Should I hire a COO, or fix my operating structure first?
By Brendan Levin. 20+ years scaling businesses, from teams of 8 to 600 and budgets from startup to $100m.
Key takeaways
- Hiring into no structure relocates the bottleneck, it does not remove it.
- A COO runs a machine. If the machine is not built, they inherit the load you carry now.
- Structure first, then staffing: fix the wiring, see what remains, then decide who to hire.
- You genuinely need to hire when the business is large enough, the structure exists, and you want an operator to run it.
The expensive mistake: hiring to escape the bottleneck
The instinct is understandable. The business runs through you, the days are full, and a senior operator looks like the way out. So you go to market for a COO, hoping the right hire will absorb the load and give you your time back. The trouble is what you are actually handing over. If the operating structure was never defined, there is no machine to hand off. There is only the routing you have built in your own head, and the new person cannot see it. They can only stand where you stand and take the same calls you have been taking. You have not escaped the bottleneck. You have paid a premium to move it one seat over.
A COO needs a structure to run
A good operator is a force multiplier on top of a defined system. Give them a business with clear decision rights, owned recurring decisions, and known defaults, and they will run it well and free you up fast. Give them a business where none of that exists and you have asked them to do two jobs at once: invent the structure from scratch while also operating it under live pressure, with no map of how anything currently works. Most of their first months go to reverse-engineering the business. Meanwhile the team keeps routing decisions to you out of habit, because nothing told them to stop. You are now paying for a senior hire and still carrying the weight.
The order that works: structure first, then staffing
Reverse the sequence and the decision gets easier and cheaper. First install the operating structure: name the owners for the recurring decisions, set the defaults for when you are unavailable, and define the thresholds that genuinely need you. Then watch what happens. A large share of what used to route through you stops doing so, and you find out exactly how much of the load was structure and how much was truly a staffing gap. From there the hire is a clear-eyed one. You know what remains, you know what a full-time operator would own, and you are hiring into a defined role rather than into a hope. This is the Direction pillar of the Momentum Engine at work: get the structure right first, and every downstream decision, including who to hire, gets simpler.
When you genuinely do need to hire
None of this means never hire a COO. It means hire one when the conditions are right, which is when three things are true at once:
- The business is large enough. There is a real, full-time remit for a senior operator, not a part-time gap you are stretching into a role.
- The structure already exists. There is a defined operating machine to hand over, with owned decisions and known defaults, so the person steps into something real rather than a blank page.
- You want them to run it, not invent it. The job is to operate and improve the structure you have built, not to reverse-engineer the business while firefighting.
Hire into a defined role and a strong operator compounds. Hire into a gap and you are asking a person to be the structure, which is the same dependency you started with.
How to decide
The test is simple. Ask whether you could write down, today, the machine you would hand a new COO on day one: the recurring decisions, who owns them, the defaults, the thresholds that need you. If you can, you are ready to hire, and the structure work is done. If you cannot, that gap is your answer. Fix the structure first, remove the load that structure can remove, and then decide whether the remainder is big enough to warrant a full-time operator and what exactly you would hire them to run. The order protects you from the most common and expensive failure: paying senior money to relocate a bottleneck you could have removed. Treat this as operating structure, because structure is something you can install before you spend on a hire.
Not sure whether you need to hire or fix the structure first? The free Operating Diagnostic maps where your week goes and shows how much of the load is structure, not headcount.
Take the free diagnosticCommon questions
Should I hire a COO or fix my operating structure first?
Fix the structure first in most cases. If you hire an operator into a business with no defined operating structure, they inherit the exact routing you have now and become the new single point of failure. A COO needs a structure to run. The more reliable order is structure first, then staffing: install the operating structure, see how much of the load it actually removes, then decide whether you still need a full-time operator and what you would hire them to run.
Will hiring a COO fix that the business runs through me?
Not on its own. The reason the business runs through you is that the decisions and defaults were never made explicit, so everything routes up to whoever sits at the center. Drop a new person into that same wiring and the routing does not change, it just points at them instead of you. You have moved the dependency, not removed it. What removes it is defining the structure first, so the calls have somewhere to land that is not a single person.
When is a founder ready to hire a COO?
When three things are true. The business is large enough that a full-time operator has a real remit. The operating structure already exists, so there is a defined machine to hand over. And you want that person to run the structure rather than invent it from scratch under pressure. Hire into a defined role, not into a gap you are hoping a person will fill.
What happens if I hire a COO with no structure in place?
They spend their first months trying to reverse-engineer how the business actually works, because none of it is written down. In the meantime the team keeps routing decisions to you out of habit, so you are now paying for a senior operator and still carrying the load. Often the COO becomes the new bottleneck, or leaves, and the founder concludes hiring does not work. The problem was the order, not the person.
How much of the load does fixing the structure actually remove?
More than founders expect, because most of what feels like a people problem is a missing-structure problem. Once the recurring decisions have owners, defaults, and thresholds, a large share of what used to route through you stops doing so within weeks. The point of doing it first is that you then decide who to hire from a position of clarity, knowing exactly what remains and what you are hiring them to run.