A 100-day plan is a start, not a document.
Every engagement runs the same four phases. What changes is the business underneath them.
Diagnose
Before we change anything, we spend two to three weeks inside the business — plant floors, sales calls, the general ledger, and exit interviews with people who've already left. Most value-creation plans get written by people who skipped this step.
Prioritize
We rank every opportunity by cash impact and time to execute, not by how interesting it is. A plan with fourteen priorities has zero priorities. We usually leave a sponsor with four to six.
Execute
Kestrel operators sit inside the function — commercial, ops, or finance — running the work alongside the existing team, not around it. Weekly cadence, not quarterly.
Transition
We build the muscle to run without us — reporting cadences, pricing governance, a bench that can hold the gains — then we leave. A permanent team should never need to call us back for the same problem.
We show up before the ink is dry.
Most engagements begin inside the first thirty days of ownership, often before the first board meeting. The earlier we're in, the more of the thesis is still ours to shape rather than repair.