17/ the broad hire
Hire a COO — fractional, interim or permanent.
Anyone looking to hire a COO is choosing between four arrangements, often without saying so.
A permanent COO is an employee, full-time, running the operating model — process, delivery, systems and the people who run them — with no end date.
An interim COO works for a defined term with agreed hours: an integration after an acquisition, a restructure, or cover for an empty seat.
A fractional COO owns operations for part of each week, ongoing, and builds the cadence the business runs on.
A part-time COO takes the same seat on regular days with a single company.
The deciding question is how much COO-level work exists each week.
If running the operation, managing the heads of function and turning the plan into a weekly rhythm fill the week, hire a COO on a permanent contract — our COO headhunter page covers that search.
If the founder or CEO still carries most of the operational load and needs a senior partner for part of it, a fractional COO closes the gap without a full-time salary; fractional COO cost sets out the published figures.
However you hire a COO, the brief needs the same answers: scope, stage, the systems and team already in place, days a week, budget and IR35 position.
Give us that and we put together a shortlist of 3–5, and you interview.
For a COO engaged through their own company, status is decided by how the work is actually done, not by the heading on the contract — check it with HMRC’s CEST tool and our IR35 guide.