What is a value creation plan?
A value creation plan is the document that turns an investment thesis into a list of quantified initiatives, each with an owner, milestones and an indicator. It is built after the acquisition — often within the first hundred days — with the CEO and the executive committee, and it covers the three families of levers: growth, margin, cash. It is not a budget: a budget states what is expected, a value creation plan states what will be done to get there, in what order and with whom.
What does a value creation plan contain?
Around ten initiatives, rarely more. Beyond that, nobody follows them. They fall into three families: growth — sales, marketing, pricing, new markets; margin — operational performance, procurement, supply chain, organisation; and cash — working capital, capital expenditure, financing.
Each initiative carries four things: a quantified objective, a named owner inside the company, dated milestones, and the indicator that will show whether it is moving. An initiative without an owner is not an initiative: it is an intention.
The plan finally carries a trajectory: what those initiatives produce, year by year, through to exit — and what that assumes in investment and hiring.
Why a hundred days?
Because that is the window in which a change of shareholder makes change acceptable. After it, the organisation has settled back into its habits and every decision costs more to push through.
A hundred days does not mean everything is done in a hundred days — it means the plan is written, shared and launched at day one hundred. Execution runs across the whole holding period.
Who writes it: the fund or the CEO?
Both, and that is the condition of its survival. A plan written by the fund alone is received as control; a plan written by management alone often restates the budget in new clothes. The right set-up is a plan built with the executive committee, in workshops, from the facts — and approved by the fund.
That is where the operating partner comes in: bringing the method, the facts and the experience of other deals, while having the plan written by the people who will execute it. It is three weeks slower, and it is what makes the difference two years later.
Why do most plans fail to live?
For three reasons, always the same. Too many initiatives, so no real priority. No mandated internal owner, so the plan turns into a reporting exercise. And no monitoring tool: when updating the plan costs someone two days a month, it stops in the third month.
The remedy is not a thicker document. It is fewer initiatives, one owner per initiative, and a dashboard that fills itself from the data the company already produces.
What AI changes in the value creation plan
On the diagnosis: agents read the whole of the available data — contracts, tickets, ERP, minutes — where a team used to read a sample. Initiatives are therefore chosen on broader facts, and faster.
On the follow-up: the dashboard fills itself from existing reporting, with no re-keying. That is what keeps a plan alive in the sixth month.
And on execution: some of the initiatives are themselves tooled — an assistant that spreads sales best practice, an agent that handles an administrative flow. The plan no longer merely describes what should be done: it delivers the object that does it.