The hundred days after close is the only period in which an acquired business expects things to change. Spend it well and the value creation plan has momentum. Spend it producing another assessment and you have burned the one window where change is uncontroversial.
The mistake we see most often is starting over. Diligence produced a findings document under time pressure; the new team commissions a fresh review; three months go by; everything discovered the second time was in the first report.
Here is a sequence that avoids that.
Days 1–15: stabilise and secure access
Before anything strategic, deal with the things that are genuinely urgent — which is a much shorter list than it feels like.
- Administrative access. Establish who holds domain, cloud, banking-adjacent and vendor portal admin rights, including anyone who has left. This is routinely the single largest unmanaged risk at close.
- Contract change-of-control. Identify every agreement with an assignment or change-of-control clause and get ahead of the notifications. Missing one converts a routine renewal into a leverage problem.
- Backups, verified. Not that backups exist — that a restore has been performed and timed. If it has not been tested, it is a plan, not a capability.
- The critical-person list. Who, if they resigned this week, would stop something important? Have the retention conversation before month two, not after.
Nothing on this list is strategic. All of it is expensive to discover later.
Days 15–45: establish the baseline
You cannot demonstrate improvement without a defensible starting point, and the baseline gets harder to construct every week as changes accumulate.
Build a technology cost baseline that a CFO would sign: every vendor, every contract, every renewal date, every cloud commitment, normalised to a monthly run rate and reconciled to the general ledger. Then freeze it and date it.
At the same time, build the renewal calendar for the next eighteen months with notice periods marked. This single document drives more of the next two years of savings than any strategy deck, because it converts negotiations from reactive to planned.
If diligence was done properly, most of this exists already. The work is validation, not reconstruction.
Days 30–60: take the reversible wins
Start with changes that are quick, low-risk and visibly beneficial — partly for the savings, mostly because they establish that this process produces outcomes.
- Reclaim licences from leavers and dormant accounts
- Shut down non-production environments outside working hours
- Cancel duplicate tooling where an equivalent is already licensed
- Right-size the obvious cloud waste: unattached storage, oversized instances, orphaned snapshots
These are reversible, they need no committee, and they usually pay for the first phase of the wider programme. They also give the incumbent team an early experience of the new owner being useful rather than merely demanding.
Days 45–90: sequence the structural work
Now take the findings that need real effort — system consolidation, integration, process redesign, security remediation — and sequence them against three axes: value, effort, and whether the business can absorb the disruption right now.
Resist doing them in parallel. An operating company with a functioning technology team can usually absorb one significant change at a time and one background workstream. Attempt four and you will finish none, while degrading service in all of them.
Publish the sequence. Half the value of a hundred-day plan is that everyone stops wondering what is coming.
Days 60–100: install the mechanism
The final task is the one most easily skipped and the one that determines whether any of this holds: put in place the mechanism that keeps it from happening again.
- A named owner for the vendor portfolio, with the renewal calendar in their objectives
- A spend approval threshold above which new tools need a decision, not just a card
- A monthly benefit tracker reconciled to the ledger, reviewed with finance
- A quarterly review that revisits the baseline against actuals
Without this, the savings decay. Licences re-accumulate, tools reappear, and in three years someone commissions another assessment that finds the same seven categories.
What good looks like at day 100
Not a transformed technology estate — that takes years and should. What you should have is a validated cost baseline, the easy money already banked, a sequenced plan with owners and dates, and a governance mechanism that means the next review is a check rather than a rediscovery.
That is an achievable hundred days. Anything more ambitious usually means something on the urgent list in the first fifteen days did not get done.