Day 0–30: Close the books, meet the people
Most founder-led businesses close monthly financials somewhere between the 20th and "when the bookkeeper gets to it." The first thing we install is a real monthly close — target day 10, then day 7 — with a standard chart of accounts, reviewed balance-sheet reconciliations, and a package that a bank, an insurer, or a board can actually read.
In parallel, the new operating leader spends the first 30 days in listening mode. Every direct report gets a structured 1:1. Every customer over 5% of revenue gets a call. The point is to preserve what made the business work before we start changing anything.
Day 30–60: EOS cadence and the scorecard
We run Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) meeting cadence across every portfolio company. Weekly L10 for the leadership team. Quarterly rocks. An accountability chart that names who owns each seat. A scorecard of 8–15 weekly metrics that anyone in the business can read in 30 seconds.
The scorecard is deliberately boring. Revenue, gross margin, cash, AR aging, backlog, close rate, retention. We're not trying to invent new KPIs — we're trying to make the ones that matter impossible to ignore.
Day 60–100: 13-week cash and AI-enabled dashboards
A rolling 13-week cash flow forecast becomes the weekly artifact for the CFO seat. Not a spreadsheet nobody updates — a working document that gets reviewed every Monday and reconciled to actuals every Friday.
On top of the operating cadence, we layer AI-enabled dashboards that read from the accounting system, the CRM, and the field service platform. AI is not there to replace the operator. It's there to let one holding-company team monitor multiple businesses without drowning in reports.
What stays the same
We deliberately do not change the brand, the front-line team, the local relationships, or the customer experience in the first 100 days. The founder built something that worked. The operating system is scaffolding around it, not a replacement for it.
Why this only runs inside the portfolio
This is the piece that gets confused most often. The EOS + AI operating system is not a product we sell. It is not a consulting engagement, and it is not a fractional CFO offering. It is infrastructure we run inside businesses we own, because the whole point of a permanent-capital model is that we're accountable to the same P&L for the next 20 years.