A complete, sequenced operating system for the first 12 months after closing an acquisition, built for the self-funded or traditional searcher taking the reins of a sub-$30M B2B SaaS or services business. Across eight modules and 48 concrete tasks, it moves you in the order things actually need to happen. Most Year-One guides stop at stabilization; this one assumes you bought the company to grow it, and gives you the discipline to do so without raising additional equity.
Establish leadership credibility and operational continuity during your first month as the new owner
Signal stability to employees and customers while setting investor expectations in your first two weeks
Run the joint Day-One employee announcement and town hall with the outgoing seller
Stand on stage with the seller, let them frame the legacy, then deliver a humble 10-minute message about continuity, listening, and the first 90 days. Pre-brief the leadership team 24 hours ahead so no one hears the news in the room.
Send the first investor letter and confirm the monthly cadence within 14 days
Write a one-page letter covering closing mechanics, opening cash, employee and customer reaction, and the three biggest things you are watching. Lock the monthly cadence and the date the next letter will hit inboxes — the discipline compounds.
Personally call or visit the top 10 customers in the first week
Introduce yourself, do not pitch, do not promise. Ask three questions: what do you buy from us and why us, what almost made you leave, what would make you buy more. Take notes; follow up in writing within 48 hours.
Map talent, cash runway, and undocumented customer commitments to avoid surprises in month two
Meet every employee one-on-one inside the first 30 days
Schedule 20-minute conversations with every employee up to 80 headcount, or every direct report and skip-level for larger companies. Use the same five questions for each so you can compare answers. Resist the urge to talk; let them.
Build the 13-week rolling cash flow model and confirm bank lines
Have your controller (or Trilogy/Boulay/Profit Line equivalent) build a weekly 13-week cash forecast on Day 7. Re-paper banking relationships under new ownership; confirm revolver, line, and any debt covenants. Update the model weekly forever.
Document the seller's handshake deals before they walk
In a structured 4-8 hour session, enumerate every undocumented arrangement: vendor side deals, customer pricing exceptions, employee promises, contractor handshakes, lease quirks. Convert each to written terms inside 60 days; some you will keep, some renegotiate, some terminate.
Uncover customer dependencies, pricing leaks, and team capability gaps to build a stable foundation for growth
Interview your largest customers and fix overreliance on a few accounts or underpriced deals
Run a structured listening tour of the top 20 customers
Visit each in person; ask the same diagnostic questions you piloted in Week 1. Score each on stickiness, growth potential, and renewal risk. Aim to complete the tour by Day 75 so customer insight informs every later decision.
Map customer concentration and build a renewal-risk schedule
Compute revenue and gross margin concentration for the top 5, top 10, top 20. Flag any single customer above 20% of revenue or contribution. Build a renewal calendar with 90-day pre-renewal alerts; lock multi-year contracts with the top three accounts before any pricing moves.
Audit pricing discipline and identify under-priced segments
Catalog every customer-specific discount, every off-policy concession, every old price still in effect. Document the pricing audit findings; the actual price moves come in Module 6. Year-One discipline is to find the leakage, hold the line, and prepare the move.
Evaluate inherited leaders, lock in rhythm and governance, and plug your first financial or operational gap
Apply a Keep-Coach-Exit grid to the inherited leadership team
By Day 90, score each direct report on competence, culture fit, and capacity to scale with the company. No actions yet — you are documenting your hypothesis. Revisit at Day 180 before any termination decisions to avoid the rookie reversal pattern.
Establish a weekly leadership meeting and quarterly skip-levels
Install a 60-90 minute weekly tactical meeting (the EOS Level 10 format works for most acquired SMBs). Add quarterly skip-levels with high-potential employees two layers down. Make attendance and prep non-negotiable from Week 5.
Identify the first critical hire — usually a controller or fractional CFO
Most acquired SMBs have a long-tenured bookkeeper who is not credentialed for the new reporting cadence. Decide by Day 75 whether to upgrade in-seat, hire a controller, or engage a Trilogy-style interim CFO. Do not delay past Month 6.
Build financial controls, banking infrastructure, and management systems to sustain scaled growth through months 4–6
Lock down clean financials, update banking and insurance docs, and free up cash trapped in AR and inventory
Close the books cleanly and order the first reviewed financials
Engage an external firm for the opening balance sheet audit and Q1-Q2 review (Boulay, Cayne Crossing, The Profit Line, System Six, or local-market equivalents). Set monthly close to working day 10-15. Tighten the chart of accounts so the board pack is comparable month over month.
Re-paper banking, insurance, and IT/security under new ownership
Rebid insurance with an ETA-experienced broker (Oberle, Lockton, or regional specialist) and close any coverage gaps. Run an external IT and cybersecurity audit; most acquired SMBs have material vulnerabilities. Confirm bank line, covenants, and reporting calendar with your lender.
Optimize working capital across AR, AP, and inventory
Drive AR over 60 days down with weekly collection calls; standardize AP terms; introduce inventory cycle counts if applicable. A 5-10% working capital release is typical in Year One and funds growth bets without raising equity.
