Talk to an Expert

Staged change · PE-backed

The first 100 days

5 min on the light depth

The frame

The first hundred days of a hold settle an order. A pricing architecture is three decisions. Licensing is the unit your price attaches to, the value metric, and the rights granted with it. Packaging is which capabilities go together as editions, for which Customer Groups. Pricing is the number and the rulebook from list to what each customer pays. One decision gets read first and the others wait. Most hundred-day plans skip the choice and schedule a list price increase, because the earnings math is the easiest slide.

The pricing model shapes the valuation at exit, which is why the order is the first decision. An acquirer pays for revenue that has not arrived yet, and the model decides how much of it arrives on its own. So the early read is the record, the pricebook against the closed deals, before any price move. Early in the hold, with no added staff, that record is yours to read now. Stage 2 read it as a buyer would; this stage reads it to choose what moves first.

Two inheritances change the read. If your company came through a continuation vehicle or an acquisition, a previous owner built the architecture. It was staged for an exit date that has moved, or for a catalog it was never part of. AI repricing inside a portfolio company is a licensing question before a price question. Two questions come first: whether the unit is bounded, and whether the grant still assumes a person.

The first-hundred-days piece argues that the hold is a sequencing decision: licensing, packaging and pricing set against the value-creation plan in that order, each change priced against the deal record before it ships. The valuation piece argues that the value metric, the editions and a pricebook that explains realized prices are the part of the valuation the owner controls. The heavy depth is the reading order through both and the shelf.

Which of the three decisions does your hundred-day plan touch first, and what in the pricebook and the closed deals told you to start there?

Three things to say in the room this week

  • Before the plan schedules a price move, I want the pricebook read against the closed deals.
  • We inherited this pricing architecture. Someone else chose the unit, and I want to know whether it still holds.
  • Any AI repricing starts in the license grant. The price comes after the unit is settled.

Core reading

Go deeper: the heavy depth

Read the core in order.

  • PE portfolio company pricing, sequencing the first hundred days to exit. The hold as a sequence of the three decisions against the value-creation plan. Why a price move on an unchecked architecture compresses the exit it was meant to lift, and why pricing stays a practice across the hold. Which order a given company takes comes from its own record, in the read described at Stage 2.
  • What a software company is worth, and how the pricing model changes the valuation. The acquirer’s chair: revenue that renews by default, growth from customers who already pay, and list, net and realized price read inside an investment case.

The shelf.

  • Repricing legacy portfolio companies for the AI era. Architectures built before generative AI and AI agents, where the exposure shows in the licensing model first: whether the unit is bounded, whether the grant assumes a person, whether inference cost passes through. Which company moves first, and whether a given company should attempt the transition at all, is judgment work on its own record.
  • Software pricing in a continuation vehicle hold period. The vehicle resets the ownership clock, the valuation mark and the plan. The pricebook, the license grants and the editions reset nothing, and every renewal re-executes on them for the extra years.
  • Acquired product pricing. The product arrives with a unit someone else’s licensing chose. Pass-through is what happens when nobody decides, and the metric is harmonized before the price.

The PE track’s last stop is the operating partner’s expectations, in Stage 5.

The shelf

Which depth did you take?