Insights

The First 90 Days After You Buy a Business: An Operator's Plan

Most of the value in an acquisition is created after closing, not at the table. A former CRA auditor and Lean Black Belt on the operator's first 90 days: what to leave alone, what to write down, and what to fix first.

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A deal is where a business gets priced. It is almost never where it gets better. That happens after, in the first few months, when someone has to run the thing and discovers how much of it lived in the previous owner's head. I have come to believe that the ninety days after closing decide more about the return than the price you paid. Buy well and manage the transition badly, and you have bought yourself a job with debt attached.

This is the work I am moving toward: operating alongside people who buy small businesses, not advising them from a distance. What follows is how I would spend the first ninety days.

Days 1 to 30: watch before you touch

The strongest instinct when you take over is to start fixing. Resist it for a month. You do not yet know why things are done the way they are, and a lot of what looks inefficient is holding something together you cannot see. The seller's odd habit with a key customer might be the reason that customer stays.

So the first month is verification, not change. It is the same discipline I used for years as an auditor: compare what you were told against what actually happens. Sit where the work happens. Watch a quote get built. Follow one order from the first call to the paid invoice. Ask the person doing each job why it is done that way, and write down the answer, because half the time nobody has ever asked and the answer is a story the whole business runs on.

You are looking for one thing above all: which decisions still route back to the former owner. Every one of those is a risk you now carry personally, and the clock on them is short, because that person is leaving.

Get what is in one person's head onto paper

The most valuable and most fragile asset in a small acquisition is rarely on the balance sheet. It is the founder's judgment. How they price a tricky job. Which suppliers they trust and which they watch. What they say to the customer who calls angry. This knowledge walks out the door on the last day of the transition.

So while the seller is still reachable, capture it. Not a thick binder nobody opens. A short, plain record of how the handful of decisions that matter actually get made. If the seller has agreed to a transition period, this is what it is for. Use those weeks to move judgment out of one head and into something a team can follow, rather than to keep the seller running the business by phone.

Days 30 to 60: put the numbers on one page

By the second month you know enough to measure. Most businesses you buy will not have a scorecard, or will have one built for the seller's comfort rather than for control. Build a small one. Eight to twelve numbers, each with a clear definition, a source, a target, and one person who owns it.

The numbers that predict a small business are usually the plain ones. How many quotes turn into work. Hours lost to redoing something. Days from finished job to invoice sent. How much revenue sits with the single biggest customer. You want the numbers that move before the bank balance does, so you can act while there is still time to act.

Days 60 to 90: fix the one thing that caps the business

Now you change something, and only one thing. Every business has a single step that everything else waits on. Find it, relieve it, and leave the rest alone until that one is working. Owners and new buyers both make the same error here: they try to improve everywhere at once and improve nowhere, because effort spent anywhere but the bottleneck just piles more work in front of the jam.

Pick the constraint that is costing you the most, whether that is a slow approval, a single overloaded person, or a machine that gets fed unevenly. Put a real fix on it. Then, and this is the part that makes it stick, name who owns the new way and check it in a short weekly meeting. A change nobody owns and nobody reviews is a change that quietly reverts the first busy week.

What ninety days should leave you with

At the end of the first quarter you should be able to say four things honestly. You understand how the business actually makes money, not how the pitch said it did. The former owner's judgment is written down where a team can use it. You have a one-page scorecard you look at every week. And you have fixed the single biggest constraint, with a name on it.

That is not a transformation. It is the foundation that makes a transformation possible, and it is the difference between owning a business and being owned by one. The value was never in the closing. It was in the ninety days nobody plans for.

If you are buying a business, or have just taken one over, that transition is the work Provenance does alongside you. You can read how the fractional operations work fits an acquisition, get in touch, or book a 30-minute call at cal.com/provenance/30min and tell me where the business still runs through one person.