Every COO builds and fixes. Which does yours need to be exceptional at?

At Series B and C, founders almost universally describe a COO as someone who can run the operation day-to-day and think strategically about where the business is going. They’re commercially sharp, but happy to get into the weeds, and a big-picture thinker who can also write the process.

While a COO is typically versatile enough to be both of these, they are rare. Luckily, they do exist, you just have to be clear on what it is you’re looking for.

The ‘builder’ and the ‘fixer’ correlation

Operational excellence needs strategic judgement to meet the businesses targets. Strategic expertise needs operational understanding to deliver. The two skills reinforce each other, and most capable COOs carry a working level of being both the ‘builder’ and the ‘fixer’.

The real distinction is where someone starts thinking in relation to your business needs. A fixer's first question is what breaks if we do this, whereas a builder's first question is what becomes possible if we do this. Both will answer the same question, it's the order they ask them that tells you how they'll spend their first 6 months.

How do you avoid the costly hire?

The honest question founders need to answer is - what is the most dangerous thing that happens if we get this COO hire wrong?

If the answer is 'we scale badly and the unit economics break,' you need someone who leads with fixer instincts. If it's 'we optimise the wrong things and miss the strategic window,' you need someone who leads with builder instincts.

We've placed enough COOs at Series B and C to know most founders already have one of these two fires burning, this question just helps them name it.

The Founder and COO mis-match

After years of working alongside founders from Series A to IPO, we’ve found that failed COO hires are matching problems, not a reflection of the candidate's capabilities. The candidate often had real strengths, aimed at a different problem than the one the founder actually needed solved.

The profile that works depends on the founder as much as the business. A founder who's operationally hands-on but thin on long-range thinking needs a COO who leads with builder instincts, someone to hold the horizon while the founder runs the mechanics. A founder who's already a visionary and struggles to get out of the weeds needs the opposite - someone who can turn that thinking into a working machine.

What we actually look for

We spend as much time in a COO search understanding the founder's gaps as we do assessing the candidate's strengths. In fact, profile and expertise matching plays a critical role in hiring for any role.

When it comes to hiring a COO specifically for Series B to C, we spend more time on what a candidate has fixed than what they've built. Anyone can look good scaling a clean operation. The real signal is what happened when something broke and what the candidate did next.

The best operators in complex environments have almost always lived through a serious failure and we treat that as a qualification.

Get the COO hire right the first time

This is the call we help founders make before it becomes an expensive one to reverse. If you're looking for your next COO hire, talk to our team. We've run critical searches at Series B and C in AI-native business, B2B, and Consumer, to know exactly which questions will get you to the answer.

Get in touch with the Founders Keepers team.