Every operating partner walks into their first portfolio company with the same three levers already loaded. Pricing. Cost base. Sales headcount. It’s practically muscle memory at this point, and I get why. They’re visible, they’re measurable, and you can show movement on them inside a quarter. 

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. 

Two of those three are usually the wrong first move, and I’ve watched enough 100-day plans go sideways to say that with a straight face. 

Start with pricing, because it’s the one people reach for first and defend the hardest. Pricing is genuinely powerful. A well-run pricing exercise can add more EBITDA than almost anything else you’ll touch in year one. But it only works if the underlying customer base is stable enough to absorb it, and half the time nobody’s checked that before the price letter goes out. I’ve seen a portfolio company push a 6% increase across the board three weeks after acquisition, before anyone had properly segmented churn risk by cohort. Six months later they were explaining a logo attrition spike to the board that had nothing to do with the market and everything to do with a spreadsheet nobody stress-tested. 

Cost base is the second one, and it’s tempting because it’s the fastest win on paper. Renegotiate vendor contracts, consolidate tools, tighten headcount. All fine in isolation. The problem is sequencing. Cut before you understand what’s actually driving the number and you end up cutting the thing that was quietly compensating for a weakness somewhere else. I’ve seen support headcount cut right before a product migration that needed exactly the support capacity that just walked out the door. The saving showed up in the model. The cost showed up three months later in churn, and by then it’s not a line item anymore, it’s a narrative problem with the board. 

So what’s the lever that actually deserves to go first? Management team clarity. Not process, not tooling, not a new dashboard. Whether the people running the business day to day actually agree on what the next 18 months are supposed to look like. 

This sounds soft next to pricing and cost base, I know. But almost every operating partner I respect tells some version of the same story. They walk into a portfolio company, sit through a few management meetings, and discover the CEO and the CFO have two entirely different mental models of what the growth plan actually is. Not different opinions on execution. Different plans. One thinks the story is expansion into a new vertical. The other thinks the story is deepening penetration in the existing base. Both of them have been nodding along in board meetings for months. 

You can’t fix pricing or cost base cleanly on top of that kind of misalignment, because you don’t actually know which plan you’re optimising for. Every other lever you pull is downstream of this one, whether anyone admits it or not. 

The practical version of this, if you want something you can actually do in week one: sit down with the CEO and the CFO separately, not together, and ask each of them to describe the next 18 months in their own words. Not the board deck version. The version they’d give a friend over a drink. If those two descriptions don’t roughly rhyme, you’ve found your actual first project, and it’s not the one anyone put in the 100-day plan. 

Pricing and cost base still matter. They’re just second and third, not first. Get the alignment right and the other two levers move faster and stick better, because you’re no longer fighting an argument the management team hasn’t had yet.