What does a COO do? A COO serves as the CEO’s strategic thought partner, translates vision into priorities and accountability, and coordinates every business function so the plan becomes real. The role combines execution, structure, truth-telling, and people leadership, giving the founder a second-in-command who can build beyond the founder’s personal capacity.
In this episode of The COO Solution Podcast, host Derek Fredrickson explains what the Chief Operating Officer role should actually deliver, why many founders hire the wrong version of it, and how to choose a second-in-command who can turn vision into execution.
Take the Quiz: Find Out What Your Business Actually Needs
About This Episode
In this episode, host Derek Fredrickson breaks down one of the most misunderstood leadership roles in a scaling business: the Chief Operating Officer.
After 16 years in the COO seat, both in-house and fractional, Derek has learned that the role has two equally important halves. Most founders hire for execution but overlook the strategic thought partnership that makes it effective.
A great COO does more than manage operations, oversee teams, or take tasks off the founder’s plate. They help the CEO think through difficult decisions, translate vision into action, build operating systems, and create accountability across the entire business.
Derek also explores why hiring the wrong type of COO can leave founders just as overwhelmed as before, and what to look for in a second-in-command who can challenge their thinking, lead people, and build a business that scales.
If you’re considering hiring a COO or wondering why your current leadership structure isn’t working, this episode will help you understand what the role should actually deliver.
In This Episode
[02:01] The COO as a Strategic Thought Partner
Why founders need someone they can think out loud with before turning ideas into plans.
[04:42] Translating Vision Into Execution
How a COO turns strategy into priorities, ownership, deadlines, and accountability.
[09:32] Building Systems and Telling the Truth
Why a great COO must build operational structure and be willing to challenge the founder.
[12:28] The Human Side of Leadership
How emotional intelligence, honest conversations, and compassionate accountability shape company culture.
[14:23] Why Founders Hire the Wrong COO
The hidden cost of hiring for tasks instead of strategic partnership, and the mistakes that keep founders stuck.
[17:10] How to Hire the Right Second-in-Command
Why decision rights, proven building experience, emotional intelligence, and a 90-day plan matter.
Why This Matters
Many founders believe hiring a COO means finding someone to take operational responsibilities off their plate.
But hiring an executor without a strategic partner often leaves every important decision flowing back to the founder.
A successful COO partnership requires more than delegation. It requires trust, honest feedback, shared thinking, and a clear operating structure.
The right COO doesn’t simply manage what already exists. They help build the business into something that can grow beyond the founder’s personal capacity.
What you’ll learn
- Understand the two essential halves of the COO role.
- Recognize why some COO hires fail to reduce founder dependency.
- Distinguish between a manager, an operator, and a strategic second-in-command.
- Build accountability across every business function.
- Identify what to look for when hiring a COO.
Action Steps for Listeners
- Define decision rights before writing a COO job description.
- Identify the outcomes your COO should own across the business, not just operations.
- Ask candidates what systems they’ve built from scratch, not just managed.
- Test their ability to challenge a CEO and handle difficult conversations.
- Establish a 90-day plan and weekly leadership cadence to build a strong partnership.
Resources & Links
Questions We’re Asked About the COO Role
What does a COO do in a founder-led business?
A COO acts as the CEO’s strategic thought partner and turns the founder’s vision into priorities, ownership, deadlines, and accountability. The COO also coordinates work across sales, marketing, finance, people, delivery, and systems so the whole business moves in the same direction.
What is the difference between a CEO and a COO?
The CEO sets the destination, protects the vision, and leads strategic thinking. The COO translates that direction into an operating plan and makes sure the people, systems, and business functions execute it together.
Why do some COO hires fail to reduce founder dependency?
Many founders hire an executor or operations manager but expect a strategic second-in-command. When the person cannot challenge the founder, make cross-functional decisions, or carry strategic context, important decisions continue flowing back to the founder.
