The wire clears, the lawyers go quiet and you own a business.
What happens in the next hundred days decides whether you bought an asset or bought yourself a job.
The instinct is to arrive with a plan and start improving things.
Across the twelve acquisitions our founder has integrated, the first month is mostly about not breaking what was paid for.
The value usually comes from a small number of deliberate moves rather than a long list of changes.
What should you do in the first 100 days after buying a business?
Three things, roughly in sequence.
Keep the business running.
Find out what is actually true.
Then change a small number of things deliberately.
The temptation is to compress them and start changing things before anyone understands what was bought.
Days 1 to 30, keep it running
Secure banking authority, payroll, insurance and system access.
Meet everybody.
Talk to the largest customers yourself, early, before they hear about the change from somebody else.
Confirm invoicing and vendor payments will not miss a cycle.
Resist the urge to announce a strategy.
Days 31 to 60, find out what is true
Work out where decisions actually stop, what is written down and what is not, and which relationships were personal to the previous owner.
An operational due diligence run before the close will have produced most of this already.
Which is the main argument for doing it then rather than now.
Days 61 to 100, change a few things on purpose
Pick the smallest number of changes that matter, sequence them and put a name and a date against each.
A short list that gets finished usually builds more confidence with a new team than a long list that stalls.
What should you not change in the first thirty days?
Pricing, people and the brand, unless something is actively on fire.
Each of those signals to customers and staff that the thing they chose has changed, and month one rarely provides enough information to make those calls well.
The exception is anything genuinely unsafe or losing money on every transaction. Those do not improve with patience.
This is fairly settled advice.
The Business Development Bank of Canada reaches the same conclusion from a lender’s vantage point.
Listen first, and make the structural changes once you understand what you bought.
What breaks first after a close?
Communication, in our experience.
In the absence of information people write their own version, and the version they write is usually worse than the truth.
The second most common failure is that decisions which used to take a day start waiting for a meeting nobody has scheduled.
The old escalation path left with the owner.
Both are cheap to prevent in week one and expensive to repair in month five. That is why an integration is run as an operation with its own rhythm rather than as a checklist.
See how we run M&A integration.
How do you keep the team?
Tell them what is not changing, first and specifically.
New owners tend to lead with their vision, which the team often hears as a list of things about to be taken away.
Naming what stays buys the credibility to change other things later.
Then find the people the business actually depends on, which is rarely identical to the org chart. Have a direct conversation with each of them inside the first two weeks.
When do you need help?
When you are also the person expected to run the business day to day.
Integration is a full-time job for somebody. Asking a leadership team to integrate while they operate is how both jobs get done badly.
If nobody has a spare hundred days, that is the gap to fill deliberately rather than hope through.
Our founder has integrated twelve of these, on both sides of a deal.
See how we work on the buy side, or take the free Deal Risk Check if you are still evaluating a target.
Common questions
Should I keep the previous owner on after the close?
A transition period is usually worth having, with a defined scope and end date.
Use it to transfer relationships, decisions and knowledge deliberately.
The risk is leaving them as the escalation point, which entrenches the dependency you are trying to remove.
How soon should I tell customers about the change?
Early, and from you rather than from a rumor.
Contact the largest accounts personally in the first two weeks.
What usually reassures them is continuity of the people they deal with and a clear answer about what is not changing.
What if diligence missed something significant?
Triage before integration.
Stop the immediate damage, establish what is actually true and only then decide which integration approach you are really running.
Trying to continue the original plan over an unknown problem is how a fixable issue becomes a structural one.
Do I need a formal 100-day plan?
A short written plan should name the decisions, the owners and the dates.
The formality matters less than the fact that it exists and that everyone has read it.
Somebody should be accountable for each line, rather than a committee being responsible for all of it.
