The PE Trade Roll-Up
Day 1–100 Operations Playbook

You closed the deal. Now the clock starts.

The first 100 days of a trade services acquisition determine more of the outcome than the next three years combined. Not because operators aren't working hard after Day 100 — they are — but because the patterns set in the first quarter calcify. The chart of accounts structure you tolerate in Week 2 is the one you're reconciling manually in Year 3. The dispatch SLA you don't enforce in Month 1 is the one causing technician churn by Month 18.

PE firms that consistently hit their return targets in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical roll-ups share one trait: they show up on Day 1 with a standardization playbook, not a wish list.

This is that playbook. It's built for operating partners running 3–15 company trade-services portfolios. It assumes you're dealing with a mix of FSM platforms (ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, or Excel), founder-CEOs with varying levels of cooperation, and a mandate to hit EBITDA targets in a 4–7 year hold.

Day 0: The Pre-Close Ops Diligence Checklist

Most PE diligence focuses on revenue quality, customer concentration, and technician count. Operating partners who do their jobs well add a third dimension: operational readiness for standardization.

What you demand from the data room before close shapes how painful Day 1 is.

Financial Infrastructure

• Chart of accounts export from the current accounting system (QuickBooks, Sage, NetSuite). Flag companies using non-standard CoA structures — this tells you the migration complexity before you own them.
• P&L by service line (HVAC install, HVAC service, plumbing, electrical, maintenance agreements). If this doesn't exist, Day 1 is harder. Note it.
• Maintenance agreement (MA) schedule — count, annual value, renewal rate, and whether agreements live in the FSM or a spreadsheet. MA portability risk is underpriced in most deals.
• AR aging report — snapshot of collections hygiene. A company with 30%+ of AR over 60 days has a dispatch or invoicing problem, not just a finance problem.

Field Service Management (FSM) Data

• FSM platform and version — ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, or other. Document the version and whether they're on the latest release. Migrations from legacy FieldEdge versions to current ServiceTitan take 8–12 weeks minimum.
• Data export sample — request a 90-day export of job records including job type, technician, revenue, materials cost, and close rate. This is your Day 15 baseline.
• Pricebook status — does a flat-rate pricebook exist? When was it last updated? Is it consistent with actual invoiced work? Pricebooks that haven't been touched in 18+ months are hiding margin.
• Dispatch SLA documentation — is there one? What's the average time-to-schedule for service calls vs. installs? What's the no-show / rescheduled call rate?

Organizational

• Org chart with tenure — flag anyone who's been there under 6 months, and anyone who is a single point of failure.
• Compensation structure — flat wage, spiff-based, or commission? Spiff structures that aren't platform-synced cause data integrity problems on Day 1.
• Key employee agreements — identify who has change-of-control provisions or retention risk.

Red Flags That Change Your 100-Day Approach

Day 1–14: The Standardization Beachhead

The first two weeks are not about improvement. They're about instrumentation and quick anchoring.

You cannot improve what you cannot measure. And you cannot measure what isn't standardized. These 14 days are about standing up the four pillars that everything else depends on.

Pillar 1: Chart of Accounts Standardization

The moment you own multiple portcos, their financials must be comparable. That requires a unified CoA. Enforce this across every portco by Day 14. Yes, it creates short-term friction with the existing bookkeeper. Do it anyway.

Revenue
  4100 - HVAC Service Revenue
  4110 - HVAC Installation Revenue
  4120 - Maintenance Agreement Revenue
  4200 - Plumbing Service Revenue
  4210 - Plumbing Installation Revenue
  4300 - Electrical Service Revenue
  4400 - Other Revenue

Cost of Revenue
  5100 - Technician Labor (Direct)
  5110 - Subcontractor Labor
  5200 - Parts & Materials
  5300 - Equipment / Units (Install)
  5400 - Vehicle / Field Direct Costs