Is an operations manager the same as a COO?
No. An operations manager usually owns a specific function or keeps an existing process running, while a COO owns outcomes across the business and helps build the structure that does not yet exist. A true COO also has the standing to challenge the CEO and make significant decisions independently.
When should a founder hire a COO?
A founder should consider a COO when decisions across multiple functions still route through them and the business needs senior leadership to translate strategy into execution. The right timing also depends on whether the company needs a fractional or full-time second-in-command.
Subscribe to The COO Solution Podcast so you don’t miss an episode, and share this conversation with a founder who is preparing to hire a second-in-command. The right hire starts with understanding what the role is meant to do.
Take the Quiz: Find Out What Your Business Actually Needs
Full Transcript
[00:03] The CEO makes it up, the COO makes it real. That is the whole role in two sentences and if you are a founder asking what a COO actually does, that is the answer almost nobody gives you. Instead, you get a job description. Runs operations, manages the team, owns the systems. All true. All beside the point.
[02:01] Not for you, with you. Every founder I’ve worked with has ideas they are not ready to say out loud. The half formed strategy, the frustration with a leader on the team. The thing you suspect is broken, but you can’t prove it yet. The pivot you are not sure about. You cannot bring that to your team because the moment that you say it, it becomes a plan. You cannot bring it to your spouse because they have heard it enough. And you cannot bring it up to your peer group because by the time you meet, the moment has already passed. So it stays in your head. And a founder with too many unspoken ideas in their head is a founder who is making decisions alone. The COO is the person you bring to that. The consigliere from the movie the Godfather.
[02:53] The one person in the business who can hear the raw idea, the venting. The thing you cannot say in the room and respond with judgment instead of reaction. No flinch. No, no. But what about. Just tell me more. Let us think about this. I remember the first time this happened to me in the seat. A CEO I was working with came to me with an idea that was frankly not ready. Big, expensive, and I would say half baked. And my instinct was to start poking holes. This is what operators do. We find the problems. But I caught myself I realized the idea was not the point. The thinking was the point. This founder needed to say it out loud to someone who wouldn’t react so they could hear it themselves.
[03:50] So I shut up and listened. At about 10 minutes, they talked themselves out of about 2/3 of it and landed on the one piece that actually was good. That piece became a real initiative and it worked. And it only existed because there was one person in the business the CEO could think out loud with. That is the first half of the job. The thought partner. The person who makes your thinking better by being in the room. And most founders have never had this. And because they have never had it, they do not know they are missing it. They think they need someone to take things off their plate. What they actually need first is somebody to think with.
[04:42] here’s where the second half begins. Because the thought partner only matters if someone can take the thinking and then make it happen. You the CEO sees the destination. This is your gift. You see where the business needs to be in three years and you can feel it before you can explain it. What you cannot do and what you should not be doing is turn that into a sequence. Priorities, owners, deadlines, a cadence that the team can actually execute against week after week. Not because you are not capable, because you are inside the vision. You cannot translate it from there. The COO takes the idea off the whiteboard and lands the plane. Strategy to tactics, vision to plan, plan to rocks, and then rocks to weekly accountability.
[05:46] All the way down to the things somebody on your team is doing on a Tuesday afternoon. That is the translation. And it is the part most founders think they are hiring for when they hire a COO. Someone to execute. But notice what you just heard. The translation only works because of the thought partnership that came before it. The COO can land the plane because they were in the room when you designed it. They understand the why. They heard the version you threw away. They know which parts are non-negotiable and which parts were just you thinking out loud. An executor who wasn’t in that room gets a finished plan and runs it without actually understanding it. That works until the first thing goes wrong. Then they come back to you and now you are back.
