The outcome of a private equity acquisition is largely determined before the deal closes. Despite the average PE ownership being five to seven years, the most important foundations are laid before acquisition.

According to Accordion's 2025 State of the PE Sponsor-CFO Relationship survey, 74% of PE sponsors are dissatisfied with their portfolio company CFOs, and so, post-deal, sponsors replace three out of four, usually within 18 months. And the root cause, consistently, is not a lack of financial knowledge. It is a failure to show up to the post-close environment prepared for what PE ownership actually demands.

The implication for portfolio company finance teams: The 90 days before close are your time for preparation, transition and survival. While the CFO leads this charge, the actions and mindset shifts described here cascade directly into every layer of the finance function, from FP&A analysts and controllers to treasury and accounting teams. What the CFO prioritizes in this window shapes what the entire finance function is equipped, or not equipped, to deliver on Day One.

The standard playbook treats the pre-close period as the sponsor's domain: The finance team responds to diligence requests, supplies financial data and waits for Day One instructions. That passivity is expensive.

The finance leader who uses the pre-close window intentionally arrives close with a functioning 13-week cash model, a realistic assessment of their team's gaps, a working knowledge of the debt covenants and a clear understanding of what the sponsor needs to see in the first board package. The finance leader who does not will spend the first quarter of PE ownership catching up on the work and rehabilitating their reputation with the new owners, and in PE, first impressions are difficult to recover from.

What Actually Changes After the Deal Closes?

As seen across PE-backed environments, the finance function witnesses a spiral of unfamiliar changes once a PE firm takes over. Suddenly, the finance function faces:

• Compression of time horizons: faster decisions, shorter debates, fewer “next quarter” conversations.
• Shift from comfort with ambiguity to intolerance for it: everything must ladder to the investment thesis.
• Board reconstitution with investor representatives who interrogate every number, variance and assumption.
• Cadence change: weekly metrics, monthly closes, relentless KPI inspection instead of periodic reviews.
• Elevation from scorekeeper to value‑creation engine, with less patience for backward‑looking narratives.
• Cultural reset: urgency without panic, intensity without consensus‑building rituals.
• Management by exceptions, thresholds and signals — not stories or gut feel.
• Constant awareness of the exit clock — even when no one says the word “exit” out loud.

In order to be adequately prepared for these changes post-deal, here is what the finance team under the leadership of the CFO should actively do in the 90 days pre-close.

Read the Investment Thesis Before You Build a Plan

This sounds obvious. It rarely happens. Most finance leaders either do not have access to the full investment thesis pre-close, or they have access and do not prioritize it. That is a mistake, because the thesis is the clearest possible signal of what finance will be expected to deliver:

• Is the value creation story built around margin expansion? Then your immediate job is cost visibility, working capital efficiency and a reporting cadence that gives the sponsor granular EBITDA visibility.
• Is it a growth thesis? Then you need revenue analytics, unit economics modeling and pipeline-to-revenue tracking that your current reporting probably does not produce.
• Is it an add-on platform where further acquisitions are planned? Then you need integration playbooks before the first bolt-on closes, not after.

The finance leader who arrives at close having already translated the investment thesis into finance priorities is immediately recognizable to a sponsor. That alignment, demonstrated early, is the foundation of the sponsor-CFO relationship. The finance function that shows up asking what is expected has already sent a signal. For FP&A, this means arriving with driver-based models already mapped to the thesis levers, not waiting to be told what to forecast.

Improve Your Processes

The 90 days before close are the best time to conduct an honest audit of your own financial infrastructure, because you still have the time and the bandwidth to fix what you find. Post-close, every gap becomes a distraction from an already packed agenda.

Research on pre-close financial preparation suggests that companies maintaining clean, well-documented financials can command meaningfully higher exit multiples than comparable companies with weaker financial organization, with some estimates placing the premium between 0.5 and 1.0 times revenue. That premium at exit starts with discipline before close.

Practically, this means addressing four things:

• Put a compression plan in place before the sponsor's first investor committee meeting if your monthly close takes more than seven to 10 business days. PE firms run at a different pace, and a 15-day close cycle signals that the finance function is not ready for it.
• Document your revenue recognition policies and ensure they are defensible. Diligence teams will look at this closely, and inconsistencies create delays and valuation adjustments.
• Surface and understand customer and vendor concentration risks before the sponsor discovers them.
• Ensure your multi-year financial statements reconcile cleanly across periods. These are the areas where diligence teams spend the most time, and they are all fixable in the pre-close window with enough lead time.

Have an Honest Conversation About Your Team

One of the hardest things a finance leader can do in the pre-close period is assess their team objectively. The people who helped build the business to the point of PE interest may not be the people who will succeed at PE pace. This is not a reflection of their quality. It is a reflection of the reality that PE-backed finance functions demand a specific combination of speed, analytical depth and stakeholder communication that not every finance professional has developed.

