Completion is the start of the hard part, and it is the point at which most buyers are suddenly on their own. One or two days a month on your board — transition, strategy, the decisions that are hard to make alone, and the value creation the whole thing was for.
Everything before completion has a deadline and a process. Everything after it is judgement, usually made alone, usually about people, and usually with debt to service while you make it.
That is the gap this fills. Not a consultant with a deck, and not someone running the business for you — an experienced acquirer sitting on your board, who has already made the mistakes once.
The first hundred days
The handover period decides how much of what you bought survives. Staff deciding whether to stay, customers deciding whether anything has changed, and a seller who is still around but no longer in charge.
Strategy, once you own it
The plan that justified the price has to become a plan the business can actually run. What to change first, what to leave alone for a year, and what the numbers have to do for the debt to be comfortable.
The decisions nobody else can help with
Whether to replace the manager who came with the business. Whether to take the big contract that needs working capital you have not got. The ones where your accountant has no view and your family has the wrong one.
Value creation, deliberately
Pricing, margin, the two or three customers carrying too much of the revenue, and the things a buyer will look at when it is your turn to sell.
One or two days a month
Enough to be genuinely useful and not so much that it becomes another manager's salary. Usually a day on site or on a call, plus being reachable in between.
A seat at the table, not a report
Board meetings if you have them, a monthly session if you do not. The point is somebody independent in the room when a decision is made — not a document afterwards.
Somebody who has owned one
50+ completed acquisitions, which means the post-completion problems are familiar rather than theoretical. The staff who leave, the customer who tests you, the forecast that was optimistic.
It depends on the business, how often you want somebody in the room, and whether there is a specific problem to get through. Easiest to work out on a call — and if a non-executive is not what you need, that is a short conversation rather than a long one.
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