Guide
The 100-day plan for a newly acquired home services portfolio company
Day 1 starts the clock. The strongest PE platforms walk into close with the marketing 100-day plan already written, not waiting to be discovered. Here's the framework — what to install, when, and who reports on it.
Every PE-acquired home services platform spends its first 100 days doing one of two things. Either executing a documented operating plan written before close, or discovering what the platform looks like by accident. The first compounds. The second wastes a quarter of value-creation runway.
This guide walks through what the marketing 100-day plan actually looks like — sequenced week by week, organized by workstream, anchored to a sponsor-facing reporting cadence.
Week 1-2: Stabilize and instrument
The first move is not new spend, new vendors, or new campaigns. It's instrumentation. The operating partner can't manage what they can't measure, and the second-most-common Day-1 mistake is to make marketing changes before the data layer is reconciled.
- Audit current attribution methodology and document where it differs from financial system reality
- Inventory active vendors, contracts, scope, exit clauses, and renewal dates
- Stand up a baseline platform dashboard with channel mix, sourced revenue, CAC trend, and booked-call rate
- Establish the monthly sponsor reporting template — same cadence as financial close
Week 3-6: Consolidate the vendor stack
Vendor consolidation is usually the largest single EBITDA lever available in the first 100 days. Most acquired platforms run 6-12 vendor relationships across paid, organic, content, brand, and analytics — half of which overlap in scope and bill against the same outcomes.
By the end of week six, the operating partner should have a documented vendor map for the platform: who stays, who consolidates, who exits. Contract renegotiations are scheduled. Service-level expectations are written. The next add-on integration has a target vendor stack waiting for it.
Week 5-10: Install the operating system
Running in parallel with vendor work. This is where the marketing function becomes a system instead of a collection of activities.
- Unified lead taxonomy across portcos — same source, type, disposition, and DMA fields in every CRM
- Attribution methodology reconciled to the financial system, with a documented audit trail
- Local SEO and Google Business Profile standardization across every location
- Paid search and Local Service Ads consolidated under a platform-level account structure
- Lifecycle and email programs designed against membership economics, not service economics
- Brand architecture decisions documented — what to consolidate, what to retain locally, what to retire
Week 8-12: Activate the platform-wide playbooks
By month three, the operating model is documented and the foundational systems are live. The work shifts to running the platform-wide marketing playbooks — and proving that the system produces sponsor-grade outputs at the next QBR.
- Run the first platform-wide monthly review against the new dashboard
- Deliver the first sourced-revenue attribution report reconciled to financial actuals
- Stand up the multi-arbitrage value thesis: brand, lead, geo, and ticket-mix levers identified and sized
- Document the playbooks every operator can run without sponsor support
Week 12-16: Plan the next 12 months
The 100 days are about getting to a stable, documented marketing operating model — not about hitting EBITDA growth targets. Those come in the following nine months. By the end of the 100-day window, the platform should have a written 12-month value-creation plan with quarterly milestones and an explicit marketing-sourced EBITDA contribution model.
The 100-day plan isn't about new tactics. It's about getting the marketing function to a state where every subsequent decision compounds — instead of starting from scratch with every quarter.
Who runs the 100-day plan
Three roles, on purpose: the operating partner (governance and decision rights), the portco CEO or marketing lead (execution accountability), and a specialist marketing partner like Sheppard (the playbook and the documented system). Without all three, the 100-day plan tends to default to whichever vendor is most available — which is rarely the same as whichever vendor is most useful.
Reporting cadence — what the sponsor sees
Three documents on a recurring cadence: a monthly marketing summary tied to financial close, a quarterly business review with the operating partner and CEO, and an exit-ready data room asset class that grows with the platform through the hold. The reporting itself is the artifact — sponsors who can produce platform-wide marketing performance in fifteen minutes at any board meeting carry a credibility premium in every subsequent capital decision.