Operating Expenses
  6100 - Dispatch / CSR Labor
  6200 - Management Labor
  6300 - Marketing
  6400 - Facilities
  6500 - Fleet (G&A)
  6600 - Software & Tools
  6700 - Insurance

Pillar 2: Dispatch SLAs

Dispatch efficiency is the hidden EBITDA lever in trade services. A technician sitting in the parking lot waiting for a job assignment is pure margin destruction. Set these SLAs in Week 1:

Pillar 3: Tech Onboarding

Within 14 days, every technician should be credentialed in the FSM with trade certifications documented, using the mobile app for job completion (no paper tickets), assigned a truck and inventory kit in the FSM system, and clear on the flat-rate pricebook.

The FSM mobile app adoption is non-negotiable. Paper tickets are the source of every data integrity problem you'll fight later. If you see techs still writing paper and having the office transcribe it, that's a Day 1 priority, not a backlog item.

Pillar 4: Pricing Book Unification

Flat-rate pricing does three things: it protects your margin, it removes technician-level pricing discretion, and it makes your FSM data trustworthy.

Set minimum gross margins by category: service calls 65–75% GM, installs 40–55% GM, maintenance agreements 70–80% GM. Lock the pricebook in the FSM so only you can modify it.

This step will generate complaints from the founder-CEO and senior technicians. They'll say "we've always priced by feel" and "our customers will leave." Neither is true.

Day 15–45: Data Integration Patterns

You now have a standardized CoA, dispatch SLAs on paper, techs in the FSM, and a flat-rate pricebook. The next 30 days are about data plumbing — getting information out of the FSM and into a format where you can actually manage performance.

The FSM Landscape Reality

The Two Integration Approaches

Option 1: Platform standardization — migrate everyone to ServiceTitan. It's the right long-term move for portfolios larger than 5 companies with 15+ techs each. But it takes 8–16 weeks per migration, disrupts operations during the transition, and costs $5,000–$15,000 in implementation fees plus ServiceTitan's per-tech pricing.

Option 2: Data layer unification — keep FSMs in place, extract data into a shared warehouse, build your KPI layer on top. This is the right move for the first 45 days in any portfolio, and the permanent approach for sub-10-tech companies on FieldEdge or Housecall Pro.

What the unified data layer must contain:

company_id | date | revenue | cost_of_revenue | gross_margin
technician_id | jobs_completed | revenue_per_tech | avg_ticket_size
service_category | job_type | pricebook_adherence_rate
maintenance_agreements_active | MA_renewal_rate | MA_revenue
dispatch_sla_compliance | avg_time_to_assign | reschedule_rate
ar_balance | ar_over_60 | collections_rate

The Spreadsheet Problem

A significant percentage of acquired trade companies — particularly owner-operated businesses doing under $5M revenue — are running critical data in spreadsheets. Maintenance agreement lists, customer contact databases, equipment service history, even technician schedules.

• Identify what lives in spreadsheets. Ask the office manager. The founder-CEO doesn't know. The office manager does.
• Prioritize by revenue impact. MA lists and customer history are Day 15. Vendor pricing spreadsheets can wait until Day 45.
• Assign an owner. This is a revenue protection project. Assign your integration lead, not the company's office admin.
• Validate the migrated data. Pull a 10% random sample after migration and verify against source documents. Migrated data is wrong more often than you think.

QuickBooks Sync: The Hidden Integration Risk

Key issues to audit in Days 15–45: chart of account mapping to your standardized CoA, invoice timing (completion-triggered vs. manual approval), and payment reconciliation (automatic vs. undeposited funds queue).

Day 46–100: KPI Rollup, Cross-Portco Benchmarking, and EBITDA Lift Tracking

You've instrumented. You've standardized. Now you manage.

The Portfolio KPI Dashboard

By Day 46, you should be reviewing this dashboard weekly across all portcos:

Operational KPIs

Financial KPIs

Cross-Portco Benchmarking: The Underused Lever

One of the structural advantages of running a portfolio is that you can benchmark portcos against each other. A company at 55% technician utilization sitting next to a comparable company at 73% utilization isn't a mystery: it's a dispatch problem you can diagnose and fix.