This assessment matters at every level: the FP&A analyst who has never built a driver-based model for an investor audience, the controller whose close process was designed for a less demanding owner, and the systems manager who has never had to support weekly KPI reporting all face real adjustment demands.

The research is consistent on this. Finance teams at PE-backed companies are persistently under-resourced, particularly in FP&A, technical accounting and systems. The finance leader who identifies these gaps pre-close and builds a plan, whether through targeted hiring, interim resources or deliberate development, is the one who avoids a reporting failure at Month Three when the sponsor is watching most closely.

• Map your team against PE-specific demands, not current job performance. Evaluate each person on close speed, driver-based analysis capability and investor-ready communication, as strong performers under prior ownership frequently fall short on all three.
• Identify single points of failure before close. If the person who owns your close process or financial model exits post-close, your reporting function is exposed at the worst possible moment.
• Engage interim finance resources before you need them. Identifying interim FP&A, accounting and systems specialists pre-close means you have a solution ready when a gap opens, not when the pressure is already on.
• Have direct conversations with key team members. Ask your controller, FP&A lead and systems owner what they find hardest about current reporting and where they feel least confident.

Build the 13-Week Cash Model Before You Need It

PE sponsors watch cash closely and early. The 13-week cash flow model is not a post-close deliverable. It is a pre-close foundation. A finance leader who arrives at close with a functioning, accurate 13-week model has answered one of the sponsor's most urgent questions before it is asked: Does this finance leader understand cash, and can they give us visibility into it?

Building this model before close also gives you something valuable: a baseline against which post-close variances can be explained. When the sponsor asks why cash is tracking differently from projections in Week Four, the finance team with a pre-close model has a reference point. The finance team that built it on Day One does not.

For FP&A professionals, this requires a deliberate mindset shift. Most FP&A work is income statement driven, but in a PE-backed environment, cash is the primary performance language. Translating EBITDA assumptions into weekly cash movements, factoring in working capital timing and debt service, demands an explicit link between the two statements that most FP&A teams are not accustomed to maintaining. In larger portfolio companies, treasury may own this model. In mid-market and smaller businesses, which represent the majority of PE-backed companies, the CFO and FP&A team are building and maintaining it directly.

Four specific actions to take pre-close:

• Link your 13-week model explicitly to your income statement assumptions, including payment terms, payroll cycles and tax obligations.
• Build debt service into the model from Day One, covering interest payments, amortization schedules and any fee obligations under the new capital structure.
• Identify your top three working capital pressure points across receivables collection cycles, inventory levels and payables terms, as these are where cash surprises typically originate.
• Agree on a weekly cash reporting format and cadence with the sponsor pre-close, removing ambiguity and signaling early that you are already thinking like a PE-backed CFO.

Map Your Covenant Headroom Before the Leverage Is Applied

This is the pre-close action that appears least often in CFO playbooks, which is exactly why it matters. Once the deal closes and leverage is applied, the income statement tends to absorb most of the finance team's attention. The debt structure gets reviewed in the closing mechanics and then largely set aside until something looks like it might break.

The smarter approach is to model covenant headroom in the pre-close period, when you have time to think clearly:

• Read the term sheet carefully and identify the key covenants, i.e., a net debt to EBITDA threshold, interest coverage ratio, minimum liquidity.
• Model covenants against a base case and a downside scenario of 15 to 20%. Identify the first quarter in which headroom could tighten.
• Build a monitoring cadence into the post-close operating rhythm before you need it.

Finance teams that do this arrive at close with an early warning system already embedded. Those who do not often discover their covenant exposure in the middle of an investor committee presentation, which is the worst possible time.

The Pre-close Mindset Shift

Underlying all five of these actions is a single orientation change that separates finance teams that succeed in PE from those that do not. The pre-close period is not a waiting room. It is the first chapter of the value creation story.

Sponsors evaluate all company talent on their ability to move at the PE pace and deliver on expectations. The finance team’s survival in a PE environment may depend not just on what they do after close, but on how prepared they appear when the relationship formally begins. The finance team that has modeled the covenants, compressed the close, built the cash forecast and mapped the team gaps before Day One signals that they understand PE ownership. That signal has real consequences for the trust and runway they will be given to execute.

Three out of four finance leaders do not survive 18 months post-close. Most of them lost the relationship before they ever had a chance to win it.

This is the first of two articles on the 90-day windows that determine PE acquisition outcomes. The second article, "The 90 Days After a PE Deal Closes: How CFOs Build Credibility and Capture Value," examines the post-close actions that separate the CFOs sponsors keep from those they replace.

Adedolamu Shogelola is the Founder of Dolash Advisory Partners, a corporate finance advisory practice focused on supporting SMBs that are navigating institutional capital. He is a former Senior Associate in the Strategy and Transactions practice at Deloitte and holds an MBA in Finance and Strategy from Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Connect with him on LinkedIn or view his business website.