The Growth COO — Making it happen in fast growth business
The Chief Operating Officer (COO) is often heralded as the “number two”, the “right hand”, or the second in command to the CEO, or Founders. There are many stories of strong combinations in tech startups of the COO and CEO combo.
However, when Googling for the title of COO, there are equally strong views on whether you need one at all, or confusion at what one actually does. What most seem to agree on, is that no two COO’s are the same and the role is hard to define (see: Second in Command: The Misunderstood role of the Chief Operating Officer). This is because the role is generally a reflection of the business itself (market, product) and the Founders or CEOs they support.
The COO role is becoming a must have functional role in fast growth businesses as it provides purposeful scaffolding that holds the business up, together and moving in the right direction.
What is clear though, is the COO is a role that make things happen. And in a fast growth businesses, this is integral to scale. The COO role is becoming a must have functional role in fast growth businesses as it provides purposeful scaffolding that holds the business up, together and moving in the right direction to multiply the effectiveness of all other functions, people and the business. I call this role the “Growth COO.”
What is a Growth COO?
In fast growth business, nothing in the “business” really exists (yet) to operate, but for core functions (typically sales and product to begin with). However, through growth, it becomes more important to focus on not just building out the core functions, but also scaling the business itself. This is where the growth COO comes in.
Scale = growth operations
The business doesn’t build itself. A Growth COOs functional responsibilities are the “growth operations” of a business and the continuous evolution of the business thereafter to help it grow at each stage. You need to keep on growing and changing.
“What got you here won’t get you there.” ― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
To deliver scale effectively, a Growth COO needs to be able to perform across three main activities: building things, running things and aligning things.
In the business, everything needs to be created, developed and scaled (up or down). But of course, nothing stays the same for long. The operating model, org structure, team, metrics, strategy (sometimes) and people all inevitably change at each stage of growth which means a continuous evolution.
The Growth COO also needs to perform these activities across a wide variety of functions. A true “specialist generalist” the Growth COO is a key enabler of the business and others, but is a functional leader responsible for:
- Alignment functions — chief of staff, performance & metrics and strategy.
- Operational functions — often the traditional operational functions that provide the scaffolding that support the business — including business operations & workplace, process improvement, people.
- New functions — As the business grows new functions are required. The COO is often the interim head prior to bringing on specialist hires. For example, as a Chartered Accountant I took on the Interim-CFO role whilst also acting as COO.
- Functions that aren’t working — the COO often inherits functions that aren’t working and supports the team to build, plan and align — then hands them over to run.
- Wartime planning and actions (recent COVID-19 addition) — when things aren’t going to plan, working with the business to shift tact and create new plans of action during crisis.
So, what defines a Growth COO?
My experience of being a Growth COO, coupled with discussions throughout a peer network group via The COO Collective (a group I founded), I have identified some similar characteristics which the Growth COO shares.
Importantly, you don’t have to have the “COO title” to be responsible for some or all of the Growth operations. I have also met some wonderful CFO’s and similarly CEO’s who take responsibility for the growth operations. It really depends on the organisation structure, and the Founders roles in particular.
Here are my identified characteristics of a Growth COO:
1. Responsible for scaling up or down (the business)
Your product is the business. Your goal: to scale it.
Unlike a VP of Sales whose product is a customer contract, or the VP of Product responsible for software; the COO’s product is the business. You cannot scale “a business” until you have a kickass product and have got it to market already. It often means looking deeply inward at problems others can’t see, or solving problems that are on fire, and putting them out quickly. What is clear is that change is the constant when scaling the business (up or down) through the growth journey. What worked at 25 employees, doesn’t work at 50 or so on. Keep iterating, improving and know the job is never done.
2. Doing it — creating it and making it happen
The COO needs to make it happen.
To quote the Co-Founder of Cover Genius, Chris Bayley, “…you need to sweat the detail”. You need creativity, persistence and attention to detail in almost everything you do. The challenge here is how to balance the creative chaos with often tangible operational outcomes — or simply getting it done.
This is particularly important because making something new is difficult. However, changing something later is even harder. So sweat the detail now.
