In the euphoria of a traction start, the startup gets carried away: accelerated recruitments, extended roadmap, tripled objectives. We raise, we hire, we push the product. The company changes size, but not yet structure. The CEO remains at the center of all decisions. The team is growing, the processes do not follow. And very quickly, the alert signal is repeated: energy decreases, internal friction increases, the delivery cycles slow down. The startup is growing, but it runs out.
This is where an often underestimated role comes in: that of COO. Not as an administrative manager, but as an architect of scalability.
The myth of the all-powerful CEO
As long as the startup has ten people, the CEO can supervise everything. It is the obligatory passage point: product, finance, customers, recruitment, strategy. This centralism is tolerable in the short term, but becomes unbearable as soon as the team crosses 20 to 30 employees. Decisions slow down. The information is going badly. Priorities are diluted.
The CEO turns into a bottleneck. And the company, instead of gaining speed, starts turning on itself. At this stage, Scaler becomes a risk operation. Not for lack of market, but by organizational deficit.
COO, strategic fluidity lever
A good CO is not an “executive right arm”. He is the guarantor of readability. He structures the company so that it can grow without depending on initial reflexes. It transforms intuition into a system, orality into a method, does it in process.
Concretely, his role is to:
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- Set up Clear steering rituals (weekly journals, product prioritization, delivery rate).
- Formalize internal communication to avoid information losses.
- Define roles, responsibilities, decision -making areas.
- Align tools on the strategy (CRM, project management, data).
- Anticipate dysfunctions before they become systemic.
His goal is not to slow down action. It is to allow everyone to act with clarity, on a large scale.
A role still misunderstood in France
In France, the role of COO is often vague, or even confused with that of an administrative director. Sometimes relegated to pure execution functions, it is rarely integrated as strategic co -pilot. However, in American or Anglo-Saxon structures, COO is central in the phases of Scale. He is the one who keeps the machine under pressure.
This cultural underestimation produces a hidden cost: companies that grow without vertebral column, where the mental charge accumulates on the CEO, and where each change of scale becomes a crisis.
Knowing how to recruit your COO at the right time
The right time to recruit a COO is not post-lever or post-crisis. It is the threshold of structural growth : when the first disorganization signals appear, that the team charge exceeds the bandwidth of the CEO, and the Roadmap lengthens.
The good COO is not a clone of the founder. It is its complement. It brings frame, without rigidity. Method, without bureaucracy. Distance, without inertia. He knows how to make the teams speak, arbitrate without politics, and frame without braking.
Scaler is not growing. It is stabilizing while growing up.
Too many startups think that Scaler is hiring. Or multiply initiatives. In reality, Scaler is to master the new complexitywithout losing initial clarity. It is knowing how to repeat what works, on a larger scale, without burning the team, neither exploding the margins, nor diluting the vision.
And this requires an operational spine. A well recruited COO does not only accelerate the execution. It protects the organization of entropy. It allows the CEO to become a strategist again. He transforms a team into a company.
Conclusion
The role of the COO is rarely publicized, often misunderstood, but absolutely decisive in the growth phases. It is not a luxury or a corporate posture. It is a critical function as soon as the startup comes out of the crafts to enter the rehearsal.
Scaler without COO is running a sprouting marathon. It impresses on the first kilometers. But it doesn’t hold.
