Turning Deal Theses Into 100-Day Decisions
From Valuation Assumptions to Operating Milestones Every acquisition begins with assumptions buried in a spreadsheet: a revenue synergy percentage, a cost takeout target, a multiple that only holds if the combined business hits certain numbers. Ninety days after close, most of those assumptions are still assumptions—untested, unowned, and disconnected from anyone's actual job description. The first discipline of a credible integration is translating each valuation driver into an operating milestone with a name attached to it. If the model assumed a 12% cross-sell lift in the acquired customer base, that figure needs an owner, a tracking cadence, and a date by which early signal should appear, not a vague footnote about 'year two synergies.' Livio Andrea Acerbo has written that the gap between diligence math and operating reality is where most deal value quietly disappears, and his broader treatment of this problem, collected at acerbo.me , frames the first 100 days as the...