Cameron Herold maps how companies should hire as they grow: a fractional executive assistant at $1M revenue, a VP of operations at $10M, and a full COO at $30M. He warns against inflating titles and explains what separates a true COO from other operations roles: strategic insight, P&L mastery, people leadership, and autonomy.
Chapters
A company goes through these different kind of iterations of growth every time they hit a 1 or a 3. So $100,000 in revenue to $300,000 in revenue to $1 million in revenue to $3 million in revenue to $10 million to $30 million, et cetera. And at each of those hurdles, your company looks and acts very differently. Your company is going to go through these evolutions. When you're about $1 million in revenue, you can't hire a COO because you can't afford one. Right, you don't have enough revenue and gross margin allowing you to hire a true seasoned COO, but you could probably hire a fractional executive assistant and get a bunch of the admin off your plate at the million-dollar hurdle that allows you to get to $3 million. When you get to $3 million, you can probably afford to hire a director of operations. Maybe you're starting to approach the VP of operations level, and you definitely can have an executive assistant. As the entrepreneur of a $3 million company, for sure an EA, probably director of ops or VP of ops. When you get to the $10 million level, you absolutely have enough money for a vice president operations, for a VP of all of your teams, and for sure for an executive assistant. And then moving into the $30 million, that $10 to $30 million level is when you should be hiring your first true C-suite, the people that have the C-level titles. And that's where the COO comes in. We've really noticed a lot of title inflation over the years that people are giving away titles too early. So the COO title should be given to someone that has a lot of strategic insight into your business or industry. They have a lot of P&L responsibilities, so they understand cash flow and budgeting. They understand the balance sheet, how to leverage the key ratios and metrics. They understand all the people side of the business around communication and people and alignment. They're very good at, at leading leaders, and they can come in with a lot of autonomy, right? They actually can come into your company and show you what needs to be done versus you delegating the work to them. If you know you're hiring somebody that you have to delegate a lot of work to and oversee them, that's probably a director. If you're bringing somebody in that you might delegate to, you might talk to them with, you might brainstorm with, but there's still a little bit of— that's probably a VP. If you're bringing someone into the company that's showing you what needs to be done, that's probably a true COO. So you need to tie the title to those kind of levels of expertise and to what you're willing to pay the people. But often we find these entrepreneurial companies giving out titles that are too big too early.
