The "Oh Shit I Own This Now 👀" Survival Guide

The 90-Day Playbook I Built Before Buying My First Business ( So I Don't Screw It Up )

Raw 30/60/90 day Plan … Like a man!

You signed the papers. The wire cleared. You own a business now.

So … now what?

Being part of a community of absolute STUDS getting after it, I’ve heard most new owners fumble through this part.

I get it, it takes A LOT of effort to even get here.

I’ve heard horror stories that they either change too much too fast and torch the culture, or they sit back paralyzed and watch problems fester.

The way I see it, both paths lead to the same place: regret.

I’m not about that shit. And, if you’re here, neither should you.

So, as an engineer and systems bro, I built myself a framework. Conveniently called a ‘30/60/90 day plan’. No, I didn’t come up with the name haa.

My entire goal with it is to balance learning with action.
Observation with execution.
Respect for what exists with vision for what’s possible.

This is the playbook I’m committing to publicly.

Feel free to steal it, adapt it and make it yours.

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Four Things. That's It. Don't Overcomplicate This, Bro.

I think of this like dating the girl who’s way out of your league.

Learning – You don’t walk up and start talking about yourself. I mean, I don’t, idk about you guys. You watch. You listen. You figure out what she actually cares about before you open your mouth.

Initiative – Small moves. You don’t propose on the first date. You test the waters. See if she laughs at your jokes. See if she texts back.

Performance – Eventually you gotta prove you’re not all talk. Show up when you say you will. Be the guy she brags about to her friends ( Jacked & Tan™️ ).

Personal – This is the real game. Connection. Trust. The thing that makes her choose you over the other bros sliding into her DMs.

Skip any one of these and she’s gone. Same with your business.

Days 1-30: FFS, STFU. Open Your Eyes!

( Side note, I’ve been told I use too many acronyms … idc. It’s my newsletter! Unsub is at the bottom, or just gpt it ).

Your job right now isn’t to be smart. It’s to be curious.

Learning

Study the company’s vision and mission. Not the BS rah-rah marketing posters on the wall.

Hell, does it even have a vision?

Check out what shows up in how decisions get made when nobody’s watching.

You’ve gotta learn the hierarchy. Who actually has power? Sometimes it’s not the org chart. Ideally, yes. But I’m sure we’ve all been in a biz where the middle-manager is just a peon, and it’s his direct reports who’s running shit.

Meet with every senior person. Ask them two questions:

1. “What’s working?”

2. “What would you change if you could?”

For god sake, understand the customer. Who buys this shit? Why? What problem does it solve for them?

Ideally, you would have a decent understanding of this before you buy the company, but … y’know.

Read everything. Now that you’re the owner, you can really go balls deep into the past financials. Have chats about old strategies. The wins. The failures. Especially the failures. Do they have post-mortem docs?

Research competitors. How does this company stack up? Where are the gaps? Where are the advantages?

Again, ideally you would’ve done this before, but if not, this is absolutely the time.

Initiative

Start one small experiment. Something low-stakes that lets you see how the culture responds to change.

Find some stupid-easy low-hanging ( hyphen? ) fruit.

Ex: Does the team have a system in place to respond to inbound in under 60s? That’s some easy shit.

Map out your people. Roles. Responsibilities. Strengths. Weaknesses. Who’s a killer? Who’s a nepo baby?

Performance

Here’s the move that surprises people: maintain current output. Don’t try to be the fkn hero yet!

Your only performance goal right now is don’t break anything.

Personal

Meet everyone. Not just management—everyone. The person running the front desk knows things the CFO doesn’t.

Find a mentor inside the business. Someone who’s been there. Someone who’ll tell you the truth when you’re about to step on a landmine.

Build rapport before you build strategy.

Alright Hotshot, Time to Actually Do Something

You’ve listened ( right? ). You’ve hopefully learned a shit tonne. Now you’ve somewhat earned the right to lead.

Learning

Dig into the processes.

SYSTEMS SYSTEMS SYSTEMS.

Where’s the friction? Why does it happen?

Challenge ‘tHaT’s hoW We hAvE aLwAyS DoNe iT’ - man I hate hearing that shit.

Where do things slow down? Where do people ( employees && customers ) roll their eyes?

Understand the product roadmap. Is there a roadmap?
What’s coming?
What’s stalled?
What got killed and why?

Identify your strategic lanes. The areas where you can actually add value. You didn’t buy a biz where you can’t add any value did you?

Maybe it’s culture. Maybe it’s systems. Maybe it’s sales. Pick your battles.

Initiative

As mentioned before, if there is one build a fkn roadmap! Even if it sucks. Feedback loops and iteration are where it’s at. And not some fantasy GPT’d document. Something with balls. A real plan with real milestones tied to business objectives.

Get buy-in from senior management AND the team. Top-down and bottom-up. Both matter.

Then … 🥁… execute! Spearhead at least one initiative. Here’s the most important part of this ( imo ) YOU HAVE TO OWN THAT SHIT. Completely.

