Insights
A working checklist for the hundred days after completion, from someone who has bought, built, sold and separated businesses. Print it, argue with it, and assign a name to every line.
By Christopher Fagan, PEF Consulting Partners. 3 September 2026.
Leadership and reporting lines decided by name, announcements drafted. Day one plan written as a go live plan: payroll, customer service, order fulfilment, regulatory notifications, each with an owner and a tested fallback. One version of financial truth designed, even if manually assembled at first. The keep, combine or kill decision made per function, system and brand. Retention conversations planned for the people who hold customer relationships and system knowledge, because competitors are already calling them. Customer and supplier communications written in plain language, delivered by faces they know.
Day one executed and visibly clean. Leadership announced everywhere at once. The money story live: cash, covenants, synergy baseline. First all hands held, questions answered honestly including the uncomfortable ones. Critical staff retention agreed. Customer facing service levels monitored daily. Transitional service agreements mapped, with costs and exit dates. Quick wins delivered and credited to the acquired team, not the acquirer.
Integration programme stood up as a real programme: named owner with authority, weekly cadence, a scorecard the board reads. Keep, combine or kill decisions executed, not revisited. Systems and data plan under way with the same disciplines as any migration: understand the data before moving it, controlled steps, reconcile everything. Synergy case translated from deal model to named initiatives with owners and dates. Duplicate spend surfaced and scheduled. Culture handled by deeds not decks: the behaviours you reward in these weeks are the culture you will get.
First synergies banked and reconciled against the deal model, honestly. Transitional service agreement exits on track or renegotiated deliberately. The combined operating model live in at least one function end to end. Retention holding, and regretted leavers examined for what they signal. Customer retention measured against the deal assumptions, with the gap owned. A board narrative that reads like a delivery report, not an apology.
Everything in this checklist fails through one of two doors: unowned decisions and untested assumptions. If a line has no name against it, it is not planned. If a number has not been reconciled, it is not true. The full reasoning behind the checklist is in our guide on what actually matters in the first hundred days.
PEF leads post acquisition delivery from the client side: day one readiness, integration and separation, and the hundred days that decide the deal.