There is a pattern I see again and again working with founders scaling through £1 to £3 million in revenue. The business is growing. The team is growing. The founder is working harder than ever. And somehow the most important things, the strategic priorities, the operational improvements, the initiatives that would actually change the trajectory of the business, just are not moving.
It is not a motivation problem. It is not even a strategy problem. It is an architecture problem. Your business has outgrown its operating system.
That is usually the moment when someone mentions hiring a COO. And usually the moment when a founder's eyes glaze over, because the role is genuinely misunderstood at this stage of growth. Let me try to clear it up.
What a COO actually is
The Chief Operating Officer, at its core, is the person who runs the business so the CEO can lead it. The founder looks outward at strategy, relationships, vision and culture. The COO looks inward, making sure the organisation actually executes on the plan.
What surprises most founders is that a good COO is not a super-manager. They are not there to manage your team for you, or to be a glorified project manager keeping tabs on deliverables. A good COO operates at the same altitude as the CEO. They just point in a different direction.
After twenty years inside SMEs, the simplest way I can describe the role is this: where the CEO is scanning the horizon for opportunity and threat, the COO is owning the interior. Both are necessary. Neither is optional.
What a COO is not:
- Your executive assistant. They handle senior decisions, not your diary.
- A replacement for you. They make you more effective, not redundant.
- A consultant in disguise. If they are not executing, they are advising. A different thing entirely.
- Necessarily a full-time hire. More on that shortly.
Why the £1 to £3 million stage is the critical moment
The timing matters enormously.
Below £1 million in revenue, most founders can still hold the whole picture in their head. The team is small enough that informal communication works. The bottlenecks are usually about winning business, not running it. A COO at that stage is often a distraction from the real work.
Above £3 to £5 million, the business typically needs, and can afford, a full-time operational leader embedded in the culture, building the leadership team, owning the P&L.
The £1 to £3 million window is where it gets interesting. This is the growth corridor where businesses are winning customers faster than they can serve them reliably. Hiring faster than their management infrastructure can absorb. Making decisions reactively because there is no system for making them proactively. The founder is usually working hardest of all, and paradoxically becoming the biggest constraint on the business's growth.
That is not a personal failure. It is what happens when a business succeeds its way into needing a different operating model.
If two or more of these feel uncomfortably familiar, you are probably there:
- Your calendar is relentlessly full, but your strategic priorities keep slipping
- Your team says they are "waiting on you" more than they used to
- You are spending more time in the business than on it
- You can feel the quality of your decision-making declining under volume
- You have a growth plan that nobody, including you, has time to execute
The question is not really COO. It is what is slowing you down.
Here is where I would push back on the standard advice slightly. Most founders at this stage do not actually have an "operations" problem. They have a Direction, Structure or Team problem, often two of the three at once.
At Brynley Knight, the work falls into three pillars. Direction: where the business is going, and where you are going with it. Structure: the operational infrastructure that lets the business deliver. Team: the people layer that makes Direction and Structure actually work.
Hiring a "COO" tends to assume the answer is Structure. Sometimes it is. Often it is not. The faster question to ask yourself is which of those three is most clearly slowing you down right now. The right hire, or the right partner, flows from that answer.
Full-time or fractional? This is the question that actually matters.
A full-time senior operator is embedded in your business, builds relationships over time, owns culture as much as operations, and grows with the company. They are the right answer when you need deep, continuous senior leadership across the business and the complexity demands someone fully present, every day.
A fractional partner works with your business on a part-time basis, typically through a retainer or a defined project. They are usually senior operators with the experience to bring full-altitude perspective to a specific challenge or phase of growth.
The fractional model has grown significantly in the UK over the past few years, and for good reason. It gives earlier-stage businesses access to genuinely senior thinking at a cost that makes sense before a full-time hire is warranted. The fractional model is not a compromise. For the right business at the right stage, it is the smarter choice.
The simple diagnostic:
- Continuous problem across the whole business: hire full-time.
- Specific initiative or period of transition: a Sprint, defined scope, defined end date.
- Ongoing senior support but a full-time hire is not yet viable: an Engage retainer, on agreed days each month.
- You want someone to think out loud with, not someone running the work: Coaching and Mentoring, not an operational hire.
One thing worth saying clearly. A fractional partner is not an advisor in disguise. An advisor tells you what to do. A fractional partner takes ownership and does it. If the person you are engaging is not actually running the work, they are consulting. Which might be what you need, but name it correctly so you know what you are getting.
What changes when you get this right
When founders make the right call, full-time or fractional, three things tend to happen fairly quickly.
Decision-making quality improves. Not because the founder is suddenly smarter, but because they are no longer making every decision. The cognitive load drops. The decisions that genuinely need them get better attention.
The strategic priorities actually move. The initiatives that have been sitting on the plan for months suddenly have someone who owns them. This sounds obvious. It is transformative.
The team performs differently. People who have been quietly frustrated by slow decisions and unclear accountability get what they need to do their best work. The operational improvement is also a cultural one.
None of this requires finding a unicorn. It requires being honest about the ceiling you are hitting, and being willing to let someone else carry part of the weight. That second part, in my experience, is the harder one.