The first-100-days checklist most new CEOs skip

Five moves that separate operators who ship from operators who spin their wheels through their first quarter.

Most first-time CEOs of acquired companies read a dozen Twitter threads on "what to do in the first 100 days" before close. By Day 3, they realize the threads overlap on 20 things, each labeled "critical." By Day 30, half of them haven't been touched.

Here is the shorter version. Five moves. If you get these five right, everything else compounds. If you skip any of them, the rest of your Day-100 plan is fragile.

1. Ship the monthly package by day 10 of close

Your lender, your board, and your management team all assume the monthly package will show up the same week every month. If it shows up late or looks different every month, you lose credibility you cannot rebuild.

Lock a one-page format: P&L (actual vs budget vs prior year), balance sheet, cash flow, covenant compliance summary, top-seven KPI scorecard, one-page CEO commentary. Ship by the tenth business day after month-end. Same order every month. Bad news on the front page, not the back.

Pitfall: letting your CFO design the package. They will optimize for accounting completeness, not management decisions. You are the customer; specify what you want to see.

2. Interview five customers off the seller's reference list

The five customers the seller offered are not the signal. The signal is the five they did not offer.

Pull the top 20 customers by revenue from the billing export. Strike the five on the seller's reference list. Of the remaining 15, pick three largest plus two smallest. Route the outreach through your banker or QoE provider so it looks neutral.

Call each for 30 minutes. Use exactly this script: "Walk me through why you first chose them. What makes you renew each year. What would cause you to leave. Who else did you consider and why not them. If the price went up 10%, what would you do."

Take verbatim notes. Do not sell. Do not defend. If you hear the same complaint from three of them, you found your first integration priority.

3. Score every leader on Gets-Wants-Capacity in week two

You cannot run a business with a leadership team you have not evaluated. Score each direct report 1 to 5 on three dimensions: Gets the seat (understands what the job requires), Wants the seat (actually wants this specific job, not just a job), Capacity for the seat (has the time, skills, and energy to do it at your required bar).

Below 3 on any dimension is a development case, role change, or transition decision. Make the call inside 90 days. Every month you carry a wrong-seat leader past 90 days costs you six months of momentum.

Do this in week two, not month three. The sooner you score, the sooner you can act, and the cheaper the exit is for both sides.

4. Install the weekly operating rhythm in week one

Pick Monday or Tuesday, 8:30 to 10:00 AM. Send a recurring invite to the leadership team. Publish a written agenda before the first meeting: Segue, Scorecard, Rock review, Customer and employee headlines, To-Do review, Issues (IDS for 60 minutes), Conclude with cascading messages.

The first meeting will feel rough. The tenth will feel transformative. The discipline is not the content; the discipline is the consistency. Protect this meeting like a board meeting.

Run the first four yourself, then rotate facilitation.

5. Draft your 100-day plan on paper before Day 1

The time to write the 100-day plan is during diligence. The time to stress-test it is during the two-week pre-close window. By Day 1, it should already be printed, circulated, and have owners assigned to every line.

Structure: five workstreams (Financial Controls, Commercial, Talent and Org, Technology and Data, Leadership). Three to five goals per workstream. Each goal has an owner, a due date, and a measurable "done when." Ship it as a one-page visual your leadership team can mount on the wall.

Most operators write this plan in month two, after they have burned a month reacting. You want to be executing in month two, not planning.

If you can do these five things in your first thirty days, the next seventy days run on momentum. If you try to do the other twenty things first, you will wake up in month three still working on the same five.

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