Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Your “COO” Isn’t a COO

14 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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1:04

Cameron Herold argues that mislabeling senior operational hires as “COO” inflates pay expectations and creates misaligned responsibilities. He contrasts the COO title with a director role and a CEO’s focus (strategic vs. operational), and illustrates the point with an anecdote from his time at 1-800-GOT-JUNK where role expectations and delegation dynamics differed.

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And what happens with the pay expectations is if somebody has that COO title, they're going to go on. Indeed. They're going to go on ChatGPT, they're going to go on Google and say, what does a COO get paid? They'll be, whoa. Coos are supposed to be 300,000 to 500,000. Oh, yeah, but you're really a director. Well, then why did you call them a coo? Call that director? If you give them this huge, big title, there's nothing for them to work towards because they're already at the pinnacle of their career. And then the last part is it usually kind of puts expectations on their plate that are not actually aligned with what you really need them to do. A real CEO is working on the business, but a director is usually working in the business. And if you want somebody to roll up their sleeves and get dirty, if you want to be delegating lots of stuff to them, you want more of a director than a CEO. Right? When I came to 1-800-GAD junk, I showed Brian the plan of what we needed to do to scale the company for the next three years. He's like, I don't even know how to do that. I said, good, I do. You go out of the way and do finance and it and let me build it. He didn't delegate really anything to me for about three or four years.