What to ask for in your first week

You are inheriting a state, not a job description

Taking over a portfolio is not like taking over a role with a process. There is a set of assets, each mid-something, with obligations already running and people already expecting things. Most of what you need was never written down because the person who held it did not need to write it down.

So the first week is not about learning the assets. It is about finding out what is already in flight and what expires before you have found your feet.

Ask for these six, in this order

1. The list. Every asset, where it is, and who else touches it. If this takes more than a day to produce, that is your first finding.
2. Everything expiring in ninety days. Registrations, insurances, certificates, inspections, contracts and their notice periods, across all assets, sorted by date rather than by asset.
3. Open work, with who owns each item and what it is waiting on.
4. Money in flight. What is quoted, what is invoiced and unpaid, what is committed for the rest of the year.
5. The people. Your own team, and every outside company, with what each is actually contracted to do rather than what they habitually do.
6. Decisions that are not obvious. Why that yard, why that insurer, why that arrangement with the gardener. This is the one nobody offers and everybody needs.

Ask for them in writing. Not to be difficult, but because the act of writing them down is what surfaces the gaps, and the gaps are the handover.

The ninety day list is the urgent one

Everything else can be learned gradually. Dates cannot: they arrive whether or not you have got to them, and the ones that lapse quietly are the expensive kind.

Go through that list item by item in your first week and, for each, establish three things: what it is, where the document is, and who has historically done it. A date with no document behind it and no named person is not a date you have, it is one you will discover.

Meet the vendors early, and separately

The outside companies know more about the recent history of your assets than anything you have been handed. They also each have a version of the relationship that may not match the one you were told about.

Ask each of them the same three questions: what are you contracted to do, when did you last do it, and what is outstanding. The answers will disagree with your records somewhere, and every disagreement is worth understanding before you change anything.

Resist the urge to replace anyone in the first month. The contractor who seems expensive is often the one who knows where the shutoff valve is.

Walk the assets

Wherever possible, physically. Reading about a generator is not the same as finding that it is behind a locked door nobody has the key for, that the lift service sticker expired last year, or that the tender has been on the hard since February and nobody mentioned it.

Take photographs as you go, dated. In six months they are the record of what you inherited, which matters both for your own sake and for the honest assessment of what has changed on your watch.

Write down what you are told

The single most useful habit in the first month is to write down every fact you are given verbally, with who told you and when. Half of what you are told will turn out to be slightly wrong, and the value is not in catching people out. It is that a written version can be corrected, and a remembered version cannot.

This is also how you build the record that did not exist. You are not reconstructing the last decade. You are capturing the state as you find it, which is the only version anyone actually needs.

What this looks like in Meridian

The six asks above map onto what the product holds, which is why the first week is short when the record already exists: the asset list with status, location, next action and the month's spend is the Assets view; the ninety day question is Horizon, which puts every dated thing from every source on one runway and tells you which expiries have no work covering them yet; open work with owners and what each is waiting on is Operations; committed against spent is on the asset's Financials and on the Portfolio screen as two figures rather than one; the people and the vendors are recorded against the work they actually do.

The handover pack on each asset prints its identity, people, open work, documents and current state as one document, which is the version to ask for if the outgoing manager has been keeping the record properly.

See how the operations view works, or read running work across your team and outside vendors, which is most of what you have just inherited.