Depending on the organisation, they may oversee customer delivery, operations, technology, people, procurement, transformation or several of these areas together. They are likely to be involved in budgeting and performance management, while working closely with the CFO on the relationship between operational decisions and financial outcomes. In acquisition-led businesses, integration may form a substantial part of the role.

This is why copying a COO job description from another company rarely works particularly well.

If customer delivery is struggling to keep pace with sales, the business may need somebody with deep experience of scaling service operations. If several acquisitions have been completed, integration and organisational design could be more important. Where the founder remains involved in almost every significant decision, the immediate priority may be creating a management structure that allows responsibility to sit elsewhere.

These are all legitimate COO appointments. They require different candidates.

Before defining the candidate profile, it is worth establishing whether COO is actually the right role.

A Chief Executive who remains the escalation point for routine operational decisions is one obvious indication that greater operational leadership may be needed. So is an executive team whose members run their individual functions effectively but struggle to coordinate activity between them.

Growth may also expose inconsistencies in customer experience, delivery, recruitment or internal processes because different parts of the organisation have developed at different speeds.

None of this necessarily means the business is badly managed. Quite often, a structure designed for a smaller organisation has simply reached its natural limit.

We look at the timing question in more detail in Signs It’s Time to Hire a COO – When Founders Need to Scale Leadership.

There is also an important distinction between needing a COO and needing somebody to increase the capacity of the Chief Executive. In some founder-led companies, a Chief of Staff may be the more appropriate appointment, particularly where the requirement is centred on strategic projects, leadership coordination and increasing the founder's effectiveness rather than taking ownership of substantial operational functions.

Getting this distinction right before recruitment begins can prevent a business from creating a senior role whose responsibilities remain unclear after the successful candidate arrives.

Once the need for a COO is established, the next question is what kind.

The answer depends heavily on the company's ownership, stage and immediate priorities.

Within growth and founder-led businesses, the COO is often the first executive recruited specifically to reduce organisational dependence on the founder.

This requires sensitivity. The objective is not to replace entrepreneurial decision-making with corporate process, but to determine which decisions genuinely require founder involvement and which should be owned elsewhere.

The successful candidate may need to build management structures, introduce accountability and improve cross-functional execution while preserving the speed and commercial instincts that helped the company succeed.

VC-backed companies can present a different challenge.

Rapid recruitment following a funding round can create organisational complexity surprisingly quickly. The COO may need to build management capability, introduce clearer accountability and ensure infrastructure develops quickly enough to support commercial growth.

Candidates who have experienced this transition before can be particularly valuable because they understand that scaling is not simply a matter of adding more people. Systems, management structures and decision-making all need to develop alongside headcount.

Within private equity portfolio companies, the remit can be more closely connected to the investment thesis.

Operational improvement, acquisitions, integration, productivity and margin development may all feature prominently, making experience of delivering measurable change particularly important.

The COO also needs to be comfortable with the pace and accountability associated with institutional ownership. The requirement may consequently look much more like a transformation or value-creation role than the broad organisational COO found in some founder-led companies.

AIM-listed businesses require operational leadership capable of functioning within a public-company environment while retaining commercial agility. Greater scrutiny, governance and reporting expectations can influence how the organisation operates.

PISCES businesses may face their own combination of growth, shareholder and governance considerations as leadership structures develop alongside the company.

In either case, the company needs to identify which aspects of public or private-market experience genuinely matter rather than making previous experience of a particular ownership structure an automatic requirement.

Relevant sector experience can matter, particularly where operations are regulated, technically complex or dependent upon specialist customer knowledge. It should not automatically become the defining criterion.

For many growth companies, experience of navigating comparable organisational change is more valuable than having worked for a direct competitor.

A candidate who has taken a business from 50 employees to 300, built management layers, opened international operations and professionalised internal processes may bring highly relevant experience even if their previous sector differs.

Equally, somebody running a large division within a multinational company may have an impressive CV but limited experience of creating systems without substantial infrastructure already around them.

Assessment should therefore establish what candidates personally built, changed or improved rather than accepting company growth as evidence of individual contribution.

How large was the organisation when they joined? Which responsibilities did they inherit? What did they change? What became possible as a result?

