Published 18 Feb 2026  ·  Depesh Vyas

What a COO Actually Does in Month 1 (A Detailed Look)

One of the most common questions in a first conversation with a service business founder is: "What would you actually do?" It's a fair question. "COO" is a category that sounds significant but doesn't always come with a clear picture of what happens in practice.

Here's the honest, detailed answer — week by week — based on how a Month 1 engagement actually unfolds.

Before Month 1: The Operations Audit

Before any execution work begins, the right starting point is a diagnostic. An Operations Audit runs for 7 days and produces a clear picture of the business: what's working, what's broken, where the highest-leverage constraints are, and what needs to happen first. It's not a generic report — it's a scored assessment across six operational dimensions with a specific, prioritised roadmap attached.

The audit also serves a second purpose: it's how the founder and I figure out if we're the right fit to work together. Operations work is close-contact — I'm embedded in the business, working with the team, and making decisions that affect how the company runs. That requires mutual trust and clear communication. The audit is the best way to establish both before committing to a longer engagement.

What the audit produces determines whether an Operations Sprint (focused 8–12 week fix for specific problems) or a Full Partnership (comprehensive, 12-month operational engagement) is the right next step. Month 1 trial applies to the Full Partnership path.

Week 1: Full Immersion, No Changes Yet

The first week is observation. Not passive observation — active, systematic observation with specific things I'm looking for.

I map every decision that routes back to the founder. I sit in on team calls to understand the current communication patterns. I look at the tools being used and how information is flowing (or not flowing) between them. I review recent client work to understand what quality currently looks like and what the standard actually is. I talk to the team to understand what they're accountable for, what decisions they can make independently, and where they get stuck.

I'm not building anything yet. I'm building a precise picture of the operational reality — which is almost always more complex than what the founder described in the audit. Problems that were described as one thing often turn out to have root causes that are different. Fixing the symptom without addressing the root cause wastes time.

By end of week 1, I have a clear operational map: where decisions are concentrated, what the top 3–5 highest-leverage fixes are, and what the sequence should be.

Week 2: Establishing the Operating Cadence

The first thing built — before any specific system or process — is the operating cadence. This is the weekly rhythm of the business: the meetings, the check-ins, the planning sessions, and the reporting structure that creates a consistent heartbeat.

This typically looks like: a daily 20-minute standup (team-level, not one-on-one check-ins), a Monday planning session where the week's work gets assigned with clear ownership and time estimates, a Friday retrospective where the team reviews against plan and identifies what to improve, and a weekly KPI review where the key numbers get looked at by the appropriate people.

Why this first? Because the operating cadence is the infrastructure that makes everything else work. If you build great SOPs but there's no weekly rhythm where people are held accountable to them, the SOPs don't stick. If you delegate authority but there's no regular forum where you can see whether that authority is being used well, delegation becomes abdication. The cadence is the system that makes all other systems maintainable.

The immediate effect of this, in most businesses, is that the volume of ad-hoc interruptions to the founder drops significantly within the first two weeks. Questions that previously went to the founder as soon as they arose now get collected and handled in the appropriate forum. Context-switching drops. Deep work becomes possible again.

Week 3: Addressing the Top 1–2 Operational Constraints

With the cadence in place, week 3 goes after the highest-leverage operational fix identified in week 1. This varies by business, but the most common culprits at the $10K–$40K MRR stage are: founder-as-quality-gate (building a peer review system with a defined "definition of done"), delivery inconsistency (documenting the delivery workflow and setting quality standards), or decision concentration (building a clear authority framework that defines what the team can decide independently).

This is hands-on work. I'm not writing frameworks and handing them to the founder to implement — I'm building the actual systems with the team, testing them against real work, and adjusting based on what works in practice. The goal by end of week 3 is for at least one meaningful operational function to be running without founder involvement.

Week 4: Measurement, Adjustment, Decision Point

The final week of Month 1 has two functions: measurement and decision.

Measurement: We look at what's changed. How many decisions are still routing to the founder versus two weeks ago? What's the quality of work going through the new review process? Are standups running to time and producing useful outputs? What do the KPIs look like, and what does the operating dashboard tell us about the health of the business?

Decision: At the end of Month 1, we sit down and honestly assess whether the engagement is working. Is the founder seeing meaningful relief from operational work? Is the team responding well to the new structure? Are the right foundations in place to build on? If yes — and it usually is, though not always — we decide on the path forward: Operations Sprint (continue for 8–12 weeks focused on specific outcomes) or Full Partnership (12-month comprehensive engagement that takes over all operations).

The Month 1 trial exists precisely because this decision should be made with evidence, not promises. After 30 days of embedded work, both sides have a clear picture of whether the partnership is working and what the right next step is.

What Founders Typically Notice by End of Month 1

Based on consistent patterns across engagements, by the end of Month 1 most founders report: a meaningful drop in ad-hoc interruptions (typically 60–80% reduction), at least 5–8 hours per week freed from operational tasks, a team that is beginning to function with more independence, and a clearer picture of how the business is actually performing week to week.

The full impact of an operational engagement takes longer than a month to materialise — most of the meaningful compound effects happen in months 3–6 as systems become embedded and the team builds genuine operational independence. But month 1 should produce tangible, visible change. If it doesn't, something is wrong and the engagement isn't working.

That's the honest picture of what Month 1 looks like. Not vague strategy. Specific systems, specific changes, specific results — measured against where the business was on day one.

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Depesh Vyas is the founder of VBOG (Vyas Business Operations Group). Engagements start with a $500 Operations Audit — a 7-day diagnostic that produces a clear operational picture and determines whether a Sprint or Full Partnership is the right next step. Applications for the current cohort (3 companies maximum) are open.