Chief Operating Officer
Turns the plan into a working machine: delivery, hiring, the operating rhythm, and the unglamorous follow-through the founder keeps running out of time for.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
The hire a founder makes when the constraint stops being 'what should we do' and becomes 'why is nothing finishing'. Two patterns work: an operator who has scaled a company through the stage you are entering, or a strong general manager from your industry who can be taught the startup part. The fractional version suits a founder who needs the operating cadence installed — weekly numbers, a hiring process, an accountability chart — rather than someone to run it forever.
Education
No requirement and no pattern. Operations is learned by running something; an MBA supplies the vocabulary and none of the judgment.
Experience
8+ years with real ownership of delivery or a P&L, including one period of fast growth and one of cost discipline. Ask what they inherited, what they changed first, and what it cost — operators who have only added resources have not been tested.
Vertical / domain experience
Matters where delivery is the hard part: field service, manufacturing, logistics, clinical operations, anything with a crew, a vehicle or a shift. In a software company it matters much less than whether they can install a cadence and hold people to it.
What it pays, roughly
$119,995 median, Canada — for Administrative services managers, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $104,000 to $123,718 over 192,795 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| PMP — Project Management Professional | Project Management Institute | Common in project-based operations; a signal of method, not of leadership. |
| Lean Six Sigma Black Belt | American Society for Quality | Genuinely useful where throughput and defect rate are the problem. |
| CPIM / CSCP | ASCM (APICS) | Supply chain and production planning — relevant when you hold inventory. |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Does not exist. The founder is the operator, and the discipline to build now is writing down what you decided and when you will check it.
Often the second founder, or a fractional operator two days a month installing the rhythm: one weekly meeting with numbers, one owner per outcome, one list everyone can see.
A real seat. Owns delivery, the operating cadence, most hiring, and the systems the company runs on — which frees the CEO for capital, strategy and the two decisions a year that cannot be delegated.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Field Service Manager (Field & trade)
- Program Manager (Operations)
- Chief Human Resources Officer
- Chief Financial Officer
COO and CFO merge well below about fifty people — both jobs are about where the resources go — and COO plus head of people is the other natural pairing, since hiring is usually the binding constraint on delivery. A COO who is also the head of delivery is normal in a trade business and is simply what a good general manager does.
Keep separate from
If the CEO is also the COO, nothing is ever escalated: the person deciding what matters is the person deciding what gets done, and the urgent beats the important every week. This is the merge most founders should break first.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Asks for the numbers before offering an opinion
- Can describe an operating cadence they installed and what it changed
- Comfortable being the person who says a date will be missed
Red flags
- Reorganises before understanding the work
- Measures activity rather than throughput
- Needs the founder's authority to be listened to
The jobs under this seat
What this hat is actually responsible for once there are people doing it. Every one is a page of its own — and at seed most of them are the same two people, which is what the merge notes above are about.
The human on the other end of an employment process — getting a person hired, onboarded, paid and answered, correctly…
Answers the customer, fixes what can be fixed in the moment, and routes the rest to whoever can.
Makes cross-functional work actually finish: the launch, the migration, the certification, the thing that needs six…
Pays people correctly and on time, in the right currency, with the right deductions and the right filings behind it.
Gets a person legally able to work where the company needs them, and keeps the permissions current.
Owns the first 30 to 90 days of a customer's life: getting them live, trained and using the thing they bought.
Does the licensed work, and is the reason the job passes inspection. In a small trade business, also the de facto…
Learns the trade on your jobs while doing the work that does not need a ticket — and is the only sustainable answer to…
Decides what a job will cost and what to charge for it — the single role with the most direct line to whether the…
Owns the day: who goes where, in what order, with which parts — and tells the customer the truth about when.
Runs the crew on site: the sequence, the safety, the quality and whether the job finishes in the hours it was sold for.
Owns the whole delivery engine: the crews, the schedule, the fleet, the parts, the margins per job and the callback…
The whole departments: Operations and Field & trade · every job in one list
What this role runs on
The software categories this seat lives in, each linked to the screen of who sells it — the incumbent, the challengers and what the lock-in is.