Published 18 Feb 2026  ·  Depesh Vyas

COO vs OBM vs VA: What Does a $10K–$40K MRR Service Business Actually Need?

When a service business founder hits the wall — too much in the weeds, can't scale, team isn't executing without constant oversight — the immediate question is: what kind of help do I bring in?

Three options come up most often: a Virtual Assistant (VA), an Online Business Manager (OBM), or a COO. They sound adjacent. They're not. Hiring the wrong one at this stage doesn't just cost money — it costs the 3–6 months it takes to realise it's not working, then the additional time to find and onboard someone else.

Here's an honest breakdown of what each role actually does, who it's right for, and where it fails.

The Virtual Assistant: Task Execution, Not Problem Solving

A VA is a task-executor. You tell them what to do; they do it. The better ones are fast, reliable, and proactive within a defined scope. They can manage your inbox, schedule calls, handle admin, produce reports from a template, and manage tools they've been trained on.

What a VA cannot do is diagnose why your business isn't scaling. They don't own outcomes — they own tasks. If you're working 70-hour weeks and the bottleneck is that every decision routes back to you, a VA solves the wrong problem. You'll delegate admin and still be drowning in everything that matters.

A VA is the right hire when your time is being drained by low-skill, repeatable tasks that don't require judgment. It's the wrong hire when the problem is structural — when you need someone who can build and own the systems, not just work within them.

Typical cost: $500–$2,000/month depending on hours and capability.

The Online Business Manager: Operational Coordination, Not Operational Architecture

An OBM sits above a VA. They manage people, projects, and workflows. A good OBM can run your project management tool, coordinate the team's weekly tasks, make sure deliverables don't fall through the cracks, and keep day-to-day operations moving without you being in every thread.

This is genuinely useful — but it has a ceiling. An OBM manages operations; they don't build them. If your business doesn't have a clear operating cadence, a delivery system, defined role accountabilities, and measurable KPIs, an OBM has nothing solid to manage. They're coordinating chaos rather than creating order.

The other limitation is authority. An OBM typically doesn't have the standing to make structural decisions, push back on the founder on strategy, or redesign how the business fundamentally operates. They're good at keeping an existing system running. They're not the right person to build the system from scratch or to tell you that the system you have is wrong.

An OBM is the right hire when you have a reasonably functional operation and need someone to manage its day-to-day execution. It's the wrong hire when your core problem is that the operational infrastructure doesn't exist yet.

Typical cost: $2,000–$5,000/month.

The COO: Operational Ownership and Architecture

A COO operates at a different level. They don't just execute tasks or coordinate existing workflows — they take ownership of the entire operational function. That means diagnosing what's actually broken, building the systems and processes that don't exist, hiring and structuring the team, establishing accountability frameworks, and ultimately removing the founder from day-to-day execution entirely.

The key distinction is authority and accountability. A COO isn't there to advise you — they're embedded in the business, doing the actual work of building the operational layer that lets everything else run without you. They own delivery quality, team performance, the operating cadence, and the systems that govern how the business functions.

This is the right hire when your problem is structural: when there are no systems, when the founder is the bottleneck for every decision, when delivery is inconsistent, when scaling means the founder works more rather than less. These are architectural problems that require an operator, not a coordinator or a task-executor.

Typical cost: $3,000–$15,000/month depending on scope, engagement model, and whether the arrangement includes performance-based components.

The Decision Framework: Which One Does Your Business Actually Need?

Rather than starting with budget, start with the actual problem. Here are the three questions that clarify the right answer:

Question 1: Do you have systems that work but need someone to run them? If yes, an OBM might be sufficient. If no — if the systems don't exist or don't work — an OBM will struggle and a COO is more appropriate.

Question 2: Is the founder the primary bottleneck for decisions and quality review? If yes, this is a structural problem that an OBM or VA won't solve. The issue isn't task volume — it's that authority and accountability haven't been properly delegated. That requires a COO who can take over operational ownership, not someone who can help you execute your decisions faster.

Question 3: Does the business need task execution or operational leadership? Task execution = VA. Coordination of existing operations = OBM. Building the operational infrastructure and owning the outcomes = COO.

The Sequencing Question: Which Do You Hire First?

For a service business in the $10K–$40K MRR range that has no real operational infrastructure, the correct sequence is: COO first, then OBM, then VAs as scale requires. The COO builds the systems. The OBM runs them. The VAs handle volume within them.

Many founders reverse this because a VA is cheaper and less intimidating. They hire a VA, get some admin relief, but the structural problem doesn't move. Then they hire an OBM, who struggles because there's nothing solid to manage. Then they eventually get to the COO conversation 6–12 months and $30K–$50K later than they should have.

The expensive decision isn't the COO. The expensive decision is hiring the cheaper option first and spending 6–12 months finding out it doesn't solve the actual problem.

A Practical Note on Engagement Models

Not all COO engagements look the same. At VBOG, the process starts with a 7-day Operations Audit ($500) — a diagnostic that identifies exactly where the constraints are and what the business needs structurally before any execution work begins. That audit determines whether an Operations Sprint (a focused 8–12 week fix for 1–3 specific problems) or a Full Partnership (12-month engagement that takes over all operations) is the right next step.

The audit matters because it answers the foundational question: what does this business actually need? The answer isn't always a full COO engagement. But it's always a clearer picture of the operational reality than most founders have when they start looking for help.

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Depesh Vyas is the founder of VBOG (Vyas Business Operations Group), a COO service for service business founders at $10K–$40K MRR. If you're trying to figure out what kind of operational help your business actually needs, a $500 Operations Audit will give you a clear diagnostic before you commit to anything.