Published 18 Feb 2026 · Depesh Vyas

Is a COO Right for Your Business? A 10-Question Self-Assessment

A COO engagement is a significant commitment — in money, in time, in the level of access you're giving someone to your business. Before starting one, it's worth being honest about whether your business is actually at the stage where it makes sense.

The following 10 questions are designed to cut through the noise and give you a real answer. Be direct with yourself. There are no right answers to impress someone — just accurate ones that help you make a good decision.

Question 1: Are you the bottleneck for operational decisions in your business?

By which I mean: when your team needs to make a call on delivery, client communication, process, or team management, does it route back to you before anything happens? Not occasionally — regularly, as a structural pattern.

If yes, this is the clearest indicator that a COO has work to do in your business. Decision concentration in the founder is the most common operational constraint at the $10K–$40K MRR stage, and it's precisely what an ops engagement is designed to fix.

If no — if your team is genuinely autonomous and making good decisions without you — a COO may not be the priority right now.

Question 2: Are you working more than 50 hours a week to sustain current revenue?

If maintaining your current client base and revenue requires you personally working 50+ hours a week, the business is not operationally efficient at current scale. Adding more clients will require proportionally more of your time — which means you've hit a structural limit, not just a busy period.

If you're working 30–40 hours a week and things feel well-managed, the priority might be elsewhere.

Question 3: Has revenue been flat for 3+ months despite having sales opportunities?

If you have leads, you're having sales conversations, and you're still not converting or growing, the constraint is sometimes sales. But at this revenue stage, it's more often operations — you're not closing because you don't have confidence you can deliver, or you're not following up consistently because you don't have the bandwidth.

If revenue is flat and you're not generating sales opportunities at all, the priority is probably marketing and lead generation before operations.

Question 4: Do you have at least 3 paying clients and a team of at least 2–3 people?

An operations engagement requires something to operate. If you're a solo founder with 1–2 clients, the bottleneck isn't operations — it's building the core business. A COO needs a team to manage, systems to build, and a delivery operation to run. With fewer than 2–3 team members and 3+ clients, the engagement won't have enough to work with to justify the investment.

Question 5: Is your revenue at least $10K MRR (or equivalent annual contract value)?

Below $10K MRR, the economics of a COO engagement typically don't work. The fees — even for a month 1 trial — represent too large a percentage of revenue to be reasonable. Below this threshold, the priority is almost always getting to product-market fit and building the initial client base, not operational infrastructure.

Above $10K MRR, the economics start to make sense and the operational constraints start to bite.

Question 6: Do you know specifically what you'd do with 15+ hours per week if you got them back?

This is a more important question than it sounds. A COO can free up significant founder time. But if that time has no clear, higher-leverage use — if the founder would spend it on operational work of a different type rather than on sales, strategy, or key relationships — the ROI is lower than expected.

The best candidates for a COO engagement are founders who know exactly what they'd do with more time: close more deals, build the next product tier, develop key partnerships, or move into markets they currently can't pursue. If you're not sure what you'd do with 15 extra hours a week, that's worth thinking through before starting an engagement.

Question 7: Are you willing to let someone else own operational decisions — not just help you make them?

This is the question most founders underestimate. An embedded COO is not a consultant who advises you on what to do. They make operational calls, direct the team, build systems that change how the business works, and sometimes tell you that the way you've been doing something is wrong.

If your instinct is to stay in the loop on every decision, to override operational calls because you know the business better, or to use a COO as a sophisticated VA who executes your directions — the engagement won't work. The model requires real delegation of operational authority, not just task delegation.

If you can genuinely hand off operations and trust the person you've hired to run them, the model works extremely well.

Question 8: Is delivery quality inconsistent, or are you not sure what quality looks like without your personal review?

If client experience varies depending on who's working on the account, or if you're not confident work going out without your review would be up to standard, this is a core operations problem. A COO can fix this. But it requires building quality standards from scratch and removing you from the review loop — which goes back to question 7.

Question 9: Do you have at least some documented understanding of your core processes, or are they entirely in your head?

Entirely in your head is fine — that's a common starting point. But it means month 1 of an engagement will involve significant time on extraction: understanding how things currently work before building anything better. That's useful work, but it means the first 4 weeks produce less visible output than an engagement where some documentation already exists. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Question 10: Are you planning to scale in the next 6–12 months, not just maintain current revenue?

If you're happy at current revenue and have no plans to grow, an operations engagement focused on scaling infrastructure is the wrong priority. Operational investment makes most sense when there's a growth plan that requires the infrastructure to support it. If the goal is stability rather than growth, a targeted Operations Sprint to fix specific problems is likely a better fit than a full engagement.

Scoring Your Answers

If you answered yes to 7–10 of these questions: a COO engagement is likely appropriate for your business right now. The starting point is an Operations Audit to get a clear picture of the specific constraints before committing to anything larger.

If you answered yes to 4–6: there may be a fit, but it depends on which questions. Questions 1, 4, 5, and 7 are the most diagnostic — if you answered no to any of those, it's worth discussing before committing to an audit.

If you answered yes to fewer than 4: a COO is probably not the right fit right now. The priority is likely earlier-stage work — building the initial client base, achieving product-market fit, or getting to a revenue level where operational investment makes economic sense.

This assessment is designed to give you an honest picture, not to generate business. The most common mistake in this space is founders who engage operational help before they're at the stage where it will work — which produces frustration on both sides and doesn't move the needle. The goal is to help you identify whether you're at that stage, not to convince you that you are.

If your answers suggest a COO engagement is likely appropriate, the right starting point is the $500 Operations Audit — a 7-day diagnostic that produces a clear, scored picture of your operational constraints before you commit to anything larger. Apply here, or reach out directly if you'd like to discuss before starting.