Install an operating rhythm and board cadence that run on one-page clarity, not sprawling decks
Adopt an operating system to install rhythm and accountability
Choose EOS, Scaling Up, OKRs, or Rockefeller Habits and commit fully — partial adoption is the failure mode. EOS is the most-cited choice in the searcher community for sub-$30M companies; engage a certified implementer for the first six months.
Run the first formal board meeting on three pages, not thirty
Distribute a 12-page pack five days ahead. Spend 90 minutes on three real questions, not 4 hours on a recap. Use the meeting to align on Year One bets and to ask the board for two or three specific things — intros, hires, or advice.
Standardize the monthly investor letter and the KPI dashboard
Lock a one-page monthly letter format: headline number, three things working, three things not, three asks, forward-looking line. Lock a one-page KPI dashboard: revenue, EBITDA, cash, AR over 60, concentration percentage, headcount, top-3 customer health.
Define your ICP with filters and signals, then build three buying-center personas mapped to their change, vendor, and timing motivations
Write filters for who you can serve and signals for who to prioritize, then validate against your wins and losses
Write the ICP using filters for who you can serve and signals for who to prioritize
Filters separate your TAM from the SAM you can actually deliver on; signals separate the SAM from the SOM you should prioritize this quarter. Document both as explicit lists, not vague descriptions, so sales and marketing can act on them.
Choose your strategic posture — dominate, disrupt, or differentiate
Each posture implies a different ICP, a different value prop, and a different competitive set. Pick one explicitly. The ICP for dominating your category is wider than the ICP for disrupting it or for differentiating within it.
Validate the ICP against your top customers and your last 10 wins and losses
If your top revenue customers do not match the ICP, the ICP is wrong. If your last 10 won deals match a different profile than the last 10 lost deals, that is the real ICP. Use the data to overrule the diligence assumptions.
Document your P1 user, P2 buyer, and P3 sponsor, then test with five customer interviews before committing
Document the P1 user, P2 economic buyer, and P3 sponsor for your ICP
B2B sales is rarely a single-person decision. The P1 uses the product, the P2 owns the budget, the P3 sponsors or blocks the deal. Each persona has different daily realities, different fears, and different reasons to say yes — document them separately.
Map each persona to their why-change, why-you, and why-now answers
Each persona has three questions you must answer before they sign. Why change from the status quo? Why you instead of the alternatives? Why now instead of next quarter? The answers are different for P1, P2, and P3.
Test the personas with five live customer interviews before committing
Personas built in a conference room are theory; personas tested with real customers are operational. Run five 45-minute interviews per persona, record them, and rewrite the documents based on what you actually hear.
Craft messaging that speaks to buyer pain points, articulate your competitive edge, and align brand voice across all customer touchpoints
Build persona-specific Pain-Claim-Gain stories and convert web copy to customer-centric language backed by real outcomes
Write the Pain-Claim-Gain narrative for each persona
Pain names the customer's current frustration in their language. Claim is your specific, defensible promise. Gain is the quantified outcome they get. Each persona gets a different Pain-Claim-Gain — write three, not one.
Replace company-centric web copy with customer-centric language (the you test)
Most acquired-SMB websites talk about themselves — we, our, the company name. The fix is the you test: count the ratio of you-words to we-words on the homepage. Below 20% you-language is failing; the fix is to rewrite around the customer.
Capture testimonials and outcome metrics from the customer listening tour
The 20 customer interviews from Module 2 produced raw material that most companies waste. Convert the strongest insights into named testimonials, quantified outcomes, and case study drafts — usable across the website, sales deck, ABM, and content.
Define brand voice, map competitive positioning, and refresh key web pages around your differentiated wedge
Document brand voice attributes and the founder/CEO point of view
Brand voice is what the company sounds like in writing. Most acquired SMBs do not have one — every page sounds different because every page was written by a different person. Document three to five voice attributes and a CEO point of view that anchors the voice.
Map the competitive landscape and name your wedge against the top three
Pick the three competitors prospects compare you against most often, and document the explicit wedge against each. The wedge is what you do better, named in the customer's language, defensible with proof.
Refresh the homepage and top-five landing pages around the new positioning
Most acquired-company websites have not been touched in three to five years. The Year-One refresh applies the new ICP, personas, value props, and brand voice to the five pages that drive 80% of inbound conversion.
Unlock revenue from existing customers by tightening pricing discipline, eliminating discounts, and building tiered packages that align cost-to-serve
Establish pricing rigor by raising rates on underpriced segments, eliminating off-policy discounts, and moving to fixed-price packaging
Raise prices on the under-priced segment and document the conversation
By Month 6 you have the data, the relationships, and the new positioning to defend a price move. Start with the segment you identified as most under-priced in Module 2. The conversation with customers is more valuable than the revenue lift.
