The VCP and the 100-day plan
A value-creation plan is the three to five year roadmap for equity value: the initiatives, sequenced and sized, that carry a business from entry to exit. The 100-day plan is its opening chapter, the period where the team stabilises operations, verifies the baseline, and books early quick wins that build credibility with management.
The two documents share a spine. The 100-day plan is not a separate exercise, it is the first phase of the VCP made concrete, with named owners and a weekly cadence.
Levers, sized and owned
A credible plan resists the label. "Improve pricing" is a wish; "reprice the mid-tier segment against a defined benchmark, owned by the commercial lead, targeted within two quarters" is a lever. Value-creation levers split cleanly into two families:
- Revenue levers: pricing, mix, cross-sell, new segments or geographies, commercial engine.
- Margin levers: procurement, SG&A, operational efficiency, footprint, technology.
- Each lever: single owner, sized impact, baseline, and a milestone date.
The discipline is that every lever names a person, a number, and a date. A lever without all three is a slide, not a plan.
The value bridge that reconciles to the model
The signature exhibit is the value bridge: entry equity value on the left, each lever a labelled bar, exit value on the right, split across EBITDA growth, margin expansion, multiple, and deleveraging. Its job is not decoration. It is to show, in one page, exactly where the return is meant to come from.
The bridge only earns trust if it reconciles to the sponsor's model. A reforecast that does not tie back to the investment thesis is a red flag to the investment committee. This is where a verified baseline matters: every target should trace back to the fact base the deal was underwritten on.
Standardising without flattening
At portfolio scale, the operating partner faces a tension. Building each VCP by hand is slow and produces inconsistent quality; a rigid template flattens the specifics that make each business different. The resolution is a common structure with company-specific content.
A platform helps by holding the structure constant, the lever taxonomy, the bridge, the initiative charter, the 100-day cadence, while the analysis, targets, and evidence are drawn from each company's own documents. Every plan reads the same way to the IC, and each is still grounded in its own reality.
The payoff is comparability. When every portfolio company reports against the same skeleton, the fund can see across the book at a glance, and a new operating partner can pick up any plan and understand it immediately.
Why auditability matters to the IC
Operating partners defend their plans to an investment committee that has seen many optimistic decks. The plans that survive are the ones where every number can be opened: the baseline traces to management accounts, the market claims trace to a source, the initiative targets trace to a defined benchmark.
Decisity is built so that the numbers behind a value-creation plan are designed to be clickable to their origin. The intent is simple: when the IC asks where a figure came from, the answer is one click away, and the plan keeps its credibility.