The Search Fund / ETA Operator's Day-1 Finance Playbook

The first 90 days as a new search-fund operator are where most finance foundations get laid — and where most of the avoidable mistakes happen. The acquired business has books you didn’t write, a controller you didn’t hire (or none at all), a lender relationship you inherited, and no rolling forecast anybody trusts. The pressure is to close the first quarter cleanly while the real operational insight requires two quarters of data.

This playbook is the day-1 sequence we give any search-fund or ETA operator coming into a multi-location services platform. It’s written assuming you don’t have a full-time controller yet and you’re using Aziell as the finance layer — but most of the sequence applies even if you’re running on spreadsheets for month one.

Days 1–30: Get the books in shape

The temptation is to start improving operations immediately. The discipline is to spend the first month cleaning the books. Decisions made on bad books are worse than decisions made later on good books.

Week 1: Connect the ledger, verify trial balance

Step one is cutting over the QuickBooks file (or whatever’s in place) to your access, verifying the last trial balance ties to the bank feed, and confirming the previous owner hasn’t left any post-close adjustments unrecorded. You’d be surprised how often there are three weeks of unrecorded invoices sitting in the previous owner’s email.

Week 2: Chart of accounts rebuild

Audit every account. Re-map into four roles: revenue, COGS, labor, overhead. Multi-purpose accounts (the “Supplies” line that has both COGS materials and office supplies) get split. This is the same COA discipline the operator getting-started guide describes, and the most consequential hour of your first month.

Week 3: Branch / class tagging

If the platform has multiple locations (and most search-fund targets do), every posted transaction needs a location tag going forward. Historical transactions should be tagged where possible — especially if you want branch-level benchmarking against a 2-year baseline.

Week 4: First clean close

Your first monthly close should land on day 7 after month-end, with a clean trial balance, branch-level P&L, and no “Unallocated” bucket. If any of those three are wrong, the issue is in the COA or the tagging, not the close process.

Days 31–60: Build the rolling forecast

With one clean month of books, you have enough data to build the first driver-based forecast. The sequence:

• Identify your three revenue drivers. Capacity, utilization, average ticket. See the operator framework.
• Seed the forecast with trailing twelve-month averages. Don’t aspire yet. The first forecast is calibrated against reality.
• Layer in the two or three driver improvements you plan to pursue. These should come from whatever you underwrote in the acquisition LBO model. If the LBO model assumed utilization rises 300 bps, that’s your first forecast lever.

Days 61–90: Lender + LP posture

Two external relationships matter in the first 90 days: your senior lender (SBA or bank) and your investors.

Lender

Introduce yourself. Send a one-page quarterly update voluntarily, even if the credit agreement only requires annual. Include DSCR, leverage, minimum liquidity, and a forward-looking covenant status. The lender’s relief at getting proactive communication from a new operator is measurable — and it becomes your refi leverage in year two. See covenant monitoring for the full posture.

Investors

Your search investors signed up for quarterly updates. Ship the first one on time. The content should be a driver-based operating view, not a financial deck — investors reading 15 search-fund updates that quarter are comparing your operating discipline to 14 other first-time CEOs. Lead with drivers, end with outlook.

What day-1 surprises look like (and how to catch them)

Across the search-fund platforms our desk has observed, the three most common day-1 surprises are:

• AR is not what it looks like. Aged >90 invoices that the previous owner treated as good often aren’t. Budget for a write-down in month 2.
• Deferred revenue rhythm is tighter than modeled. If the platform has memberships or prepaid services, the month-1 cash doesn’t show up in month 2 at the rate the LBO model assumed.
• Maintenance cap-ex is delayed. Previous owners almost always under-invest in the final year before sale. Year-1 cap-ex runs 1.3–1.8× the steady-state figure in most platforms.

The tool that compresses the sequence

Aziell’s onboarding is designed to walk a new search-fund operator through the day-1 sequence efficiently. The 30-minute setup takes a new operator from QuickBooks connection to the first driver-based plan — with branch tagging, COA review, and board-pack export included. The CFO Copilot surfaces the first week’s recommendation set overnight, giving a first-time CEO a calibrated list of operating and capital moves before they’ve even hired a controller.

If you’re about to close on a platform and want a structured day-1 walkthrough, the live demo runs the full sequence against an 8-branch sample dataset in about five minutes.