VP, Operational Excellence
About the role
Role: VP, Operational Excellence
Organization: Cobalt Service Partners
Location: Remote (US)
Reports To: President
About Cobalt Service Partners
Cobalt Service Partners is a private equity–backed platform building the leading commercial access and security integration business in North America. Our partner companies design, install, and service mission-critical systems including access control, video surveillance, intrusion detection, and related low-voltage infrastructure for enterprise, institutional, and commercial customers. Backed by Alpine Investors, a private equity firm specializing in middle market companies in the services and software industries and with $15bn+ of AUM, Cobalt has scaled rapidly since launch, completing twenty acquisitions in two and a half years and establishing a differentiated operating model in a large, fragmented, and growing market. Today the platform spans 12+ security businesses operating across the country. Our leadership team combines deep operating experience with disciplined investment practices, and we are building a platform designed to scale through both organic growth and M&A.
Position Overview
This is a high-impact operating role sitting at the center of Cobalt's Security group performance engine. The VP of Operational Excellence owns gross margin expansion, operating system transformation, and technology-enabled performance improvement across all Cobalt Security partner companies. You will drive measurable EBITDA improvement through field operations discipline, labor productivity, quoting integrity, and cross-business initiative execution.
This role requires someone who can work across multiple businesses simultaneously, influence without line authority, build systems from scratch, and leave every organization more capable than they found it. You will report directly to the President of Security and your work will be visible at the portfolio level from day one. You will own a real P&L number: success is measured by a direct EBITDA delivery target, with supporting KPIs including revenue per technician, billable utilization, and tech stack adoption across the portfolio.
What You Will Own
- Gross Margin Expansion
- Drive sustained improvement in gross margin percentage and gross profit dollars across the Security group through structural operational changes.
- Launch and manage cross-business margin initiatives with documented pre and post financial impact.
- Own quoted vs. actual margin variance tracking and enforce tolerance standards across all partner companies.
- Field Productivity and Labor Economics
- Build visibility into field labor productivity across the Security group and drive measurable improvement in revenue per technician.
- Track and improve billable utilization, optimize subcontractor spend, and implement tech tiering models across partner companies.
- Ensure no business runs more than 30 days without a current labor productivity snapshot.
- Quoting Intelligence and Job Costing
- Build the standards, data, and tools that make disciplined quoting possible across the portfolio.
- Define and enforce quoting standards including labor hours by task, complexity, and material cost benchmarks.
- Establish a job costing cadence with regular job-level margin reviews across all partner companies.
- Technology and AI Enablement
- Identify, pilot, and evaluate AI and automation tools that improve gross margin, field productivity, and operating visibility.
- Build technology roadmaps grounded in financial return, not hype, and deliver forward-looking recommendations to t