Private equity has discovered operating partners in the same way a middle-aged man discovers Lycra before his first charity bike ride. Suddenly everyone has the kit, the language, the confidence, and absolutely no guarantee they can get up a hill.

The operating partner model is ubiquitous. Every fund has “value creation” plastered across its website. Every pitch deck has an operating system, a pricing playbook, a procurement engine, a talent network, and usually a very serious diagram with arrows pretending to be strategy.

It all sounds excellent until someone asks the vulgar little question: What actually moved EBITDA? The answer is where the room gets clammy.

The old operating partner paradigm was built around market conditions that favored success: cheap debt, expanding multiples, and a functioning exit market. Private equity needs a new operating partner model, one suited for the market conditions of today.

An Ornamental Role?

Today, many operating partners are hired under the guise of strategy but deployed like mere ornaments.

In some cases, operating partners meet management only after the deal has closed, the investment thesis has been blessed, the 100-day plan has been stapled together, and the CEO has quietly decided whether they are helpful, threatening, or just another person who says “cadence” too often.

By the time they can effectively embed themselves within a business, the operating partner has inherited a plan they did not write and a mandate they cannot easily challenge. Those mandates are often too vague, with objectives like “support management” and “improve performance.”

The playbooks, maturity models, and initiative trackers that operating partners and their value creation teams create, all with color-coded status updates, may be reassuring to everyone from their boards of directors to LPs. But today, this practice of content creation lacks demonstrable, repeatable operational improvement.

This is administrative morphine. It makes the board feel calm while the patient continues to deteriorate.

Private equity has built a role designed to drive value while often denying it the power to change the things that create value.

The classic operating partner has influence but no authority. Accountability but no control. They are expected to “partner with management,” which often means giving excellent advice to people who did not ask for it and do not report to them.

Picture a middle-market home services business. Replacement windows, flooring, that sort of thing. The sponsor brings in an operating partner with a real CV, a former CEO hired to drive commercial value creation. On paper he is everywhere: on the board, in the quarterly reviews, building a pricing playbook the LPs love.

Then look at what he can actually move. Marketing reports cost per lead, not cost per sale. The reps discount to hit volume, but the comp plan that would fix it belongs to the CEO, not the operating partner. The TV budget bleeding margin was signed off in diligence, so reopening it means admitting the thesis was wrong. So he writes an excellent deck, and margin does not move.

It is like hiring a world-class surgeon and asking him to stand outside the theatre with a clipboard, checking whether the anesthetic is accretive.

Yet this operating partner model worked because, in a way, it didn’t have to. It was the favorable market conditions of yesteryear, not the model, that drove growth.

But times have changed.

A New Reality for Operators

McKinsey’s 2026 Global Private Markets Report found the conditions that once amplified returns, including declining interest rates, expanding multiples, and abundant leverage, have passed. Outcomes now depend much more on operational value creation, AI, leadership, liquidity management, and disciplined asset selection.

Further, BDO’s 2025 Private Equity Survey found that 63% of funds reported average holding periods of five years or more, while 84% said holding periods have increased compared to the prior year. In plain English, firms are stuck owning assets for longer, and the old trick of buying high and selling higher has become a less reliable career plan.

Real EBITDA movement tends to come from the unglamorous parts of operating a business, like pricing discipline, lead conversion, call center performance, and better data.

This is the plumbing that runs throughout the business, and an effective operating partner should be inside the pipes.

The board deck loves transformation. EBITDA prefers plumbing.

Operating partners should have visibility into where margin leaks are, whether marketing is generating demand or renting leads from the same aggregators as their competitors, and whether the CFO can produce gross margin by channel without three analysts, a priest, and a séance.

But the work of many operating partners today remains too functional. They can fall within silos, focusing on procurement, talent, pricing, or finance. While these are useful specialties, companies rarely fail in neat, functional lanes. Instead, they fail in the ugly gaps between them.

Operating partners need to see between those silos. That means visibility across the entire funnel, from lead to sale to margin to retention, for instance. Plenty of portfolio companies struggle to access basic, yet fundamental, stats like customer acquisition cost (CAC) by source, conversion by sales representative, or gross margin by channel. If those answers live in separate spreadsheets, the model is already wheezing.

A Modern Model

The problem with the traditional operating partner model is not the operating partners themselves. Many have run companies, built teams, missed budgets, fixed broken functions, and lived through actual consequences. They know revenue does not grow because someone changed the color palette in Salesforce.

The issue is that these operators are forced inside the box of a governance model built for spectators. EBITDA does not care about an operating partner’s bio or how tastefully shaded a status tracker is, however. It cares about whether price went up and churn did not, whether conversion improved, and whether labor became more productive. It cares about whether a business can repeat those improvements without a sponsor-powered panic attack each quarter.

There are ways to modernize the model for today’s market, and they begin before a deal ever closes.

Pre-acquisition, operating partners should be involved in the diligence process and challenge the value creation thesis. They should be armed with sharper mandates and cleaner data that provides insight into which levers are directly connected to EBITDA, and which workflows across which departments will function in support of those levers.

Post-close, operating partners should be integrated into the business with clearer accountability and enough authority to force decisions when a business starts protecting its own dysfunction.

So what does that integration look like in practice? It starts with visibility. The first job post-close is to get one version of the truth, not four dashboards that have never met. That means direct read access to the systems rather than a curated board pack, and a view that follows the money from first touch to repeat order. If a manager cannot tell you which customers actually carry the margin, or which rep is discounting hardest, that must become Project One, because every decision after it is a guess.

Then earn the room. Operating partners who turn up waving the playbook get managed, not followed. The ones who get traction pick one painful, visible problem and fix it early, ideally something management has been complaining about for two years. Credibility is bought with a result, not a bio. Once the CEO has watched you solve something real, the harder conversations about pricing, performance and people get easier.

On technology, lead from the plumbing, not the press release. The point of a new tool is not the demo at the next board meeting. It is whether a manager can answer a basic question on Monday morning without waiting three days for someone to reconcile the spreadsheets. Connect the data first. Put AI where it lowers cost or lifts conversion, not where it photographs well on a slide. And make adoption stick by tying it to how people are measured, because nothing gets used if the scoreboard never changes.

Above all, give the work owners and dates. Every EBITDA lever that matters gets a name against it and a deadline, not a working group and a status update. That is the line between an operating partner and an expensive bystander.

Finally, an operating partner model fit for today’s market requires asking the question: What happens if nothing changes? It can be an uncomfortable question, but consequences are where value creation either lives or dies quietly in a steering committee.

Otherwise, the industry risks repeating old mistakes: turning a good idea into a title, a deck, a conference panel, and a very expensive illusion of progress.

Lee McCabe is the founder of Claymore Partners, a private equity value creation firm. Formerly an operating partner at AEA Investors, with prior leadership roles at Facebook, Alibaba, Expedia, and eBay, he now holds board seats at 50 Floor and Window Nation and has a forthcoming book with Macmillan. He is a member of ACG Los Angeles.

ACG Insights is produced by the Association for Corporate Growth. To learn more about the organization and how to become a member, visit www.acg.org.