The 100-day plan a private equity operating partner expects after close

What the operating partner is actually asking for

The 100-day plan is not a strategy deck. It is a sequence of dated decisions that turns a portfolio company from "recently acquired" to "one pilot live, one gate cleared, one number on the board pack." In the SEAS system the sequence is built for a company in the $50 million to $500 million revenue range and assumes what most portfolio companies have: an enterprise resource planning system, a finance team of a few people, and a chief financial officer who has to defend every dollar to a sponsor. Every step below names the document that runs it.

Days 1 to 7: the EBITDA scan

The private equity operating partner version of the FLOAT diagnostic uses the same three pockets as the operator version (selling, general and administrative expense gap; pricing and contract drift; supply chain and vendor concentration) and adds the portfolio math: a $3 million EBITDA improvement at a 10 times multiple is $30 million of equity value. Ninety minutes of executive time inside the first week produces at least three quantified opportunities. In the SEAS reference model the 72-hour ranking that follows looks like this:

The column that matters to a sponsor is "feasible in 90 days." Levers that cannot show cash inside the first quarter are logged for Phase 3, not argued about in week one.

Week 1: the investment committee memo

The one-page memo carries the three pockets, the ranked levers, the pilot recommendation and one line most memos omit: the expected 90-day cash impact. Working capital release from receivables and inventory arrives in the bank account inside 60 to 90 days; profit and loss savings from automation arrive later. Separating the two keeps the memo honest and keeps the sponsor's first question, "when do we see money," answered before it is asked. The Read Me First path for operating partners reaches this memo in five hours from opening the package.

Weeks 2 to 5: the pre-launch sequence

1. Week 2, executive alignment: chief financial officer, chief operating officer and chief information officer aligned on three target processes; EBITDA target documented; budget approved; executive sponsor named (finance or operations, never information technology alone).
2. Week 3, process documentation: current-state flowcharts for the three processes, manual touchpoints quantified, time per transaction recorded, cost baseline set, top ten exceptions documented.
3. Week 4, baseline metrics: starting EBITDA, cycle time, cost per transaction and error rate recorded; dashboard mock-up agreed; the 500-record data fitness audit run on the pilot workflow.
4. Week 5, vendor selection: three to five vendors shortlisted, demos on the company's own data, weighted scorecard completed, contract with SLA addendum reviewed by counsel and signed.

Weeks 6 to 13: the pilot and its gate

One workflow, typically accounts payable because it has the clearest baseline and the fastest payback, runs in parallel with the manual process, read-only first, with humans approving every action. Weekly steering of sixty minutes reviews four things: metrics against plan, blockers, decisions required, next week's milestones. At the end of week 8 of the pilot, which lands around day 90 of the plan, the gate applies its thresholds: accuracy above 90 percent on 100 or more validated transactions, cycle time down 25 percent, cost per transaction down 15 percent, exceptions under 8 percent, satisfaction above 3.5 of 5, plus five operational criteria, pass at seven of ten. The modeled Phase 1 result for the reference company is $500,000 to $1 million of cumulative EBITDA plus the working capital freed.

What the sponsor sees on day 100

A ten-slide board deck with the pilot result on slide 4, the return on investment on slide 5, and the Phase 2 plan on slide 7. A governance dossier started, not finished: the acceptable use policy adopted, the kill-switch operators named, the risk scorecard applied. And a decision, taken on measured evidence, to scale, pause or stop. That decision is the deliverable; the number is the proof.

Across the portfolio

The second company is cheaper. The SEAS execution manual models template agents cutting per-company deployment cost by 40 to 60 percent and time by 30 to 40 percent after the first implementation; a $3 million improvement per company across five companies is $15 million of fund-wide EBITDA, $150 million of enterprise value at a 10 times exit multiple. Two governance instruments make that repeatable: a chief executive alignment charter that links 20 to 30 percent of year-one variable compensation to AI-attributable EBITDA milestones, and a fund-level reporting template with multiple-on-invested-capital-linked key performance indicators so every portfolio company reports the same numbers the same way.