A lot of firms sell an operating model. They bought a Trello board.

I keep seeing this new species in private equity: the Operating Model Influencer. Always “rolling out the platform”. Always “standardising value creation”. Always one Notion workspace away from operational excellence.

It usually comes with three archetypes:

The Playbook Peddler
Arrives with a 74 page PDF called “The Playbook”. Leaves before anyone tries to use it under pressure.

The KPI Librarian
Obsessed with cataloguing metrics. Lightly allergic to decisions. Builds dashboards that track everything except the things that move EBITDA.

The VCP Tourist
Turns up for the first three weeks, takes photos of the ops review, drops “cadence” into every sentence, then disappears until the next board meeting.

The sharp example is the 100 day plan that turns into a 100 week plan.

Week 1: big workshop, lots of stickies, a “single source of truth”.
Week 4: the CEO is asking who actually owns pricing, CRM, the call centre, and whether anyone is allowed to kill a pet project.
Week 12: the plan is now a backlog.
Week 40: it’s still a backlog, but with prettier labels.

An operating model isn’t a meeting rhythm and it isn’t a tool. It’s a repeatable capability. It’s what the business can do on command, in every market, with normal humans, without heroics.

If you want to prove you’ve got one, publish two things:

The operating cadence: what happens weekly, monthly, quarterly, and who has to show up prepared.
The non negotiables: the standards you won’t compromise on even when everyone’s busy role playing as victims.

Everything else is project management cosplay.