Your 100-Day Plan Has a Talent Problem You Haven't Solved Yet

Every PE firm has a 100-day plan. Most of them treat talent as a parallel workstream.

That's the mistake.

Why Talent Is Treated as a Parallel Workstream

I've seen it happen repeatedly: the operational plan identifies a need to restructure the commercial function, but the question of whether the current Commercial Director can actually lead that restructuring gets deferred. The financial plan assumes a step-change in management information quality, but whether the existing finance team can deliver it doesn't get tested until the first quarterly board meeting — at which point the answer is obviously no.

By then, you've lost two months. And in a 100-day plan, two months is not recoverable.

What the First 100 Days Should Actually Resolve

The sponsors who avoid this failure mode do one thing differently: they map the talent requirements of the 100-day plan explicitly. They identify the roles that are critical to execution, assess current incumbents against those requirements, and make early decisions about where to invest in development and where to move fast on replacement.

That doesn't mean replacing people for the sake of it. I've seen plenty of cases where the assessment reveals the existing team is well-placed — they just need the right structure and support around them. But the key word is assessment. Deliberate. With a clear framework. Not a retrospective discovery through missed milestones.

How to Fix the Sequencing Problem

At Alder, we increasingly work with sponsors in the weeks immediately after close to run rapid talent assessments against the 100-day plan. The output is straightforward: where is the team strong, where does it need development, where does it need reinforcement. The sponsor gets the information they need to make talent decisions at the pace the investment thesis requires.

The 100-day plan doesn't work without the right people executing it. That part of the plan deserves the same rigour as the rest.