Should I hire a COO or an operations manager?

The question usually arrives when you're underwater and someone has suggested you need help at the top. Then you look at what a COO costs, and you look at what an operations manager costs, and the decision turns into a budget conversation.

It shouldn't. They solve different problems, and buying the wrong one is expensive in a way that isn't only about salary.

The distinction that matters

Forget the org chart. Ask what kind of question you're tired of answering.

If the questions are what should we do, you need someone senior. What should we charge, which market, do we take this client, do we open the second location, is this the year we hire ahead of revenue. Those are judgment questions with money attached and no correct answer available in advance.

If the questions are where is this and why hasn't it happened, you need an operations manager. Who's got the Henderson job, why did the crew sit idle Tuesday, did anybody call the supplier back, is that invoice out.

Both are exhausting. They are not the same exhaustion, and the person who fixes one is usually mediocre at the other.

Why most owners at this stage need the operations manager

Look at the three buckets in your week: work only you can do, work anyone competent could do, and work that exists because nobody's coordinating.

For most owner-led companies under a few million, the third bucket is the one that's eating the week. Not strategy. Coordination. Things sit, nobody's chasing them, and the owner is the only person with the full picture in their head, so the owner becomes the routing layer. See when do I hire my first real manager.

An operations manager fixes that directly and costs a fraction of a COO. And you find out quickly whether it worked, because the number of things you personally chase either drops or it doesn't.

When a COO is genuinely the answer

There's a real version of this hire and it looks like a few specific things.

You've got functioning managers already, and the problem is that nobody is making the calls between functions. Sales promises what operations can't deliver, and the only person who can arbitrate is you.

Or the business has more moving parts than one person can hold, and you can feel that you're deciding things on partial information because getting the full picture takes longer than the decision allows.

Or you want out of the day-to-day permanently, not just relieved, and somebody has to hold the whole thing. That's a genuine COO and it's the most expensive version, because you're buying judgment and judgment costs.

What all three have in common: the work below is already specified. A COO inherited into an undefined company spends their first year writing down what everybody does, which you could have paid a lot less for.

The failure mode nobody warns you about

Whichever one you hire, the thing that kills it is the same, and it isn't the person.

You hire the help, and then you keep the decisions. They coordinate, they chase, they build the thing, and every call still routes to you for a yes. Within six months you've added a salary and a communication step, and you are still the bottleneck, and the honest internal conclusion is that the hire didn't work out.

The hire didn't fail. The handover never happened. See how to delegate without losing control and why your managers won't decide without you.

So before either hire, write down three things: what outcome is theirs, what they can decide without asking you, and what you will stop doing. If you can't write the third one, don't make the hire yet. You're not ready and the person will figure that out before you do.

The cheaper test first

There's a move that costs nothing and tells you which one you need.

For two weeks, write down every question that comes to you, and mark each one either "what should we do" or "where is this." Don't change anything, just record.

At the end you'll have the answer in your own handwriting, and it's usually lopsided. Owners who were sure they needed a COO frequently find that ninety percent of their interruptions were the second kind.

What the data says about the stage

Two thirds of the owner-led companies in the Platform One Index are under $1M, and operations is the constraint owners name least often, 4 percent, behind people at 46, marketing at 30, finance at 13 and performance at 8.

That's worth sitting with. Almost nobody names operations, and coordination load is what most of these owners describe when they write out what they'd fix. It gets called a people problem, because the symptoms all arrive as complaints about individuals dropping things.

People is also the lowest scoring area when all five are measured separately, 32.9 out of 100. The naming and the measuring point at the same place from different directions, which is usually the sign that the label is wrong and the underlying issue is structural. See is it a people problem or a process problem.

Start with the measurement

Twenty questions, about ten minutes, free.

You'll get scored in five areas and see which one your answers point at. Cheaper than a mis-hire at either level, and it takes ten minutes.