Trade off between efficiency and effectiveness. There is a big difference here. A traditional COO might always go for efficiency. But as a Growth COO you need to ask what will be effective. Often, doing nothing, removing a process altogether or letting something catch on fire, might be the most effective way of making it happen. Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh in their 2018 book called this Blitzscaling.
“Blitzscaling is prioritising speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.” ― Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
3. The safest pair of hands
The COO needs to be (and is often) the safest pair of hands for the CEO and Founders. As you are dealing with often hairy problems that need creative problem solving you need to be dependable and reliable.
“No” is very rarely in your language, but “Yes, and” becomes more of your standard operating procedure, or even better, “Yes and I am already all over it.” In times of crisis this is even more important (such as we are seeing with the COVID-19 crisis).
4. Aligning people to go in the same direction (together)
I often say to my team that good strategy is like a vector. That is, it has both direction and magnitude. Without either, you go nowhere (fast).
Given the broad nature of the growth COO role, you are privy to a broad range of people, process and product insights that help to identify areas of misalignment. Whilst the COO’s job isn’t always to align people around the passion or vision of the company (that’s the CEO and Founders), seeing various parts and providing insight can help prevent misalignment that can derail.
Good strategy is like a vector. That is, it has both direction and magnitude. Without either, you go nowhere (fast).
5. There is no job description
I often refer to the growth COO as the COE, or the Chief of Everything (Else). That is, you get to look after what the CEO or Founders aren’t doing or need you to do. You will get involved in almost every function from time to time.
It also means you will often be the interim “head of” for many of the core functions in the business — from people, to core operations, communications to finance and so forth. It really is varied. What will be consistent will be your ability to be able to quickly pick it up and run with it.
6. There are no instructions on how to do it
You can’t look to anyone else for answers and you won’t have done most of it before. Why? Because others don’t know either. Here, the Growth COO is about being a “specialist generalist.” To have the ability to be able to pick something up, quickly analyse the situation and come up with solutions. There is no time to dwell on how we got here, but instead to get on with it and move forward.
And once you have worked it out, work out the instructions so others can do it (build a process or playbook) to help you get out of the way so the business can scale and you can get to work out another problem.
7. There is no limelight
The Growth COO is first and foremost an enabling and supporting role. You need to be ok with this. The work is not often glamorous and let’s be honest it’s hard.
You are responsible for building, running and aligning the scaffolding that holds up a business. Often unseen, unheard and unknown, the things you do however — make a difference. Just think, take the scaffolding away, and you will soon find out when something isn’t done, not running well or people aren’t aligned and going in different directions.
I often refer to the growth operations team as Firefighters — they have to be good at what they do, they are there when you need them and are always the first responders. To use the term coined by Ben Horowitz in his book the Hard Thing about Hard Things, the COO role in fast growth business is a “wartime role.”
When do you need a Growth COO?
When I joined Cover Genius, we were 25 people we needed to move fast, focus on functional tasks and get out in market. I started as a Chief Commercial Officer, and primarily focussed on growth strategy and scaling sales and marketing operations in different markets. However, as we moved past 50 people and onto 150, it was apparent that we needed the Growth COO role to help build, run and align the business.
It is no surprise that the timing for us made sense. The need for a Growth COO intensifies as the number of people increase in the business. For every new team member you add the business complexity increases non-linearly. This concept is not new, and is actually quite primal as it turns out. This is known as Dunbar’s number.
A Growth COO is not however for every company, nor at every stage. Pre-product market fit or pre revenue? Not needed. In early stage companies it should be the CEO’s (or Founders) job to build in this scale and be across the detail as they are able to be across most functions. And in a later stage company, a “traditional operations only” COO might be suitable to run things.
So, if you are a CEO or Founder and looking for someone to support you in fast scaling your business, find yourself a Growth COO. You will likely wonder why you didn’t have one before.
Other articles on the role of the COO
Second in Command: The Misunderstood role of the Chief Operating Officer
Why your startup doesn’t need a COO
Great reads for Growth COOs
I created an open sourced list of books that I have read and others have recommend to me over time. Feel free to check it out and add to it here. But, here are a couple must reads:
