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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 four value-creation levers: 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.