Notes from inside the businesses we work in.
Short, specific, and written by the people doing the work — not a marketing team.
The 100-day plan is not a deliverable.
Most value-creation plans are built to be presented once, to a board, and then filed. You can usually tell within the first slide: too many initiatives, too little ownership, no mechanism for anyone to notice if it's not happening. A plan that's actually going to get executed looks smaller and less impressive in the deck — four or five priorities, a named owner for each, and a number that moves within thirty days of the first one starting. If nothing measurable changes in the first month, the plan wasn't a plan. It was a wish list with a timeline attached.
Pricing is the fastest lever nobody pulls.
Ask most management teams why they haven't touched pricing in three years and the answer is some version of not wanting to risk the relationship. Meanwhile the same team will happily launch a new product line, open a new territory, or take on a systems migration — all riskier, all slower to pay back. Pricing changes are uncomfortable because they're visible immediately. That's also exactly why they're the fastest way to move EBITDA in a business that's otherwise healthy. The discomfort is the point; it means the lever still has room in it.
What we look for in the first two weeks.
The diligence data room tells you what a business claims about itself. The first two weeks inside it tell you what's actually true. We spend that time on the things that don't show up in a CIM: which customers the sales team is quietly worried about, which SKUs the plant avoids running, and what the last three people who quit actually said in their exit conversations. None of it is complicated to find. It's just rarely asked before close, because asking takes longer than the diligence timeline usually allows.
Interim leadership isn't a stopgap.
Sponsors often treat an interim CFO or COO as a placeholder — someone to keep the seat warm until the "real" search finishes. Treated that way, that's exactly what you get: caretaking, not progress. Treated as a deliberate choice, an interim leader can move faster than a permanent hire would in the same window, precisely because they're not spending their first six months building political capital. The best interim placements leave a business in better shape to hire well, not just in one piece until someone else arrives.