The benchmarking cadence: weekly (revenue per tech, jobs per tech, daily revenue per portco), monthly (full P&L comparison, MA metrics, dispatch SLA compliance), quarterly (full portfolio performance review vs. value creation targets).

"Company A has a $512 average ticket size. Company B, same size, same market, same service mix, is at $341. That's a pricing book or close-rate problem. Let's pull the job records."

This is not possible without a unified data layer. This is only possible when you've done Days 1–45 correctly.

Tracking EBITDA Lift

Build your baseline by Day 14. LTM EBITDA, broken down by revenue mix, labor cost, material margin, and G&A as a percentage of revenue. Then by Day 100, you should be able to show the delta and attribute it:

Firms that track this rigorously exit at higher multiples because they can tell the story with data.

Common Failure Modes

1. Founder-CEO Friction

The founder built the company. They know every customer, every technician, every truck. When you show up with a pricebook and SLAs, they interpret it as: "You think I don't know how to run my business."

The approach that works: Lead with the data, not the directive. "Your MA renewal rate is 67%. Industry best-in-class is 85%. Here's what the best companies do differently." You're not criticizing — you're bringing a benchmark they didn't have access to before.

When it doesn't get better: Some founder-CEOs are not operators — they're entrepreneurs. If by Day 45 the relationship isn't working, it's not going to work by Day 100. Make the management decision early.

2. Tech Turnover During Integration

The first 60 days are when technician turnover spikes. Communicate early and often with the field. Show them the pricebook and explain that flat-rate pricing means bigger average tickets, which means bigger spiffs. Make the change personal and positive for them.

3. Dispatch Chaos

The standardization period — when the FSM is being configured, pricebook is being uploaded, and techs are being onboarded to mobile — is when dispatch breaks down. Designate one person as the "dispatch guardian" for the first 30 days. Their sole job is to ensure no job goes uncovered.

4. Data You Can't Trust

The single most dangerous outcome of a rushed integration is a FSM database full of dirty data. Once your data is dirty, every KPI report is fiction. Assign a data quality owner from Day 1. Run a weekly data audit (30-minute manual review of job records) for the first 90 days. Define what "clean" looks like before you start loading data.

Where AI and Automation Actually Move the Needle

Where AI Delivers Real ROI

• Dispatch optimization — AI-powered scheduling reduces drive time by 15–25% and increases jobs per tech per day by 0.5–1.0. This is real, measurable, and compounds across a portfolio.
• Maintenance agreement renewal outreach — automated renewal sequences improve MA renewal rates by 8–12 percentage points when implemented correctly.
• Call transcription and categorization — AI transcription of inbound calls reduces CSR error rates and creates a searchable record. Particularly valuable for multi-location portfolios.
• Cross-portco anomaly detection — automated flagging when a portco's metrics deviate from portfolio norms surfaces problems before they become crises.

Where AI Doesn't Move the Needle

• Replacing the founder conversation — no automation substitutes for a well-run monthly operating review with the founder-CEO.
• Fixing a broken pricebook — the work of building, loading, and enforcing a flat-rate pricebook requires human judgment about your specific market.
• Solving technician retention — compensation, culture, and management quality determine retention. AI tools can help with scheduling flexibility, but they don't fix a toxic shop floor.
• Accurate forecasting from dirty data — AI forecasting on top of dirty FSM data produces confident-sounding nonsense. Clean your data first.

What the Best Operating Partners Do Differently

The operating partners who consistently deliver top-quartile returns in trade services don't have a secret model. They have a discipline.

They show up on Day 0 with a standardization playbook. They enforce the CoA by Day 14, not whenever it's convenient. They build a portfolio data layer before they try to benchmark. They have the hard founder-CEO conversation at Day 45, not Day 200. And they track EBITDA lift attribution from a clean baseline, so they can tell the story at exit.

Everything else is implementation.