Don’t Hire a COO Yet. Give Away the Decisions First.

You finally did it.

After 2 years of 60-hour weeks, you hired a COO. Good résumé. Ran operations for a bigger contractor. You told the team on a Monday that he’d be running the day-to-day.

By Wednesday, your best PM called you anyway. A sub was walking off a job. You handled it, because you always handle it.

14 months later, the COO is gone. You tell people he wasn’t a fit.

He might not have been. But he never had a chance to find out.

Why do so many COO hires fail?

Because the COO inherits whatever the owner says operations is, and in a founder-led contractor that usually means everything the owner is tired of doing and none of what the owner still wants to control.

The COO job is one of the shortest-lived seats in the C-suite. At large public companies, outgoing COOs averaged 3.4 years in the role in 2024, according to Russell Reynolds Associates. CEOs typically last 6 to 8 years and CFOs 5 to 7. Those are big companies with boards and HR departments built around the role. An owner-run contractor has far less.

And when new hires fail, skill is rarely the reason. In Leadership IQ’s 2011 study of more than 20,000 new hires, 89% of failures came down to things like coachability and fit, not technical ability.

So it’s rarely the résumé. It’s what happens after the person walks in the door.

Every other executive inherits a defined area. The CFO gets finance. The VP of sales gets sales. The COO gets the title. The owner keeps the decisions. The team watches to see who really decides, and they figure it out by the first Wednesday.

Is hiring a COO a staffing decision?

No. It’s a decision-rights decision. That’s the mistake.

A COO is only as real as the calls they’re allowed to make without you. If the bid over $500K still needs your eyes, if the PM still calls you when a sub walks, if you still pick which super goes to which job, you didn’t hire a COO. You hired an expensive assistant with a big title.

And the team knows it. Your people don’t read the org chart. They watch where the decisions actually land. When the COO says one thing and you say another, they go with you, and the COO’s authority is gone for good.

Some owners aren’t ready to give those calls up yet. That’s an honest answer. But then the right hire isn’t a COO. It’s a strong operations manager who executes inside how you already run the business, at a lower cost and with clearer expectations on both sides.

The expensive mistake is hiring for a role you aren’t ready to let exist.

What happens when 2 owners make the same COO hire?

Picture 2 electrical contractors, both around $60M, both owner-run, both stuck at the same point. The owner is the bottleneck, and both decide to hire a COO.

The first owner posts the job the week he decides. He hires a strong candidate at $225K. He tells the team the COO runs operations. Then he keeps approving every bid over $500K, keeps taking the field calls, and reverses the COO twice in the first quarter on crew assignments.

His senior PM, now answering to 2 bosses, leaves in month 9. The COO leaves in month 14. Salary, benefits and the search fee come to roughly $350K. The owner is back to 60-hour weeks, minus his best PM.

The second owner waits 8 weeks before posting anything. He spends that time writing down every decision that lands on his desk and sorting which ones he’ll give up. He hands 9 of them, with dollar limits, to his existing operations manager for 60 days as a test. He catches himself taking 3 of them back and fixes it.

Then he hires a COO into a role with the decisions already defined, and a team already used to someone else making them.

Same market, same salary, same kind of candidate. The second owner hired into decisions that already existed. The first hired into a title.

What should you do before hiring a COO?

Write the Give-Up List. It turns “I need help running this place” into a specific set of decisions someone else will own.

1. Log every decision for 2 weeks. Each time a call lands on your desk, write it down: what it was, the dollar size, and who brought it to you.
2. Sort each one into Keep, Give or Not Sure. Keep is short: company direction, your top clients, big capital spending, senior hires. Most of the rest belongs in Give.
3. Put a limit on every Give. Not “the COO handles change orders.” Instead: “approves change orders up to $50K, sub selection up to $250K, crew assignments without asking.”
4. Test it before you hire. Hand the Give list to your best current leader for 60 days. Track every time you take a decision back.
5. Tell the team in writing. Who decides what, and the dollar limits. If it isn’t written down, the team will keep calling you.

Step 4 is the one owners skip, and it’s the one that tells you the truth. If you can’t let go of those decisions with someone you already trust, you won’t let go of them with a stranger you just hired.

A simple version of the list:

Hire the decisions first. Then hire the person.

My column partner Pat Alacqua wrote in July that the owner’s best skill becomes the company’s ceiling, and the fix is letting go. The Give-Up List is what letting go looks like on paper.

A COO can’t take decisions you haven’t given away. Write the list. Test it for 60 days. Then post the job.

If you hired a COO tomorrow, which 5 decisions would you actually stop making?