on.

You won't have all the answers yet. Say so. "Here's what I know. Here's what I don't. Here's when I'll tell you more." That honesty does more for you than any polished welcome pack ever will.

Fear grows in silence. The fastest way to lose a business you just bought is to say nothing.

Meet the key people one to one that first week. The ones who hold the customers, the knowledge, the culture. Listen far more than you talk. You're there to work out who your crown jewels are, so you know exactly who you cannot afford to lose.

Days 8 to 30: stabilise, don't reorganise

The first month is for holding things steady. Resist every urge to start "improving" the place.

You bought it for a reason. Right now you protect that reason and change almost nothing else. Customers keep the account manager they trust. The founder stays visible so the staff can see the world hasn't ended. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that screams "the suits have taken over".

That doesn't mean sitting on your hands. Behind the scenes you're learning fast. Where does the cash really come from? What's held together with goodwill and a spreadsheet? Who actually runs things when the founder's out? You're building the real map, the one that's never in the diligence pack, so that when you do start changing things you're cutting with the grain instead of against it.

Reorganise in month one and you'll do it half-blind. Wait, learn, then move.

Days 31 to 60: one version of the truth

Now you start on the plumbing. The single most valuable thing you can do in this window is get to one set of numbers.

Until the business reports inside your system, on your definitions, you don't really control it. You've a black box that emails you a figure once a month and asks you to trust it. So this is where you connect the finance, agree what a sale and a cost mean on both sides, and get to a shared view of margin, cash and pipeline across the group.

• Get both businesses reporting on the same definitions
• Move towards one system of record, even if the customer-facing side stays separate a while
• Refuse to run two of everything forever just because "that's how they've always done it"

This is dull work and it's the work that matters. Multiple versions of the truth is what drags your valuation down at exit. Building that mess on purpose, the day you complete, is a slow and expensive mistake. Fix it early while everyone's still expecting change.

Days 61 to 100: prove the thesis

The last stretch is about the reason you bought the thing in the first place.

You had a thesis. Cross-sell to their customers. Strip out duplicated cost. Push your product through their sales team. Whatever it was, now's when you land the first proof it's real. Not all of it. One clear win that tells you, and your team, and your funders, that the logic holds.

Small and real beats big and theoretical here. One cross-sell that closes. One duplicated cost genuinely removed without breaking anything. Momentum comes from evidence, and evidence comes from finishing something, not planning everything.

By day 100 you should be able to answer three questions honestly. Did I keep the people and customers I paid for? Can I see the truth across both businesses in one place? Have I proved, even in a small way, that the deal does what I said it would?

If the answer's no, you learn and you adjust

Get to day 100 and find the answers are shaky? Good. Better to know now than at exit, when a buyer's diligence team finds it for you.

The first hundred days are a rehearsal for the second acquisition, and the third. Integration lives inside Scale for exactly this reason. Each time you do it, you get sharper, faster, less violent. The owners who win at buy-and-build aren't the ones who never stumble. They're the ones who run a tight hundred days, learn from it, and do the next one better.

If you've a deal closing soon and no plan for the morning after, fix that first. A strategy call maps your first hundred days before you complete, not after it wobbles. Book one and walk in with a plan instead of a hope.