Performance

At the very least streamline or systematize something. One workflow. One process. One bottleneck.

Just fkn fix it bro.

Complete at least one project, and it has to be something visible. Something people can point to.

Personal

Organize something fun. A team chess boxing match - Y’all know about chess boxing, right? Tubes it. It’s fantastic. I’ve yet to find an IRL bro who will do it with me, sadly. Or if you’re lame a bowling night. Basically, something that isn’t work.

This sounds soft. It isn’t. People don’t follow titles. They follow humans they actually like.

And yeah, ik work events kind of suck. But I’m still going to try it.

Get to know the frontline workers. Ya know, the ones doing the actual work. Probably your role in your current job, yeah? Their respect matters more than you think.

Receipts or It Didn't Happen

Three months in. Time to show what you’re made of 💪.

Learning

You’ve better been taking notes, bro. Time to reflect. HARD.

What worked? What flopped? What would you do differently if you started over tomorrow?

FKn write it down. Your future self will thank you.

Initiative

Define KPIs for your team. Make them real metrics and not just vanity bullshit. Actual indicators of progress. Be sure there is a way to measure them, too.

After learning the policies inside and out, it’s time to propose changes. Positive ones. Things to improve.

Don’t be changing for the sake of change. Have a reason why and how it makes things better.

Hell, launch collaborative projects across departments! Break the fkn silos! I’ve worked in too many silo’d orgs. It’s unnecessary overhead.

Let’s get people working together who never did before!

Performance

Make sure you deliver results on something you’re leading. Not “contributed to” → led.

Increase team output. 10%? 15%? Pick a number and hit it!

Identified some vacancies or gaps in skillsets? Fill ‘em! The right people in the right seats changes everything.

Personal

Find a community cause the team actually cares about. Not some corporate ‘round up at checkout’. Key word here is ‘community’. Support it together.

Build the company’s public reputation. Ask for reviews - unless y’all suck lol. Get testimonials. Encourage word of mouth.

Become the obvious choice in your market and community!

“BuT bEaR, ThIs dOeSn’T ApPlY tO mY bIz”

Yes it does. Shut up.

“I bought a laundromat, bro. There’s no org chart. No senior management. It’s just me and a part-timer named Doug.”

- You

Okay. Let’s talk about Doug.

Doug’s been running your washers for eleven years.
He knows which unit eats quarters.
He knows the lady who comes in every Sunday at 0600 and will raise hell if her favorite machine is broken.
He knows the vendor who overcharges and the one who actually picks up the phone.

Doug is your entire organization.

So when my framework says “meet with senior executives” … that’s fkn Doug bro.

When it says “learn the company culture” → that’s figuring out why Doug does things the way he does, and whether it’s genius or just going through the motions.

I’ll continue, if you don’t get it yet.

Learning → That’s sitting with Doug and extracting eleven years of knowledge before you touch a damn thing.

Initiative? → Simply asking Doug what he’d change if he could, and ya know, actually trying one of his ideas! Do a small experiment. See how he responds.

Performance → Fixing the three machines that have been “temporarily out of order” for eight months.

Personal → You’ve got to earn Doug’s trust so he doesn’t quit on you, and take all that institutional knowledge with him.

I feel the framework scales down and scales up.

It fits the laundromat.
It fits the HVAC company.
It fits the accounting firm with forty employees.

Basically, if this was your thought, stop looking for excuses and start adapting the playbook to your situation.

OK, enough making you feel like a bum haha, back to it.

Why Some Bros Build Fkn Empires and The Rest of Y’all Crawl Back to Your Cubicle

Here’s the thing about this framework - and most things you’re reading like this: Reading it is easy. Executing it is hard.

Most people will nod along, bookmark this, and never look at it again. Don’t be that bro.

They’ll wing it. You know the type: Always reacting instead of having a plan. Putting out fires instead of actually thinking about it to prevent them.

Spoiler alert:

Six months later they’ll wonder why the business feels harder than it should.

Bros who win have a system. It can be as easy as a checklist. A document they open every Monday morning that tells them exactly where they should be and what they should be doing.

They’re tracking their progress. They’re holding themselves accountable. They don’t rely on memory or motivation. Fuck motivation 🫡.

For the Bros Who Actually Want to Win

I built the actual implementation document. The one I’m using myself.

It’s the draft doc with:

• Every task from this framework broken into weekly action items

• Checkboxes for accountability ( Think you’re man enough to share this with your new team? )

• Space for notes on what you’re learning

• GPT prompts to force reflection ( so you don’t skip the hard thinking )

• A “landmine log” to track the hidden problems you uncover - you’re in denial if you think there are none.

This isn’t theory ( Let’s be fair here, it is still theory, for me at least. If you’ve followed along long enough, you know I’m not at the acquisition stage yet, but it’s coming! ). It’s my actual battle plan.

If you’re serious about acquiring a business in the next 12 months, or you just closed on one and you’re staring at the ceiling at 0200 wondering what you got yourself into, this document will save you weeks of fumbling.

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