Founder to CEO: When to bring in a COO to support your growth
In the early days of a business, being the founder and being the CEO are basically the same thing. You’re the one selling, delivering, hiring, making decisions, and putting out fires. That scrappy phase is normal and necessary.
At some point though, what made you successful as a founder starts actively holding the business back.
This is usually the moment people start asking if they need an operator or COO. Or, they are just left wondering why everything feels harder than it should, even though revenue is growing.
Let’s talk about what actually changes when you move from founder mode to CEO mode, and how to know when it’s time to bring in operational leadership to support that transition.
Founder mode vs CEO mode
Founders are builders. You create something from nothing, then you test, iterate, pivot, and do whatever needs to be done to get traction.
CEOs, on the other hand, are operators and decision-makers. Your job shifts to setting direction, making tradeoffs, and protecting the overall health of your business.
The problem is that many business owners grow the top line without ever fully making that shift. They’re still approving every decision and re-solving the same problems over and over even though they have a whole team behind them.
That’s where things start to crack. You don’t need a COO because you’re failing. You usually need one because you’re growing.
The most common signs you’ve outgrown founder-led ops
There’s rarely one big moment where it’s obvious. Instead, it shows up in patterns.
A common one I see is that you’re constantly in Slack, email, or meetings answering questions that shouldn’t need you. This means that if you’re on vacation, for example, things aren’t moving forward like they usually do.
Another is if revenue is growing, but profit feels unpredictable or thin. It is extremely common to feel like you are working so hard, and top line is looking good, but you’re still worried about if you have enough in your account and are working extremely hard to make sur eyou do.
If your business depends on your constant involvement to function day to day, it’s time to bring in an operator in the form of a COO. A COO’s job is to remove you from this exact type of bottleneck.
What a COO actually does
A good COO isn’t just a glorified project manager - instead, their role is to turn your vision into something operationally executable.
That typically looks like translating your vision and strategy into priorities and timelines, then pushing those initiatives forward. They often own your org structure and make sure you have the right people in the right roles, while building accountability systems for your team. Lastly, they will generally develop metrics to define if the business is working, so you can see how things are at a glance, and focus your energy on anywhere that needs more attention.
In short, they make the business less fragile.
This is especially important in service-based and founder-led companies, where so much knowledge and context lives in one person’s head. A COO pulls that out, documents it, and builds infrastructure around it.
How to know if a COO makes sense for your business
People often ask what revenue level they “need” to be at before hiring a COO. The truth is, revenue alone is a terrible indicator. I’ve seen $300k businesses that desperately need operational leadership, and $5M businesses that don’t quite yet.
Things to look at instead are how many people rely on you to do their job. If it’s more than even one or two, it’s time to look at hiring a COO.
Similarly, do you have clarity on where your money and effort is actually going and if it’s paying off? If you aren’t sure, it’s time to look at hiring a COO.
If your answers make you nervous, that’s a clear signal.
COOs are especially valuable when complexity increases. More clients, more offers, more team members, and more tools all mean more complexity - when that complexity compounds faster than revenue, scale becomes really hard to achieve profitably. A COO can come in and help revamp that.
Fractional vs full-time COO (and why most founders start wrong)
One of the biggest mistakes I see is waiting too long because hiring a full-time COO feels like too big of a leap.
The reality is, most small and mid-sized businesses don’t need a full-time COO. They need senior operational thinking applied consistently, without 40 hours a week of overhead.
That’s where fractional or embedded COO support makes sense.
A fractional COO can perform all of the same duties, but makes way more financial sense as your first step towards operational leadership. This lets you get leverage without locking yourself into a massive fixed cost before the business is ready.
If you’re still founder-led, but feeling stretched, fractional support is often the cleanest bridge between where you are and where you’re trying to go.
READ MORE: Why Your Growing Business Needs a Fractional COO
What life looks like when you get this right
When operational leadership is in place, a few things usually happen pretty fast. First, decisions get made without you. Maybe you end up with more space in your calendar, and less DMs in your unread section of Slack.
You also gain back control of your growth. Your numbers make more sense and you start to feel proactive instead of reactive (finally!)
Most founders are shocked by how much mental bandwidth they get back, because they are finally not carrying everything alone.
If you’re feeling that tension - like you’ve outgrown the way you’ve been running things but aren’t sure what comes next - that’s exactly the moment to explore COO support.
Growth doesn’t need to feel heavy, and with the right operational backbone, it doesn’t.
