The 100-Day Marketing Plan for a New Platform Acquisition, Week by Week
June 16, 2026
The first 100 days after closing a platform acquisition decide whether marketing becomes a growth lever or a recurring surprise at board meetings. The plan below is a working operating sequence: three weeks of auditing what you actually own, a short list of day-one freezes, four weeks of quick wins that pay for the effort, and a roadmap built from evidence rather than the seller's recollections.
To keep it concrete, one composite runs through every section. Say you acquire a $14M revenue home services platform with six locations, spending roughly 6 percent of revenue on marketing, which works out to about $840K a year or $70K a month. There is one incumbent agency, a marketing coordinator, and a website the owner's nephew built in 2019. Nothing about that profile is unusual in the lower middle market.
The plan assumes no full-time marketing leader is in the seat yet. It is built to be run by an operating partner, a fractional CMO, or the two working together.
The plan at a glance
Four phases, deliberately front-loaded on discovery rather than action. The most expensive mistakes in post-close marketing come from acting in month one on information that turns out to be wrong in month three.
| Phase | Timing | Focus | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freeze | Day one | Stop irreversible decisions | Written freeze list |
| Audit | Weeks 1 to 3 | Ownership, tracking, contracts | Asset register and risk list |
| Quick wins | Weeks 4 to 8 | Reviews, listings, paid waste | Recovered spend and lead lift |
| Roadmap | Weeks 9 to 14 | Budget, agency, targets | 12-month plan with a scorecard |
On the composite platform, the audit phase covers about $210K of quarterly spend. In most cases the audit alone identifies enough waste and risk to justify the whole exercise before week four.
Day one: freeze what can wait
Three decisions get made too early in almost every deal, and all three are expensive to reverse.
- The rebrand. Whether the six local names roll up to a platform brand is a real question, but it is a month-four question. A rebrand executed before you understand local search equity destroys evidence you have not read yet.
- The agency switch. The incumbent may deserve to be fired. Fire them in week two and they walk out holding ad account history, tracking numbers, and institutional knowledge you have not inventoried.
- The website replatform. Someone will propose a new site immediately. Decline until the audit is done.
Here is why the replatform freeze matters on the composite. Say the flagship location's domain is eleven years old and drives 60 percent of the platform's 4,200 monthly organic sessions, roughly 2,500 sessions a month. A rushed migration with sloppy redirects typically gives back 20 to 40 percent of that traffic for one to two quarters. At a 3 percent lead conversion rate and $450 average revenue per lead, losing even 25 percent of those sessions costs around 19 leads and $8,500 a month while you wait for recovery. That is real money spent to fix something that was not yet diagnosed as broken.
Put the freeze list in writing and send it to the management team in the first week. It reads as discipline, not indecision.
Weeks 1 to 3: audit ownership before performance
The instinct after close is to ask how marketing is performing. The better first question is who owns the things marketing runs on. Performance problems are fixable. Ownership problems can hold your lead flow hostage.
Work through five categories:
Tracking and attribution. Inventory every tracking phone number in circulation: on the website, in Google Business Profiles, in directories, in old print material. Say the composite platform runs 22 local tracking numbers and the audit shows the agency, not the company, holds the CallRail account. If that agency relationship ends badly, 22 numbers can go dark, including several sitting in Google Business Profiles. Porting numbers you control takes days. Recovering numbers a hostile vendor controls usually takes 2 to 6 weeks, and sometimes never happens.
Ad accounts. Confirm whether Google Ads, Meta, and Local Services Ads accounts live in the company's name or the agency's manager account. Agency-owned accounts mean the performance history, audiences, and quality signals are not yours. In most cases at this deal size, at least one major account turns out to be agency-owned.
Analytics and site access. Get admin access to Google Analytics, Search Console, the CMS, the domain registrar, and DNS. It is common to find the domain registered to a founder's personal email or a long-departed webmaster.
Agency contracts. Read the actual agreements. Look for auto-renewal windows, termination notice periods, media markup language, and any clause claiming ownership of creative or data.
Brand assets. Trademark status, logo source files, photography rights, and any licensing tied to the seller personally.
The typical output on a six-location platform is an asset register with 40 to 60 line items, of which 3 to 6 are genuine risks needing immediate action. Budget the full three weeks. Access requests alone usually consume half of it.
Weeks 4 to 8: reviews and local listings first
Quick wins should meet two tests: visible impact inside a quarter, and no dependence on decisions still pending. For multi-location home services, review generation and listing hygiene pass both.