Eliminate off-policy discounts and document a discount approval matrix
Sales reps default to discounting unless prevented; most acquired SMBs lose 5-15% of realized price to undisciplined concessions. Build a discount approval matrix and enforce it. The discipline matters more than the policy.
Move from variable to fixed-price packaging where the math allows
Variable pricing makes the sales conversation harder, transfers risk to the customer, and surfaces every cost-overrun as a relationship issue. Where the company has scale to absorb the risk, fixed-price packaging usually wins.
Design tiered packages bundling services into pricing, trigger upsells via usage signals, and measure packaging economics continuously
Design tiered packages that bundle services into product price
Most acquired SaaS and B2B-services companies under-monetize the human work they deliver — onboarding, support, training, professional services. Bundle that work into tiered packages so the cost to serve is recovered as part of the recurring price.
Build the upsell and cross-sell motion using behavioral usage signals
Existing customers are the cheapest growth source. Identify behavioral signals (usage thresholds, workflow patterns, integration adoption) that predict expansion readiness. Trigger sales conversations on the signals, not on the calendar.
Instrument pricing and packaging analytics for ongoing learning
Pricing decisions get made every week — by sales, by CS, by the CEO. Instrument the pricing data so the team can see realized price, discount patterns, package mix, and segment economics in real time. Without the instrumentation, every pricing call is a guess.
Scale demand generation across inbound, content, and outbound channels while hiring sales leadership to close the loop
Audit and activate three demand-gen channels, publish cornerstone content for each buyer stage, and build multi-touch nurture sequences
Audit current demand-gen channels and identify the third and fourth to add
Most acquired SMBs run on one or two demand-gen channels — usually referrals plus the founder's network. T2D3 scale requires three to five active channels. Audit what works today, then deliberately add the next two.
Publish six cornerstone content assets aligned to ICP buying stages
Content for content's sake is wasted budget. Six cornerstone assets — two for awareness, two for evaluation, two for decision — anchor the ICP's full buying journey and feed every other channel.
Build the digital relationship — retargeting, nurture, and seven-touch sequences
Most leads do not convert on first touch. The seven-touch rule still holds because email gets missed, ads get ignored, and the buying calendar is the prospect's, not yours. Build the systems that maintain presence across the gap.
Build a 250-account ABM list, hire your first sales producer with a structured scorecard, and right-size leadership
Build a 250-account ABM target list using filters and signals
ABM works when the target list is right and the content is good. The 250-account list is built from the ICP filters and prioritized by the signals — not bought from a vendor, not generated by a tool. Specific accounts, named buyers, deliberate sequences.
Hire the first BDR or AE with a structured Topgrading-style scorecard
The first sales hire shapes the next five. Use a scorecard with explicit competencies, run a structured interview process, and prefer culture-add and curiosity over pedigree. Athletic backgrounds and proven follow-through outperform brand-name sales experience at this stage.
Decide on full-time vs fractional CMO based on stage and budget
Below $10M ARR, a fractional CMO plus an in-house writer or growth engineer is usually the right structure. Above $15M ARR, a full-time CMO becomes affordable and necessary. Get the strategic foundation work done before hiring tactical execution.
Audit your Year One performance, lock in governance and financials, and establish CEO systems before scaling Year Two
Close Year One with audited financials, draft your first real strategic plan with the board, and lock in Year-Two OKRs and budget
Deliver Year-One audited or reviewed financials and tax filings
Engage the audit firm by Month 9 so the calendar works. Settle the working-capital true-up with the seller per the purchase agreement. Use the audited numbers to validate Year-One performance versus underwriting; share with the board candidly.
Draft the first real strategic plan with the board
By Month 11, write the 3-year plan: market thesis, two or three growth levers, capital plan, hiring plan, what you will NOT do. Keep it to 15 pages. The plan moves the company from the seller's company to a small corporation with systems.
Set Year-Two OKRs and budget at the annual board meeting
Lock 4-6 company-level OKRs with the board, with quarterly check-ins. Build a bottoms-up budget tied to those OKRs. Set the Year-Two compensation plan and communicate it to the leadership team within 30 days.
Secure a CEO peer group and coach, align your time to benchmarks, and reset your energy and decision-making rhythm for Year Two
Lock in a CEO peer group, board chair mentor, and outside coach
The single most-cited Year-One risk in qualitative interviews is the loneliness of the seat. The fix is structural: a peer group, a mentor, a paid coach. Wasserstein, Dodson, and the Searchfunder community treat all three as non-optional.
Audit your time allocation against searcher-CEO benchmarks
Track your calendar for two weeks at Month 11. Compare against the Wasserstein 40-50% people, 20% ops, 10-15% finance and board, 10% customer, 10% self benchmark. Where you are off, redesign your meeting cadence and delegate accordingly.
Reset personal energy, family rhythm, and decision tempo for Year Two
Calendar exercise blocks, family time, and a monthly no-meetings thinking day as non-negotiables. Define your decision-tempo rules — slow on people and strategy, fast on cash and tactical issues. The goal is to keep doing this for five more years.
