How to hire, build trust with, and replace your COO

Executive overview

Most CEOs lack a true second-in-command — or have one but haven't built the trust and complementarity that makes the partnership work. The CEO-COO relationship requires near-total alignment: same direction, different strengths, argued out privately.

Cameron Herold draws on six years as COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK (scaling it from $2M to $106M) and running the COO Alliance to lay out how to find the right COO, build the yin-and-yang dynamic, manage the CEO's idea overload, and know when it's time to replace your second-in-command.

The right COO doesn't want any of the things you want — and that's exactly what makes them indispensable.

Building the CEO-COO relationship

• Map your own unique ability areas first — what you love, excel at, and get energised by.
• Hire a COO who thrives in every area you don't; eliminate overlap.
• COO roles vary radically by company: finance, engineering, marketing may or may not fall under them — structure it around the CEO's gaps.
• Trust must be implicit enough that neither party needs to gut-check the other; the team can always sense misalignment.
• Disagree privately — never in front of the board or team.
• Match personality profiles: most CEOs are high quick-starts; most COOs are high fact-finders and follow-throughs.

Managing CEO idea overload

• CEOs with ADD-style thinking treat their COO as a trusted dump for ideas their brain can't hold.
• When a new idea arrives, take the CEO for a walk, ask questions to understand it fully — they feel heard, not blocked.
• Park the idea on a prioritised list; revisit it at the next quarterly planning session.
• If the CEO insists on acting now, ask which of the current 12 projects gets bumped — forcing a real trade-off.
• The goal: CEOs can trust their ideas are safe, so they stop trying to start everything immediately.

When to replace your COO

• COOs are stage-specific: the skills that get a company from $2M to $100M are not the skills needed from $100M to $1B.
• Cameron was asked to step down by his best friend and CEO once they hit $100M — Brian spent 12 months finding a replacement.
• The first replacement (ex-president of Starbucks) failed within a year; the second, Eric Church, has grown the company from $100M to $450M over 10 years.
• Eric's strengths — corporate processes, professional team-building — would have been the wrong fit in the early entrepreneurial phase.
• Regularly ask: does my current COO have the right profile for the next stage of growth?

What makes a great COO

• Entrepreneurial background helps: Cameron's edge came from having run companies and trained 120 franchise operators before joining 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
• The COO's job is to protect the CEO's ideas, run execution, and tell the CEO the uncomfortable truths — privately, not in meetings.
• Know your zone: Cameron coached the COO at Sprint for 18 months and consistently felt out of his depth at that scale.
• Great COOs push the CEO to disconnect, think strategically, and resist the urge to break things when they get bored.

Fractional executives and the EA-first rule

• Before hiring a full-time COO, consider a fractional COO — lower cost, appropriate for earlier-stage companies.
• A fractional CMO coaching your marketing director, or a fractional CFO overseeing your controller, is almost always worth it.
• Hire an executive assistant before any senior operator hire — delegating $18/hr admin tasks to a $100/hr COO is wasteful.
• Any executive earning $250K+ should have an EA to free them for strategic work.

How to position yourself for a COO role

• Read CEO-focused material through the lens of what CEOs actually need from a partner.
• Your job is to make their company iconic and help their vision happen — not to advance your own agenda.
• Always surface the brutal facts, but do it privately: a trusted COO tells the CEO what no one else will.
• Most COOs have no desire to be CEO — Sheryl Sandberg ran Facebook for 15 years with no interest in Mark Zuckerberg's chair.

The COO Alliance and peer community

• COOs need a peer group as much as CEOs do — they can't vent to the board or the leadership team.
• The COO Alliance is the only global network exclusively for second-in-commands; no entrepreneurs allowed.
• Members span 17 countries, 40% women, ages 21–62, from $6M startups to $1.2B companies.
• Cross-industry exposure accelerates thinking: ideas from different sectors recombine into new approaches.