The answers tend to reveal considerably more about suitability than job titles alone.

This is one of the more difficult aspects of the role in a growth business.

A COO is frequently recruited because the organisation needs greater structure, but professionalisation does not require turning an entrepreneurial company into a miniature corporate.

A highly process-driven executive can frustrate an organisation whose competitive advantage depends partly on speed. At the opposite extreme, somebody who is too comfortable with ambiguity may fail to introduce the discipline they were recruited to provide.

Strong candidates should be able to distinguish between processes that genuinely enable scale and those that simply create administration.

The interview process can explore this through previous examples. What did the candidate formalise as a business grew? Which processes did they deliberately leave alone? How did they decide when another management layer was needed? What happened to decision-making as the organisation became larger?

The aim is not to find the candidate who can introduce the most structure. It is to find somebody capable of introducing the right amount at the right time.

The relationship between the Chief Executive and Chief Operating Officer deserves particular attention because an otherwise excellent appointment can fail if responsibilities between the two are unclear.

A founder may say they want to delegate while continuing to intervene in operational decisions. A COO may believe they have authority over areas the CEO still regards as their own. Members of the leadership team can then find themselves unsure whose decision takes precedence, creating precisely the organisational friction the appointment was intended to remove.

Before beginning a COO search, it is worth defining what the Chief Executive intends to stop doing once the new person arrives.

That question is often more revealing than asking what the COO will do.

If nothing genuinely moves away from the CEO, the organisation may be adding another senior executive without creating the authority required for them to succeed.

Chemistry should not be confused with similarity. Some of the strongest CEO-COO partnerships work because the individuals are markedly different. A highly external, commercially focused founder may benefit from an executive who enjoys building organisations and creating operational consistency.

What matters is mutual respect, clear decision rights and the ability to disagree without undermining the partnership.

The recruitment process should begin with the commercial and organisational objectives rather than a list of responsibilities.

If the company expects to double headcount, complete three acquisitions or enter two international markets over the next several years, candidates should be assessed against those challenges directly.

Interviews then need to examine evidence.

Asking candidates how they would scale a business can produce polished answers; understanding how they actually scaled one is more useful.

Detailed discussions around previous transformations, difficult integrations, organisational redesigns and periods of underperformance allow boards to explore judgement as well as outcomes.

It is worth examining failures too. Growth rarely progresses neatly, and candidates who can discuss decisions that did not work and what they subsequently changed often provide greater evidence of maturity than those presenting an uninterrupted sequence of successes.

Meeting several members of the executive team is particularly important because the COO will work across organisational boundaries. Depending on ownership, investors or board members may also need to participate.

References should ideally include former CEOs and senior colleagues as well as direct reports, giving a rounded view of how the individual leads both upwards and downwards.

The difficulty with COO recruitment is not simply finding senior operational executives. It is identifying which of them are relevant to the particular stage, ownership structure and challenges of the company.

A suitable candidate may currently be a COO, Managing Director, Divisional CEO or another senior operating executive whose experience maps closely to the requirement. Restricting the market to people already carrying one particular title can exclude individuals with precisely the capabilities the business needs.

Many of the strongest candidates will not be actively looking for a new role either. They may be building successful businesses elsewhere and need a compelling reason to consider moving.

Executive search allows the business to map and approach that wider candidate market while comparing executives from several relevant backgrounds rather than choosing only from people who happen to be actively available.

At Fram Professionals, we recruit COOs and other senior leaders for founder-led, VC-backed, private equity-backed, AIM-listed and PISCES businesses across the UK. Our searches are shaped around the stage the organisation has reached, the changes it expects to make and the leadership capability required to deliver them.

That is particularly important with COO appointments because identical titles can conceal fundamentally different careers.

For a growth company, the right Chief Operating Officer should do more than make operations run smoothly. They should give the organisation greater capacity to grow without every additional customer, employee or acquisition adding the same amount of complexity.

Recruiting that person requires a clear understanding of what needs to change, what should remain untouched and which experiences will genuinely prepare an executive for the challenges ahead.

If you are considering recruiting a COO, or would like to discuss the candidate market and profile before beginning a search, contact Fram Professionals for a confidential discussion.