Most companies hire a COO because the founder wants to check out, which almost never works. You need a mature business with strong systems and a team that can actually run itself before a COO makes sense.
The symptoms that point to needing a COO is actually business maturity. And you have a mature team, you have fairly mature systems, and you have a fairly mature business owner who is ready to begin to step out of the day-to-day. And they're comfortable with somebody else stepping into more of a leadership role. What it's not is somebody who is escaping and they just want somebody else to step in for them, which more times than not is what somebody is looking to do when they're looking to hire a COO.