Start with the math on the composite. Six locations complete roughly 900 jobs a month. The platform currently adds about 15 Google reviews a month across all six profiles, which means fewer than 2 percent of customers are ever asked. A systematic post-job text ask, sent within an hour of completion, typically converts 4 to 8 percent of jobs into reviews. On 900 jobs, that is 36 to 72 new reviews a month against a baseline of 15. A 2 to 4x lift in review velocity within a quarter is the usual result of simply operationalizing the ask, and it compounds: review volume and recency feed both map pack rankings and Local Services Ads placement.
In parallel, run listing hygiene across all six Google Business Profiles: correct categories, consistent name and address data, service areas that match dispatch reality, photos newer than the trucks in them, and every review answered going forward. Check Local Services Ads budgets and response times per location. In most multi-location acquisitions, at least one profile is suspended, duplicated, or still showing the pre-acquisition owner, and at least one LSA account is throttled by slow call answer rates rather than budget.
None of this requires the agency decision, the brand decision, or new spend. It is management attention applied to assets already owned.
Weeks 4 to 8: find the paid search waste
While the review program spins up, put the paid accounts under a magnifying glass. Post-acquisition paid search audits typically find 15 to 30 percent of spend producing nothing useful. The waste hides in the same places almost every time.
Run the composite numbers. The platform spends $35K a month on paid search across six markets. The search term report shows broad match keywords pulling in do-it-yourself queries, job seekers, and searches from two states away because location settings were left on the default that includes people merely interested in the area. Brand keywords are being bid on at full price with no competitor threat. Two locations are paying for clicks on services they no longer offer. Tag it line by line and the waste comes to $8,400 a month, right at 24 percent, inside the typical range.
That is roughly $100K a year that can be reallocated without cutting a single productive dollar. Expected recovery timing: the cuts take effect immediately, and reinvested spend usually shows results in 2 to 4 months depending on the channel it moves into.
One caution: distinguish waste from attribution blindness. If call tracking was broken during the audit period, some spend labeled unproductive may simply be unmeasured. Fix tracking in weeks 1 to 3 precisely so the paid audit in weeks 4 to 8 reads clean.
Weeks 9 to 14: build the roadmap from evidence
By week nine you know what you own, what is leaking, and what responded quickly. Now the deferred decisions get made, in order.
The agency decision. With the asset register in hand, you negotiate from strength or exit cleanly. On the composite, suppose the audit showed agency-owned ad accounts and a 12 percent undisclosed media markup on $420K of annual paid spend, about $50K a year. That is either a renegotiation lever or a documented reason to leave with your assets already secured.
The budget reallocation. The $100K of recovered paid waste plus any markup savings funds the next phase without asking the board for new money. Typical destinations: filling coverage gaps in underspent markets, LSA budget where response times are now fixed, and creative refresh.
The brand decision. Now the local search data exists to model what each name is worth. Sometimes consolidation wins. Sometimes the local name is carrying 70 percent of a market's demand and the platform brand should wait. The point is deciding with numbers.
The scorecard. Define 8 to 12 metrics the board sees monthly: cost per lead by market, booked-call rate, review velocity, organic visibility, LSA share. Set 12-month targets against the audited baseline, not against the CIM.
The deliverable is a one-page plan plus a budget by market and channel. In most cases the first draft targets a 10 to 20 percent improvement in marketing-sourced revenue over the following twelve months, funded largely by reallocation.
Where this goes wrong
The failure patterns are consistent enough to list.
Acting before auditing is the big one. A new site, a new agency, and a new brand in the first sixty days feels like momentum. It usually means rebuilding attribution from zero and explaining a lead dip at the quarterly review with no baseline to argue from.
Treating the audit as a formality is the quiet one. Skimming agency contracts instead of reading them, or accepting "we have access" instead of testing logins, converts week-two problems into month-seven emergencies. The pattern repeats: a platform terminates an agency in month five, discovers the tracking numbers were agency-owned, and watches call volume drop while numbers get rebuilt across dozens of listings.
Chasing the sophisticated play too early is the tempting one. Attribution modeling, marketing automation, and a data warehouse all have their place. None of them outperforms answering the phone faster and asking 900 customers a month for a review.
Run the sequence as written. Freeze, audit, quick wins, roadmap. On a $14M platform the out-of-pocket cost is mostly attention, and the recovered waste alone typically covers whatever the attention costs.