You know you need help running the business. What you are not sure about is what to call that help.
So you default to the biggest title you can think of. COO. It sounds serious, it sounds like a fix, and it feels like the kind of hire that finally lets you step back. The problem is that title often has nothing to do with the actual job you need done.
The Job Isn’t the Title
Here is a way to think about it. If your business is a high performance vehicle, you are the visionary picking the destination. A General Manager is the driver, taking the wheel for the whole trip. A VP of Operations is the mechanic, keeping the engine running clean. A COO is more like a fleet manager overseeing multiple vehicles and routes at once.
If all you need is someone to drive the one car you have, hiring a fleet manager is expensive and a bit of a mismatch. They will be bored, overqualified, and probably gone within a year.
General Manager
A General Manager owns the whole business or business unit, end to end. Commercial, operations, people, and the P&L all sit on their desk. In a smaller company, the GM is effectively the owner’s right hand, running things day to day so the owner does not have to.
COO Role
A COO is an enterprise wide number two to the CEO. Their job is to integrate and scale functions across a larger, more complex organization. It is strategic and executional at the same time, but it is built for scale most owner-led businesses have not reached yet.
VP Operations
A VP of Operations is a functional leader focused specifically on operations: production, supply chain, service delivery, operational excellence. They usually report to a COO or CEO, and the scope is narrower than either role above.
Why the Wrong Title Costs You
This is the part most owners do not think about until it bites them: the title sets the compensation expectation, and the compensation attracts the candidate pool.
Post a COO role and you will get applicants who have run enterprise functions at much larger companies. They will expect a COO salary and scope, and often a path to something bigger. What they will not have is the appetite for scrappy, hands-on, execution-heavy work, which is usually exactly what a growing owner-led business needs.
There is a flip side too. Some candidates chase the title regardless of pay, because it reads well on a resume and looks like a stepping stone. That mismatch rarely ends well either.
What This Actually Looks Like
We see this pattern constantly. An owner is buried in the day to day and desperately wants to step back into a visionary role, so they reach for the biggest title available.
But when we dig into what is actually going wrong, it is almost always one of two things. Either the business lacks a general leader who can run operations end to end, which points to a GM, or delivery itself is chaotic, which points to a VP of Operations. Rarely is the real answer a full COO.
If your pain is “I can’t step back,” you probably need a GM or an integrator-style operator. If your pain is “our delivery is a mess,” you need someone focused squarely on operations leadership, not an enterprise layer above it.
Define the Outcome First
Hire against the outcome you need, and let the title follow it, not the other way around. That sounds simple, but most hiring processes skip this step and jump straight to writing a job posting.
This is where a proper role assessment earns its keep. Before we fill anything, we work through the actual pain points with the owner, conversationally and quickly, grounded in real market benchmarks rather than a guess at what sounds impressive on an org chart.
That is a very different process than a traditional consulting engagement, which can take months and cost a small fortune before you even get to the hiring stage. For most companies under a few hundred people, and plenty of larger ones too, that kind of process is overkill for a question that can be answered honestly in one conversation.
The Bottom Line
Your business does not need a title. It needs a specific problem solved by a specific kind of leader.
Get clear on whether the gap is general leadership or operational execution, and the right hire becomes obvious. Not sure which describes your situation? That is worth a quick executive search conversation before you post anything.
Skip the title inflation. Reach out to Hire Engine and let’s figure out who you actually need.