[06:39] In every decision, the thought partner and the translator are not two roles, they are one role. The person you think with makes the thinking real. now let me just pause right here because this is where most founders listening are sitting with a question. Is what my business needs actually a COO or do I just need better operations? Those are different problems with different answers and I built a tool to help you tell them apart from if you are not sure whether what your business needs is a COO or just better operations, take the free 5 minute quiz at the coosolution.com it will show you where your business stands today and whether a second-in-command is the next move. When you take it, let us know. You heard about it on the podcast.
[07:31] now let me show you the part of this role that almost everyone scopes too small. now when most entrepreneurs picture a COO, they picture someone who runs operations, delivery, fulfillment, the machine that produces what you sell. That is just one lane. It is not the job. The COO is the air traffic controller for the whole business. Sales, marketing, people, delivery, technology. Every function has planes in the air at the same time. The COO is the one person who sees all of them at once and decides what takes off, what holds and what lands first so that nothing collides.
[08:32] Think about what actually happens in a founder led company at 2, 5 or maybe even 10 million in revenue. Sales commits to something that delivery cannot staff marketing launches something finance did not budget for. You hire three people in one quarter and nobody built the onboarding. Each decision was fine on its own. Together they crash into each other and every crash lands on your desk. This is not an operations problem. That is a sequencing problem. And it is the thing you cannot do from inside the vision because the moment you are sequencing the business you are not leading it. This is where the role clarity breaks down. Founders scope the COO to just one runway, operations, delivery, the back office and then they wonder why the airport still has collisions. That answer is that nobody is in the tower.
[09:32] A real COO sits in the tower. Every function reports into the operating rhythm that they run not because they are the expert in sales, marketing or finance because they are the one person whose job is to make it all move in sequence toward the destination that you set. two more pieces and then I will pay off what I promised you at the top. First, the COO builds. A manager and a builder are very different. A manager keeps the existing machine running. A builder makes a machine that did not exist. And most businesses at this stage do not have a machine yet they have a founder and a group of talented people working very hard.
[10:25] The accountability chart, the meeting rhythm, the scorecard, the process for how work actually moves through the company. None of that exists, yet somebody has to build it. If you hire a manager into a business that has no structure, you have hired someone to manage chaos. They will be busy, they will be exhausted and nothing will change because managing is not building. Secondly, the COO tells the truth. This one is uncomfortable. So I will say it very plainly. The COO is the one person in your business whose job includes telling you when you are the problem, when the idea is wrong, when the team is not following you, when what you are avoiding is what’s holding the company back. If your second-in-command cannot do that, you did not hire a COO. You hired an assistant with a title.
[11:24] A very capable, very expensive assistant. And every decision will still route through you because nobody in the building has the standing to challenge you. This connects back to the thought partner. The reason a COO can tell you the truth is the same reason you can think it out loud with them. Trust runs both directions. You trust them with the raw idea, they trust you to hear the hard thing. Take either one away and the whole partnership collapses into a reporting relationship. One more piece and is the one that separates the great COO from the competent ones. The COO does the human work. Every founder has conversations that they are avoiding.
[12:28] The leader who is underperforming. The two people on the team who cannot work together. The culture drift that everyone sees and nobody names. You know these are sitting there. You also know you don’t have the proximity to handle them well because you’re not in the room every day and you don’t have the patience because your head is in the next thing. The COO is in the room every day. They have the proximity. And if they have the EQ Emotional Intelligence. They do the human work the way it needs to be done. Hard conversations with care. Accountability with empathy. Coaching instead of correcting from the top down. Starting with the leadership team. And here is why this matters more than people think. Your team takes its cues on what gets tolerated from the second-in-command. Not from you.
[13:25] From the person who is there every single day. If the COO lets things slide, the standard slides. If the CEO holds people with respect, the culture holds a COO with systems. But no EQ builds a machine nobody wants to work inside. Beautiful scorecards, empty seats. I have seen it. The structure was perfect and the people left. So when you hear what a COO does, add this to the list. They hold the human side of the business together while you build its future. now let me finally pay off what I promised you. Two halves to this job. The thought partner and the execution half. Most founders hire for the execution half and skip the thought partner half entirely. Here is why the execution half is visible. You can write it in a job description.
