The first ninety days in a sponsor-owned company
A new CFO under private equity ownership has a short window to set the rhythm. Five things are worth doing first.
Private equity owners are patient about some things and impatient about others. They will give a plan years to work. They will not wait a quarter to learn where the cash is. A CFO who joins a sponsor-owned company has about ninety days to establish how the company will run, and the order of the work matters.
Cash first
Build a thirteen-week cash forecast and update it every week. The discipline matters more than the spreadsheet. It forces conversations about collections, payment timing, and what has already been committed. The first version is always wrong, and the ways it is wrong are instructive.
A short list of measures
Choose five to seven measures the management team will steer by, and give each one an owner. Twenty metrics make a report. Six make a management system.
Pricing and vendors
These are the two fastest levers that do not depend on winning new customers. Discounts drift over time and are worth reviewing line by line. Vendors overlap, especially after acquisitions, and can often be consolidated or renegotiated at volume across a portfolio.
Rhythm
Hold a monthly operating review in the same format every month, a weekly cash meeting, and a quarterly refresh of the plan. A predictable cadence lowers the temperature. People stop preparing for meetings and start preparing for the business.
Then the team
Learn the work before changing the people who do it. After two months it is usually clear who is in the right seat and where the gaps are. Hiring before that point fills the roles you expected to need.
Ninety days is not enough to fix a company. It is enough to make it legible, and that comes before everything else.