The First 100 Days: What PE Firms Get Wrong in Portco Hiring

The First 100 Days: What PE Firms Get Wrong in Portco Hiring

The first hundred days of a private equity ownership period are the most operationally consequential in the investment cycle. The management structure is being established, the investment thesis is being tested against operational reality for the first time, the GP relationship with the management team is being formed, and the cultural direction of the business under new ownership is being set — all simultaneously. The executive appointments made in this window either accelerate the value creation plan or retard it, and the mistakes made in hiring decisions at the hundred-day stage are disproportionately expensive because they compound through the remaining hold period.

This guide is written for GPs, operating partners, and deal teams who are managing the post-close period of a new acquisition and who want to avoid the most common hiring mistakes at the hundred-day stage. It covers six specific mistakes that recur across PE portfolio company acquisitions — in the sequencing of management decisions, the assessment of the incumbent team, the timing and specification of new hires, the 100-day plan as a hiring framework, and the management of the incumbent-versus-new dynamic — and explains what the right approach looks like in each case. It draws on the experience of placing executives into PE-backed businesses at the deal-completion stage since 2018, and on conversations with GPs and operating partners about what has gone wrong in their most difficult post-close periods. For the 100-day plan executive placement service, see our 100-Day Plan Executive Placement page.

Mistake one: delaying the management assessment

The management assessment — the systematic evaluation of the incumbent team’s capability, alignment, and fit with the investment thesis — is most valuable when it begins before deal close, not after. GPs who complete the acquisition and then begin assessing the management team are already behind: the first thirty days of the hold period should be the implementation of management decisions based on an assessment already conducted, not the assessment itself.

Pre-close management assessment is difficult because it requires access to the incumbent team that the deal process may not naturally provide. But the tools available — formal leadership assessments, structured interviews, reference conversations with industry contacts who know the team, and careful observation of the management team’s behaviour in the deal process itself — can produce sufficient insight to identify the likely capability gaps and succession needs before completion. GPs who use the deal process as a management assessment opportunity rather than treating assessment as a post-close activity are consistently faster to resolve management issues in the hundred-day window. For the formal pre-deal assessment approach, see our Management Team Assessment Before Deal Close guide.

Mistake two: running management changes sequentially

When the post-close management assessment identifies multiple changes needed at the senior level — a CEO who needs replacing, a CFO who is not PE-calibrated, a COO who is absent from the incumbent structure — the natural instinct is to sequence the changes: resolve the CEO first, then address the CFO, then think about the COO. This sequential approach feels prudent — managing one disruption at a time, avoiding overwhelming the organisation. In practice, it is significantly more expensive than the alternative.

Running management changes sequentially in a PE hold period means that the business is operating without its full target management team for a substantially longer period than it needs to. Each sequential change adds six to twelve weeks to the period before the complete management structure is in place — and the compounding cost of that delay, across the value creation plan, is material. The right approach where multiple changes are needed is to identify all of them in the first thirty days and run the corresponding searches in parallel — even if the sequencing of the actual role changes is staggered to manage organisational impact. This requires a search partner who can run multiple mandates simultaneously without compromising quality on any of them.

Mistake three: applying corporate timelines to PE search

The standard retained search timeline — twelve to sixteen weeks from brief to start date — is designed for corporate executive appointments where the business can absorb the time the process requires. In a PE portfolio company at deal completion, twelve to sixteen weeks for a CFO appointment means that the first quarterly board review occurs without a finance leader in place, the covenant reporting process is managed by an interim or the existing team under pressure, and the first-quarter board pack — which sets the GP’s expectations for the rest of the hold period — is produced by people who were not appointed to produce it.

PE search timelines must be set by the business’s needs, not by the search process’s convenience. A CFO needed within three weeks of close — to own the first month’s management accounts and attend the month-one board review — requires a search process that produces a placed candidate within that window. This is achievable with the right search approach: direct outreach to a pre-mapped pool of available PE-experienced CFOs, parallel assessment and GP-candidate dialogue, and compressed reference checking. But it requires a search partner who is running the process at PE pace from day one, not a generalist search firm that will adapt its timeline if pressed.

