Target Operating Model Design for a Scale-Up: The Full Process, With a Worked Example

When a board or investor first uses the phrase target operating model, most founders hear it as a demand for something corporate, expensive and probably unnecessary, which is a shame, because underneath the language is a genuinely useful method. Target operating model design is simply the discipline of describing how your business runs today, describing how it needs to run to support where you are going, and then closing the gap deliberately rather than by accident. The big firms did not invent good operating models; they invented a six-month process for designing them, and it is the process, not the idea, that does not fit a 30 to 80 person business.

This article walks through the method end to end: the phases, the deliverables each one should produce, a worked example for a mid-sized services firm, and what the work actually costs in the UK depending on who you buy it from.

What a target operating model actually is

An operating model is the set of choices about how work flows through your business: who does what, who decides what, how delivery runs, what gets measured and when people meet to steer it. A target operating model is the same thing written down for a future state, typically the business you need to be in 12 to 24 months, rather than the one you have now. The word target matters because it forces you to design against where you are going, whereas most scale-ups have an operating model that was designed, if it was designed at all, for a company half their current size.

If you want the underlying components in more depth, we have covered structure, decision rights and cadence for a growing business separately; this piece is about the process of getting from current state to target state.

The layers of an operating model

Every consultancy draws this as a diagram, and the diagram is genuinely useful, because it stops you redesigning one layer while ignoring the ones above and below it. For a services scale-up, five layers are enough.

Redesigns fail most often when someone changes the structure layer, usually by hiring a senior person, without touching decision rights or cadence, at which point the new hire inherits an org chart but not the authority or the information to run anything.

The target operating model design process, phase by phase

The big-firm version of this runs four to six months with a team of consultants. The scale-up version below covers the same ground in six to ten weeks, because a 45-person business does not need forty stakeholder interviews to understand itself.

Phase 1: current-state assessment (two to three weeks)

You cannot design a target until you have an honest picture of today, which means mapping how decisions actually get made rather than how the org chart says they do, where margin is leaking between sold and delivered, and which processes only work because a specific person, usually the founder, holds them together. The deliverable is a current-state assessment: a short document that names the real operating model, including the informal one, and rates each layer against where the business needs to be.

Phase 2: design principles (one week)

Before drawing the target, you agree the rules it must satisfy, and these principles are what stop the design becoming a wish list. Examples: no client decision under a defined value should require the founder; delivery leadership must own resourcing, not sales; every recurring meeting must have a named owner and a decision it exists to make. The deliverable is a one-page set of five to eight principles that the leadership team has actually argued about and signed.

Phase 3: target-state blueprint (two to three weeks)

This is the design itself: the future org structure, the decision rights map, the delivery process and the meeting cadence, drawn for the business 12 to 24 months out. The deliverable is a blueprint of perhaps ten to fifteen pages, not a hundred, covering each layer in the table above with enough specificity that two people reading it would build the same thing.

Phase 4: gap analysis (one week)

With current state and target state on the table, the gaps name themselves: roles that do not exist, decisions sitting with the wrong person, processes that break above a certain volume. The deliverable is a prioritised gap list, and the prioritisation matters more than the list, because the honest version is short.

Phase 5: implementation roadmap (one week)

The output that actually changes anything is a sequenced roadmap, and for a scale-up it should be not a 40-point transformation plan but three or four changes that, if they hold, materially improve how the business runs, each with an owner, a timeframe and a definition of what embedded looks like.

A worked example: a 45-person technology services firm

Consider a founder-led consultancy at roughly £4.5m revenue, where sales are strong but margins have drifted, project overruns are becoming normal and every commercial decision above a modest threshold still routes through the founder. The current-state assessment finds that resourcing is negotiated project by project between account leads, that there is no delivery owner above project level, and that the weekly leadership meeting is a status update rather than a decision forum.

The design principles the leadership team agrees include a single owner for delivery capacity, founder involvement only in decisions above £50k or affecting strategy, and margin reviewed monthly at engagement level rather than annually in the accounts. The target blueprint introduces a head of delivery role, a decision rights map that pushes pricing within bands to account leads, a fortnightly resourcing forum and a monthly commercial review. The gap analysis surfaces two hires, one promotion and three process changes, and the roadmap sequences them across two quarters, with the delivery role first because everything else depends on it. Total elapsed time from kick-off to roadmap: eight weeks.

What target operating model design costs in the UK

The same method is sold at three very different price points, and the differences are mostly about who does the work and how much of it is genuinely necessary at your size.

• Strategy houses and the Big Four. A full TOM programme is typically priced in the hundreds of thousands of pounds and runs four to six months, which makes sense for a bank or an insurer and almost never for a business under 200 people. We have written separately about when you genuinely need that tier and when you do not.
• Boutique operating model consultancies. Expect somewhere in the tens of thousands for an eight to twelve week engagement, usually ending at the blueprint and roadmap, with implementation left to you.
• Fractional or embedded support. An experienced operator working two to three days a week can run the full process and then stay to implement it, typically for a monthly cost comparable to a fraction of one senior salary, which is often the best value at scale-up size precisely because the design and the delivery are done by the same person.

The expensive part of an operating model is not designing it; it is the year the wrong one quietly costs you before anyone names the problem.

Where Vitori fits

The process described above is worth running whether you do it yourself, hire a boutique or bring in embedded support, and a capable leadership team with a spare quarter of attention can get a long way unaided. Where Vitori differs from a design-and-depart consultancy is that we run this process through our Operational Scale Framework, assessing Growth, Delivery and Operations against maturity stages, and then, through our Operator model, we stay to implement the roadmap rather than handing it over at the blueprint stage, remaining accountable until the changes hold. It is not the right purchase for every situation; a business that only needs a second opinion on structure needs an advisor for a few days, not an embedded operator. But if the gap between your current state and your target state is the reason everything still routes through you, closing it properly is what gets you a business that runs, and scales, without the founder in every decision.