The deal closes Friday. The work starts Monday. And most acquirers lose the next 90 days — not because the diligence was wrong, but because the operating choices in the first quarter post-close are different from any operating choices the new owner has had to make before.
I learned this on a specialty lender / servicer acquisition that had stalled at the LOI stage. PE-owned platform, complicated capital stack, GSE servicing exposure, a CEO who had run out of trust with his own team. The deal closed because the work changed — pricing, sequencing, and the integration plan got rebuilt. The post-close turnaround that followed is what I want to walk through here, generalized for any IMB acquisition.
Three things die in the first 90 days if you let them. Each has a fix that has to be designed before the close, not after.
Day one: the LO calls
Within 72 hours of close, every top LO in the seller's roster gets a phone call from a recruiter. Sometimes two. The recruiter knows the deal closed because everyone in the local market knows the deal closed. The recruiter is calling to ask one question: "are you happy?" And the LO's answer depends almost entirely on what the LO has heard from the new owner in the first three days.
Most acquirers default to a corporate communication strategy — the all-hands email, the welcome video, the FAQ document. None of that moves the LO. What moves the LO is a one-on-one phone call from someone they recognize as an operator (not a banker, not an HR partner) who can answer two questions: "what changes, and when does it change?"
The fix has to be set up in diligence. Identify the top 30–50 producers pre-close. Pre-stage the calls — who makes them, what they say, what authority they have to commit. Make the calls in the 72-hour window. The LO doesn't need certainty on every detail. They need to know that the new owner has thought about them specifically, and they need a name and number to call when the next recruiter rings them.
I've seen this be the difference between holding 90% of top producers and losing 25% of them. The cost differential at a $1B platform is meaningful. The cost of staging the calls properly is essentially zero.
Comp plan resets
Every IMB acquisition has a comp plan harmonization problem. The seller's comp plan was tuned to the seller's economics. The buyer's comp plan is tuned to the buyer's. Forcing the seller's producers onto the buyer's plan on day 31 is the fastest way to lose the franchise.
The mistake most acquirers make is treating comp plan harmonization as a year-one deliverable, with a scheduled rollout and a transition timeline. The right move is to leave the seller's comp plan in place for the first 12 months — sometimes longer — and rebuild the harmonization plan around what you've actually learned about the platform, not what you assumed in the model.
The exception is when the seller's comp plan is genuinely broken — overpaying by a wide margin, generating losses on volume the buyer can't price around, or creating internal equity problems that will surface anyway. In those cases, fix the specific break, communicate it clearly to producers, and don't pretend it's part of a broader integration plan it isn't.
The principle is the same: comp plan changes are political acts before they're economic ones. They cost trust at exactly the moment the new owner has the least.
GSE and warehouse relationships
Servicing relationships do not transfer cleanly. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae all have their own approval processes, their own performance metrics, and their own institutional memory of the platform you just bought. None of that is automatic in a change of control.
On the specialty lender / servicer turnaround I led, the post-close GSE conversation was the deal's biggest unforeseen lift. Servicing performance issues that hadn't generated formal letters under prior ownership became open conversations under new ownership. Aggregator pricing relationships needed to be re-papered, and a couple of them were not in the place we expected. We renegotiated Fannie Mae servicing contracts post-close. We brought take-out aggregator relationships back to favorable pricing.
None of that work was easy, and none of it should have been a surprise. It was visible in the data pre-close. We just had to be willing to go look. The lesson for anyone working a similar deal: assume servicing relationships need to be re-earned, plan the conversations into the first 90 days, and staff them with operators who have personal credibility with the agency contacts. Letters from new general counsel don't substitute.
The operations bandwidth problem
The operating team that closed the deal is not the operating team that runs the company on day 31. The seller's COO, head of capital markets, head of ops — they're either staying for a transition window with one foot out the door, or they've already left, or they're staying long-term but distracted by integration meetings. Either way, the operating bandwidth in the first 90 days is materially lower than the platform needs.
This is the moment when production pipelines slip, when secondary marketing decisions get deferred, when capacity bottlenecks compound, and when small problems become medium problems because nobody has the bandwidth to catch them.
The fix is to bring in operating bandwidth before close, not after. An operator partner who has run a similar platform, who can sit in the COO chair for the first two quarters while the new owner builds the permanent team, who can make decisions at operating speed without needing to learn the business first. That's not a consultant role. That's a fractional or interim operator role. PE sponsors have used this pattern in industrial and software acquisitions for years; in lending, it's still under-applied.
The integration trap
The biggest single mistake I see in IMB integration is the rush to consolidate. New owner takes over, looks at two LOS environments, two pricing engines, two servicing systems, and decides — reasonably enough — that the synergy case requires consolidation. So they spin up an integration program in month two.
The trap is that consolidation distracts the operating team from running the business at the exact moment when the business is most fragile. Production drops. Branches feel ignored. The synergy case erodes because the underlying revenue erodes faster.
The right sequencing on most IMB integrations is: stabilize first, integrate second. Stabilize means the producers are calm, the comp plans are honored, the GSE relationships are re-earned, and the operating cadence is restored. Integration is the next quarter's work. Sometimes the next year's. Acquirers who jump the sequence pay for it twice — once in lost production, once in the longer integration timeline forced by the production loss.
The market is watching the new owner from day one. The producers, the regulators, the recruiters — all of them are deciding whether to bring the platform their best in the first quarter post-close.
Designing for the 90 days before the close
Everything above gets designed pre-close, not post. The integration plan, the producer call list, the comp plan position, the GSE conversation strategy, the operating bandwidth plan — all of it has to be ready on day one, which means it has to be drafted and pressure-tested in diligence and final negotiations.
The acquirers who do this well treat the first 90 days as the most expensive period of the entire ownership. They staff for it, plan for it, and resist the temptation to use that window for synergy work that can wait.
The acquirers who don't, lose the deal economics in the period when the deal economics are most fragile. The diligence wasn't wrong. The execution was rushed.