[14:23] You can measure it. You can feel the pain every day because it is the stuff on your plate you wish somebody else would do. So you write a job description full of tasks. You hire someone who is good at tasks and you feel better for about 90 days. And then this happens. The person runs the machine. They do not challenge you. They cannot say no to you. They don’t carry the strategic load because they were never in the room when the strategy was built. So every real decision still routes through you. The COO becomes an expensive manager and the business plateaus at exactly the same size that only you can personally hold in your head. That is the cost. You hire a COO and you are still the bottleneck. And most founders conclude from this that.
[15:17] That the role simply does not work. Listen, the role works. They hired the wrong version. Let me run through the other way. This goes wrong because you will recognize yourself in at least one of these. Hiring for ops only you scope the role to delivery and sales and maybe some finance. And people still land on your desk. another version is hiring a clone of yourself. Two Visionaries, no coo, slash Integrator, lots of ideas, nothing lands. Or hiring a manager when you need a builder, fine. For that business that already has structure, useless for the one that does not, which is most businesses at this stage. And then also hiring for systems over EQ. The scorecards get built and the team walks out and Then this is the most common one, promoting your best doer.
[16:18] The best operator on your team is often the worst COO. Because they got there by doing and they keep doing. Instead of building, you lose a great operator and gain a struggling executive. And I will say this too, because I’ve lived both sides of it. Two years I became the founder, the CEO, And for the first time I went to hire my own second-in-command. And I caught myself writing the executor. Job description. Tasks, deliverables. Take this off my plate. Sixteen years in the seat and I still reach for the wrong half. Because the wrong half is the one that hurts day to day. And so I had to stop and rewrite it around the partnership. Who do I need to think with? Who can land the plane? Who can tell me no?
[17:10] If I can make that mistake, you can make that mistake. And the pull is strong. so what do you do instead? Well, start by defining decision rights before you hire. Not tasks, decisions. What does this person decide without you? Write that down first. Then write the outcomes the role owns across the whole business, not just operations alone. If the role does not touch sales, marketing, finance and people you are hiring for just one Runway, look for someone who has built structure and not just run it. Ask them what they built from nothing. If every answer is about a machine someone else design, keep looking and then test for truth telling in the interview. Ask them about a time they told a CEO they were wrong and watch how they tell the story.
[18:06] If they soften it, they will soften it with you too. And then also test for EQ. Ask about the hardest conversation they have had with a direct report. The best candidates will tell you what it cost them, not just what they said. Then install a 90 day plan and a weekly cadence from day one. The partnership needs a rhythm or it will not survive the first quarter. Here is the identity shift underneath all of this. Stop thinking of the COO as the person who does what you do not have time for. Start thinking of the COO as the person you think with, who then builds what you cannot build while you are inside the vision. You built the vision, The right operator builds the structure.
[19:04] You can scale structure, but you cannot scale yourself. now let me bring it all back to where we started. What does a COO actually do? Well, they think with you. Then they make the thinking real. They sequence the whole business, not just one lane of it. They build what does not exist, they tell you the truth and they do the human work from the top to down. Most failed COO hires are a definition problem, not a candidate problem. Get the definition right and the right person becomes much easier to find.
[19:55] now after listening to all of this. If you are still not sure whether a second -in-command is the next move, take the free quiz at thecoosolution.com. It takes just five minutes and it will tell you where your business stands and again mention the podcast when you do. And if you already know this is the seat you are missing, book a discovery call at thecoosolution.com and mention the podcast. We will talk about, you and I, what the right version of this role looks like for your business. And lastly, if this episode changed how you think about the role, share it with the founder who is about to hire for the wrong half. They will thank you later. Listen, the CEO makes it up.
[20:47] The COO makes it real. Here’s to scaling smarter. I will see you next time.