Mistake four: specifying the role from the job description rather than the thesis

The most common source of misspecification in hundred-day hiring is writing the role specification from the existing job description rather than from the investment thesis. The incumbent CFO’s job description describes what the incumbent has been doing; the search brief should describe what the incoming CFO needs to do to deliver the investment thesis. These are often materially different — and the candidate profile that follows from each description is different in ways that determine whether the appointment succeeds or fails.

A business being acquired for operational improvement needs a CFO who can build the financial control environment, implement management information systems that do not currently exist, and produce the board-ready reporting that PE governance requires — capabilities that the incumbent’s job description (which described what they have been doing in a lower-governance environment) may not capture. A business being acquired as a platform for buy-and-build M&A needs a CFO who has managed the financial integration of multiple acquisitions — a capability that will not appear in the job description of a single-site business that has never done an acquisition. In each case, the investment thesis brief produces a more useful candidate specification than the job description.

Mistake five: underestimating the incumbents’ assessment of the new owners

In the first hundred days, the GP is assessing the incumbent management team. Less obviously, but equally importantly, the incumbent management team is assessing the GP. Talented executives who have options — and the most talented ones always do — will use the first three months to decide whether this is a GP they want to work with, an investment thesis they believe in, and a governance relationship they can operate within. GPs who treat the first hundred days as a one-directional assessment — in which the GP evaluates the management team and the management team waits to be evaluated — lose talent that they could have retained.

The behaviours that drive the best incumbents to stay or leave in the first hundred days are specific and predictable: the quality of the GP’s engagement with operational reality (do they understand the business or are they applying a generic thesis?), the transparency of communication about plans and expectations (are changes discussed in advance or imposed?), and the consistency between the investment thesis as presented in the deal process and the operational reality of the post-close period (is the GP’s commitment to the thesis real or was it a deal narrative?). GPs who manage these three dimensions well consistently retain more of the management team they want to keep than those who do not.

Mistake six: treating the 100-day plan as a document rather than a management framework

Most PE-backed acquisitions have a 100-day plan — a document produced in the pre-close period that outlines the key initiatives, milestones, and decisions to be made in the first three months of ownership. The most common mistake with the 100-day plan is treating it as a planning document that guides activity but does not govern it — something that is produced conscientiously and then referenced occasionally rather than used as the management accountability framework it should be.

The 100-day plan is most valuable when every executive appointment in the post-close period is assessed against the plan’s requirements — not “does this candidate look like a good CFO?” but “does this candidate have the specific capability to deliver milestones three, seven, and twelve of the 100-day plan within the timeframe the plan requires?” This question produces a more useful candidate assessment than any generic executive evaluation framework, and it produces shortlists where every candidate has been assessed against the same investment-specific criteria rather than against a generic competency model.

Exec Capital uses the 100-day plan as the primary assessment framework for all post-close executive mandates — asking candidates to walk through their specific approach to the plan’s milestones and to demonstrate how their experience maps to the specific challenges each milestone presents. GPs who have participated in this assessment framework consistently report that it produces shortlists with higher signal-to-noise than generic CEO and CFO assessment processes.

Related PE Guides and Services

• 100-Day Plan Executive Placement — our post-deal executive placement service
• Portfolio Company CEO Recruitment — CEO search for PE-backed businesses
• Portfolio Company CFO Recruitment — CFO with PE reporting experience
• Portfolio Company COO Recruitment — operational leader for EBITDA delivery
• Interim CEO for PE-Backed Businesses — urgent CEO cover at deal completion
• Private Equity Executive Search — all PE executive appointments

Sources and Further Reading

• BVCA — British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association — portfolio management and value creation standards
• Invest Europe — 100-day planning and post-acquisition integration benchmarks in European PE
• McKinsey — first 100 days and value creation acceleration research
• ICAEW — corporate governance and executive accountability in PE-backed business contexts
• Companies Act 2006 — director duties applicable to PE-backed company boards