The first ninety days after you own it

The business does not know it has been sold

Closing is an enormous event for you and a piece of news for everybody else. Customers still expect their order. Staff still expect their shift and their pay. Suppliers still expect the account to behave the way it has always behaved.

That gap in significance is the most useful thing to hold onto in the first month. Almost every early mistake comes from acting as though the change of ownership were the most important thing happening, when for everyone involved the most important thing is that Thursday goes normally.

Your job in the first weeks is continuity. Not vision, not improvement, not the plan you wrote while you were still evaluating. The business you are about to change is not yet the business you think you bought, and you will not know the difference for a while.

Read before you change

There is a strong pull toward doing something visible early, partly to feel like an owner and partly because you spent months finding inefficiencies and now you can finally fix them.

Resist it for longer than feels comfortable. Every process in a business that has been running for years exists for a reason, and some of those reasons are good ones that nobody wrote down. The ugly workaround in the scheduling is sometimes laziness and is sometimes the only thing preventing a recurring failure that happened four years ago.

Reading means being present, asking why rather than proposing, and writing down what you observe without acting on it yet. It also means being visibly willing to do the unglamorous work, which buys more credibility in the first month than any announcement.

Cash first, on a weekly view

Whatever else is uncertain, know what is coming in and what is going out, week by week, for the next three months. Not a budget. A short list of dates and amounts, updated weekly, that tells you when the tightest week is before it arrives.

The following is illustrative and invented to show the shape rather than to describe any real business. Suppose payroll runs every second Friday, the largest supplier invoices monthly on the fifteenth, insurance renews in week six, and your largest customer pays on forty five day terms. Laid out on one page, those four facts alone will usually identify the two or three weeks in the next quarter that need planning, and identifying them in week one is a completely different experience from discovering them in week six.

This is the most valuable hour of the first ninety days, and it costs nothing except doing it.

Find out who actually knows how the work gets done

Every business has people whose importance is not reflected in their title. Somebody knows which customer always calls at the last minute, which supplier will do a rush order as a favour, and how the old machine has to be started when it is cold.

Find those people in the first fortnight, and find them by watching rather than by asking who is important. Notice who gets interrupted. Notice whose absence changes the day. Notice who other people check with before doing something.

Then be careful with them. An inherited team is watching to learn whether the new owner is going to be reasonable, and the person everybody quietly relies on is usually also the person with the most options if the answer looks like no. Understanding where that dependency sits is the point of this exercise. Deciding what to do about it is a larger piece of work and is not this lesson.

A habit and a control look identical from outside

This is the distinction that decides what is safe to change, and it is the one that costs new owners the most when they get it wrong.

A habit is something done this way because it has always been done this way. Removing it costs a small amount of friction and nothing else. A control is something done this way because it prevents a specific failure, even when nobody currently working there can tell you what the failure was.

They look the same. The only reliable way to tell them apart is to ask what would happen if this stopped, and to keep asking different people until either somebody names a consequence or nobody can. When nobody can name one, treat it as probably a habit and change it in a way you can reverse.

The double signature on outgoing payments that seems excessive for a business this size is the familiar case. Sometimes it is inherited caution. Sometimes there was a reason some years ago that nobody mentions to the new owner. The cost of asking twice is a conversation, and the cost of assuming is occasionally the reason the control existed.

The order to change things in

When you do start changing things, sequence matters more than which change you pick first.

Start with things that are entirely inside your own control and are reversible. Your own routines, your own reporting, how you spend your week. Nobody else is affected and you learn how the business responds to being adjusted.

Then move to things that affect internal work but not customers. Then to things customers notice. Anything that touches pricing, service levels, or the people customers deal with belongs last, and belongs there even when it looks obviously correct, because that is where an error is most expensive and least reversible.

One at a time is not caution, it is instrumentation. If you change four things and the month goes badly, you have learned nothing about which one did it.

Ninety days is a review date, not a deadline

Nothing important finishes at day ninety. What day ninety is good for is a scheduled honest look at the difference between the business you bought and the business you thought you were buying.

Put four questions on that page. What turned out to be different from the packet. What is more fragile than expected. What is more solid than expected. And which single change would matter most in the next quarter.

That review is worth more than any plan written before closing, because it is the first one written with actual knowledge of the business. Plans written during diligence are guesses made by somebody standing outside the building.