How to hire and leverage the right COO for your company

Executive overview

Most founders hire a COO too late, too cheaply, and for the wrong reasons. The wrong person in this role costs 15x their annual salary — $3–4M per year for a $200–300K hire.

The COO's job is to be exceptional at what the CEO is not. Fit is defined by that gap, not by a job description.

The right COO is someone you'd trust with your bank account, your house keys, and your kids — before they start.

The seven COO archetypes (Harvard)

1. Executor — gets things done; takes your ideas and delivers
2. Change agent — drives a pivot or cultural reset the team won't accept from the CEO
3. Mentor — brings deep experience the company lacks entirely
4. Other half — complements a seasoned CEO's specific blind spots
5. Partner — frees up CEO time; brings missing skill sets
6. Heir apparent — groomed to take over as CEO exits or moves to chairman
7. MVP — so valuable the title elevates the brand (e.g. Harley at Shopify)

Identify which role you're hiring for before you recruit — so you can explain to the team why it won't be them.

Before you hire a COO

• If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. Hire an EA first.
• Do an activity inventory: list everything you do in a month, categorise each as Incompetent / Competent / Excellent / Unique Ability, and assign an hourly dollar value.
• Offload Incompetent and Competent tasks to others.
• Hire a COO who loves — and has already done — the tasks in your Excellent column.
• Build a scorecard: the top 5 things the COO must achieve in year one. Use it to evaluate candidates.

Finding the right person

• You want someone who has done it, not just someone who knows how.
• If you're building a $100M company, only consider candidates who've already helped grow $100M companies. Don't hire someone from a billion-dollar company — the culture gap will kill it.
• A players are never job-hunting. You have to poach them; use specialist executive search firms.
• Have a professional copywriter polish your job posting before it goes to market.

The TORC interview method

• In early interviews, casually collect names: tennis partners, mastermind colleagues, friends.
• Before the final interview, present 12 of those names and ask the candidate to supply contact details for at least 80%.
• A players get you all 12. C players disappear.
• Spend the two-hour final interview asking: "What would [name] say about your performance on scorecard item 1?" — never actually needing to make the calls.
• Still do real reference checks afterwards. Push hard for the negatives up front.

Titles and compensation

• Inflated titles cause salary inflation across the whole company. Match title to actual scope.
• Twenty years ago a COO title required a major company. Now founders give C-level titles to 25-person teams.
• COO compensation in the COO Alliance ranges from ~$90K (really a GM) to $250–300K+. Match the title to the level.

Leveraging a COO once hired

• Your job is not to make them successful — they will be. Watch for unintended ripple effects: what employees, customers, and suppliers aren't saying.
• Build a regular off-site rhythm: Cameron and Brian met every other Thursday plus ran together twice a week.
• Share the spotlight: the COO rolls out tough decisions; the CEO plays cheerleader and provides air cover for the COO behind the scenes.
• Always have each other's backs publicly.

Not driving them crazy

• Use a decision filter (one-pager): time, money, ROI, and impact before pitching any new idea. If you won't fill it out, the team can say no.
• Keep a shared idea backlog; vote quarterly on green / yellow / red light.
• Teach your team about the entrepreneurial brain — ADD, big ideas, rapid pivots — so they understand the pattern without giving you a hall pass for chaos.

Cultural fit over pedigree

• Never bring a corporate executive into an entrepreneurial company on pedigree alone.
• The Starbucks president who replaced Cameron at 1-800-GOT-JUNK was culturally misaligned: hired consultants, ignored franchisees, killed the guerrilla PR that built the brand.
• The test: would you go on holiday with them? Have them to dinner? They should feel like a future best friend.

Evaluating candidates better than you

• For roles requiring deep expertise you lack, bring in external experts to co-interview.
• At 1-800-GOT-JUNK, finance leaders from Lululemon and the Vancouver Olympics helped interview the head of finance; tech leaders from peer companies interviewed the head of IT.
• You don't need to know how — you need to know who knows how.