Cameron Herold explains why CEOs hire the wrong COO: they confuse the role with a title instead of matching it to what the company actually needs. Chief-level titles once meant $250k-$450k and real P&L responsibility; now they're inflated everywhere. Harvard Business Review identified seven COO archetypes, and the trick is picking the one that fits your stage.
Chapters
The COO is the brakes to the entrepreneur's gas, but not the parking brake. And they're the leash to the entrepreneur's dragon, but they don't choke you. You need somebody who says no. You need someone who says not now. You need someone who will pull you away from the rest of the team privately over coffee and go, you're fucking this up. The CEO's job is to really focus on where we're going, and the COO's job is to figure out how to get there. Over the last 30 years, we've had a lot of title inflation. 30 years ago, back like pre-1995, you had to be a major executive at a major company to be a chief anything— chief marketing officer, chief technology officer, chief financial officer. You had to be a major player at a major company. A chief layer should come in with a lot of strategic insight, so they should be telling you how to scale the company. They should have P&L responsibility, meaning they can manage the income statement, they can manage the budget, they can manage cash flow. They should be bringing employees and partners to the company day to day. They should be telling you what the plan is to make your vision come true and you're signing off on it and you almost don't delegate anything to them. And a true C-level person is usually paid between $250,000 and $450,000 a year. I was getting paid $306,000 and that was 18 years ago when I left Got Junk. So I was a true chief operating officer 18 years ago. Be careful with giving out titles that are too big because what happens is they lose perspective as to what their role really is. They go on Indeed and Glassdoor and they look up what should a chief operating officer make? And they think they should be making $300 grand. And they're like, why are you paying me $100? Well, it's because you're a director. Then why didn't you call me a director? I noticed this happened years ago. I was coaching a company called Blue Grace Logistics in Florida. They went on to rank number 1 to work for in the state of Florida. Ernst Young, best company to work for in Florida. He was president of his YPO chapter. I took them from 40 employees up to 600 employees. He just raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus. So really solid, big, solid business. And in one day we retitled all 600 people because there were some early people that started as vice presidents that were really more like directors. And then he was hiring real true C-level people. But they're like, but why is Vanessa Chief Learning Officer? Well, because she's been here for 12 years. Great. She's like a director of learning. Yeah, she really is. So literally in one day we ripped off the Band-Aid and we retitled everyone in the organization. I suggest you do that now. The title that you give people is tied to the compensation that you're paying. If you haven't already signed up for my online training where I cover the 12 essential leadership skills for anyone who manages people, go check out investinyourleaders.com/ch. Close to 5,000 leaders are already going through my content. The COO is the brakes to the entrepreneur's gas, but not the parking brake. And they're the leash to the entrepreneur's dragon, but they don't choke you. You need somebody who says no. You need someone who says not now. You need someone who will pull you away from the rest of the team privately over coffee and go, you're fucking this up. They need to be like your business spouse. They need to also understand how to slow you down without embarrassing you. The COO's job is to tell you you're naked. It's like the Aesop's fable, The Emperor's New Suit, right? Where the emperor is naked and he's walking down the street and the little kid goes, but the king is naked. You need to have somebody who can tell you you're naked, but not in front of the board, not in front of your leadership team, not in front of the rest of the employees. That's one of the core roles of that second in command. Harvard Business Review wrote an article about 15 years ago called The Misunderstood Role of the COO. It talked about 7 types of COOs inside of your organization. The first one is called the executor. That's the person who's usually been there before, or they can just come in and just crank through a lot of the projects. They can manage time and people and Freelancers, they can just get stuff done. If you have somebody as your second in command who can get stuff done, imagine how much more revenue and profitability comes into the business. That's a huge role. The next one is a change agent. This typically happens when you're a mid-sized company that's pivoting, right? You're going in a completely different direction than you used to be going into, or you're going into a different market, or you see AI coming in that's literally going to completely obliterate 30% of your workforce. That's the change agent role. The role that I came into at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? was the mentor. I came in actually to show Brian what needed to have happen or what he needed to have happen inside the company. He just didn't know. He'd never done it before. So I came in as that mentor role. Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook was the mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. He was 21 years old. He didn't know how to grow a company. She was 35. She'd done it a couple of times already. She was the adult in the room. You can also have the other half. It's kind of like the partner. It's somebody who works well with the press or works well with the team, somebody that you can lean on inside of the organization. The partner is similar to the other half. The partner is a person that you may even be giving equity to. You might have the heir apparent. That's a way that you'll have somebody inside of your company that God forbid they ever quit. If you've got that person, that often becomes your second in command because you need to elevate them into a role that then handcuffs them in the company, right? Maybe there's equity, maybe there's phantom stock. Maybe it's just the fact that they get to do this and they have some visibility. I wasn't the heir apparent, but I was certainly the MVP. I was the one that came in that had built, built the businesses before, so I knew how to build that. There was a lot of the early stage credibility at Got Junk was built off of what I'd done before. The new COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, he and I started a fraternity together in Ottawa in 1987. I was president the first year. He was president the second year. He's been the COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK for the last 14 years. He would have been a horrible COO for the first 6 years that I was there because he'd never done it before. He wasn't entrepreneurial. He hadn't built franchising. But to take them from $100 million to $900 million, which he's now done, he was great because he was more of a corporate COO working in the same industry with the same CEO. But there was also a stage of the business that we needed to recruit for.
