The first 100 days: where supply chain value hides in a new acquisition

The first 100 days post-acquisition generally has a familiar shape. Management is distracted by the new owner's reporting demands. The operating partner wants early wins to prove value to the investment committee. Lenders want covenant headroom. And the people who run the warehouse, the buying desk and the planning team are waiting to find out whether anything is going to change.

That combination makes the supply chain easy to neglect and costly to ignore. Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report argues that a typical deal now needs roughly 10 to 12% annual EBITDA growth to hit a 2.5 times return over five years, about double what was needed in the 2010s. Efficio makes the related point that the 100-day plan has quietly become a 2,000-day plan, because holds are longer and early procurement wins tend to plateau. So the job in the first 100 days is to bank what is obvious, and set up what will compound.

Here is how I would sequence it.

Weeks 1 to 3: get the facts that diligence missed out

Diligence was probably done at arm's length, against a data room. Now you have the keys to the empire. The first three weeks should rebuild the baseline from source systems, not from the management accounts.

1. Pull twelve months of purchase ledger data and classify it. May not be perfect; well enough to see the top 20 suppliers, the top ten categories, and how much spend sits on no contract at all.
2. Pull inventory at SKU level with last movement date. Sort by value of stock that hasn't moved in six months. It is rarely a short list.
3. Get invoice-level sales data with delivery and returns attached, so you can see margin by customer after logistics, not before.
4. List every logistics, warehousing and packaging contract with its renewal date. Something will be renewing in the next six months, and that is a negotiation you can still shape.

None of this needs a new system. It needs an analyst with access and a sponsor who can unblock the IT team.

Weeks 4 to 8: free the cash that is sitting there

Working capital is usually the fastest lever. PwC's Working Capital Study 24/25 put the global excess at €1.56 trillion across more than 19,000 listed companies, and found days inventory outstanding had worsened in six of eight cash-intensive sectors since 2019. Mid-market businesses rarely do better than the listed ones on this front

The slow-moving stock list from week two is your starting point. Some of it can be sold back, sold through a recovery channel or written down and cleared. Some of it is safety stock that was set years ago and never revisited. Reset reorder points on the top few hundred lines by value, and you will usually free cash within one or two order cycles without touching service.

But be careful on the payables side of things. The government's March 2026 response to its late payment consultation confirmed plans for a 60-day cap on business-to-business terms, applying no earlier than 2027. Extending terms with smaller suppliers is a lever with a closing window and a reputational cost. Fix your own invoice approval process first; paying on time and at the agreed date is often worth more than an aggressive term change.

Weeks 6 to 12: margin, starting with price

New owners tend to start with cost. Price is often the bigger lever. McKinsey's well-known analysis of an average S&P 1500 income statement found that a 1% price rise, with volumes held, lifted operating profit by about 8%. The exact multiplier depends on your margin structure, but the direction holds for most mid-market businesses with thin net margins.

In practice this rarely means a headline price rise. It means looking at the gap between list price and what the business actually banks after discounts, rebates, free delivery and payment terms, and closing the leaks that nobody has authorised.

The increasing cost pressure is very real, and it is worth stating in the board pack. Employer National Insurance rose to 15% on earnings above £5,000 from April 2025, and the National Living Wage went to £12.71 an hour in April 2026, a 4.1% rise. In warehouse-heavy businesses those two changes together are a material step up. If customer contracts don't have a mechanism to pass labour inflation through, that is a commercial priority for the first quarter, not the first year.

While working with a portfolio company in a similar situation, we found working capital worsening due to a break in communication between sourcing, planning and sales teams. We also found three separate freight contracts across the group, each on different terms. Moving to the best of the three and tendering the rest released a saving worth about two percent of EBITDA within four months. It was the fastest win in the whole plan.

Weeks 10 to 14: set up what compounds

By the end of the first 100 days you want three or four things in motion that will keep paying for the rest of the hold. A procurement pipeline with named owners and savings tracked to the P&L rather than to signed contracts. A monthly S&OP meeting that the CFO attends. A cost-to-serve model that sales actually uses when quoting. And a clear view of which systems need replacing before the business can grow, with a budget.

What generally goes wrong is fairly predictable. Teams chase twenty initiatives and land four. Savings are reported as initiatives are signed off and leak away through poor compliance. Inventory is cut hard in month two and service collapses in month five. The fix is fewer initiatives, each with one owner, a baseline both sides accept, and a monthly number that finance signs off.

BankStreet Partners runs inventory release and working capital programmes paid from the cash they free, and the Margin Diagnostic is a quick, free way to see where a newly acquired business is likely to be leaking margin.