A fractional COO for growing businesses

What a fractional COO actually does

A fractional chief operating officer is an experienced operations person who works with your business part-time, usually one or two days a week, instead of joining as a full-time executive. You'll also see it called a fractional chief operations officer or a part-time COO; it's the same job, and you get the judgement of someone who has run things before without taking on a permanent hire.

In practice it means taking ownership of the parts of the business that keep everything moving: the processes, the tools and the finances behind the scenes, and the decisions that pile up faster than a founder can clear them. The aim is a business that runs on systems rather than on your time.

What a week looks like

In most of the businesses I've worked in and with, the days go on the work nobody else has time to own. A typical week might mean going through everything that's open with the founder and deciding what gets done first, paying suppliers and chasing the invoices that are overdue, checking the bank against the books, sorting out who has access to which files, getting a new starter set up properly on their first day, and testing an AI tool on a real task before anyone pays for a year of it.

One day a week is mostly keeping things running and fixing one thing at a time; a second day leaves room for a bigger project alongside it, like moving the finances onto proper accounting software or rebuilding the shared drive, without the day-to-day falling behind.

Fractional, part-time or interim COO

The names get used loosely, so it's worth separating them. A part-time COO and a fractional COO are mostly the same thing: someone working a set number of days each week, on a retainer, for as long as it's useful. People tend to say fractional when that person works with a few businesses at once, which is how most of us do it.

An interim COO is a different arrangement: full-time for a fixed stretch, usually to cover the gap between two permanent hires or to see the business through a big change such as a sale. If what you need is someone there every day for a few months, interim is the word to look for; for help every week for as long as it's useful, fractional or part-time is what you're after. And if you're not sure the role you need is a COO at all, here's how it differs from a CTO or CIO.

Writing a fractional COO job description

If you're putting a brief together, whether for a recruiter or to send to a few people directly, these are the parts I'd make sure it covers:

• What they own. The areas that become theirs, from the processes and tools the team uses to the finances behind the scenes, and anything that's staying with you.
• Who they report to. Usually the founder, and which decisions they can make without asking.
• Days and availability. How many days a week, whether those days are fixed, and how reachable you expect them to be on the others.
• The first three months. Two or three things that should be sorted by then, so both sides can tell whether it's working.
• How it ends. The notice period on the retainer, and what gets handed over if it stops.

The last one is easy to forget, and it's what makes the arrangement feel safe to start.