The First 90 Days After We Buy a Brand
The most dangerous period in any acquisition is the quiet ninety days after the wire clears. Most value destruction in small-brand M&A doesn't come from overpaying — it comes from fumbling the transition: breaking what worked, changing what customers loved, and losing the institutional knowledge that never made it into an SOP. So our first-90-days playbook is deliberately boring. Boring is the point.
- Days 0–30: Stabilize. Change nothing customer-facing. Secure access, keep shipping times flat, learn the rhythms.
- Days 31–60: Instrument. Wire the brand into the LAMPWORK OS — unified analytics, cohort tracking, forecasting. Measure before touching.
- Days 61–90: First interventions. Two or three highest-confidence plays only, each with a rollback plan.
The week-by-week
| Week | Focus | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Access & continuity | Accounts transferred, 2FA reset, vendor introductions, payroll confirmed. Customers notice nothing. |
| 2–3 | Listening tour | Founder debriefs, CS ticket review, supplier calls. We write down everything that lives in people's heads. |
| 4 | Baseline freeze | 30-day KPI baseline locked: CAC, repeat rate, contribution margin, ship times. Every future claim measures against this. |
| 5–6 | Instrumentation | Analytics rebuilt on portfolio standard; cohort and LTV models live; creative library indexed. |
| 7–8 | Quick-win audit | Retention flows, abandoned-cart coverage, pricing tests, shipping-cost renegotiation — scored by confidence × effort. |
| 9–10 | First two plays | Highest-confidence interventions ship behind measurement. Typical first picks: email flow rebuild, landed-cost renegotiation. |
| 11–12 | Review & roadmap | Results vs. baseline; 12-month operating plan written with the team that will run it. |
What we deliberately don't do
No rebrand. No platform migration. No "synergy" layoffs. No new agency. No pausing ad accounts to "reassess" (the algorithmic cost of restarting usually exceeds the savings). The portfolio data is unambiguous: brands that keep their operating rhythm through the transition compound; brands that get "fixed" in month one spend a year recovering.
You can't improve a machine you don't understand yet. The first 90 days buy understanding.
- Your team keeps their jobs and their rhythm — we're buying the machine, not dismantling it.
- Your customers should never be able to tell the brand changed hands. That's the standard we hold.
- If you stay involved post-close (many founders do, by choice), this playbook is the calendar of what you'll see.
Drawn from LAMPWORK's internal post-acquisition playbook and published integration research on SMB acquisitions. Illustrative of approach; every deal's plan is tailored.
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