The first ninety days

Buyers often expect the hard part of an acquisition to be diligence and financing, and treat operating the business afterward as the easy part because they already know how to run a business. What is different about the early stretch of a new acquisition is that everyone around the business, from staff to regular customers to key suppliers, is actively forming an opinion about the new owner, often based on very little information.

What tends to get watched most closely

• Whether pay, hours and reporting lines for staff stay stable or change abruptly
• Whether service levels and pricing for existing customers hold
• Whether the new owner keeps existing supplier relationships or starts renegotiating everything at once
• How visibly present the new owner actually is, especially in a customer-facing business

Why the instinct to change everything at once backfires

A buyer who moves quickly to cut costs, change suppliers and restructure staff all at once is making several changes at the same time against a workforce and customer base that has not yet decided whether to trust them. Sequencing changes, and being visible and consistent early on, tends to preserve more of the value the acquisition was bought for than moving on every front simultaneously.