A 100-day value-creation plan for a portfolio company

Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report estimates that today's buyouts need EBITDA growth of 10 to 12% to return 2.5x over a five-year hold, against roughly 5% for a typical 2015 deal, when cheaper debt and rising multiples did much of the work. General partners have drawn the conclusion: in S&P Global's 2026 private equity survey, 72% pointed to operational improvements, the top-ranked value-creation lever. The question for the first hundred days is not whether to improve operations. It is which levers, in what order, measured how.

Why health and wellness and financial services portfolios

Both sectors are built by acquisition. PitchBook counts add-ons at 72.9% of all US buyouts in 2025, and platforms in multi-site care, consumer health, ingredients, wealth management and accounting have been assembled the same way. That leaves value in documented places: pricing never harmonised across acquired companies, cost-to-serve that differs site by site, integrations that stopped at the general ledger, and working capital nobody owns. Each is countable, which is what makes it a lever rather than a theme.

Days 1 to 30: a Performance Diagnostic, the same way in every company

One page per company, from its own systems: revenue and margin by line, price realisation against list, cost-to-serve by site or channel, working capital by component, integration status against the deal case, and the operating measures the business already runs on. Same definitions across the portfolio, so the operating partners can compare. Name one owner per company. Do not start a vendor bake-off; start a measurement. The output is three priced improvement plays per company and the order to run them in.

Days 31 to 60: one program per company, against its largest lever

Pricing and commercial discipline where realisation lags: McKinsey's review of more than 1,000 programs found pricing and performance-improvement initiatives typically added 2 to 7 percentage points of return on sales, depending on the sector. Cost-to-serve and operations where margin differs site by site. Integration and value capture where acquired companies still run as separate businesses. Working capital where cash is tied up in receivables or inventory. One program, one owner, one number, reported weekly against the baseline. Data, automation and AI come in where they remove cost or delay inside a program, never as the program.

Days 61 to 100: extend what worked, stop what did not

What moved the number in one company is adapted for the next, with that company's own baseline and rules; nothing is assumed to transfer until it has been measured there. Results are reported to the board as deltas against the day-one baselines, traceable to the operating lines they touched, which is also the evidence a buyer's diligence team asks for at exit. What did not move the number is stopped, in writing.

What not to do: a technology budget allocated before the levers are measured, pilots without owners, and a value-creation plan that lives in a slide deck rather than in a weekly operating review. McKinsey's late-2025 survey found only 7% of organisations had fully scaled AI across the business; the gap it describes is one of ownership, measurement and operating rhythm more than of technology.