Most Series A founders ask the COO question between £1M and £5M revenue, with 15 to 60 employees, and a board that has started using the word “governance.” If five or more of the ten signs below apply to you, you need senior operational leadership now. Whether that’s a full-time COO or a fractional one depends on revenue, complexity, and how externally-facing the role needs to be.
The 10-point Series A operations checklist
Run through these honestly. Each one that hits gets a point.
- You are the bottleneck on every significant decision. Hiring, pricing, customer escalation, contract sign-off. If you took two weeks off, the business would slow down inside a week.
- Headcount is growing but no formal management cadence exists. No weekly leadership meeting with a consistent agenda. No quarterly OKRs the team has actually seen.
- Your investors are asking for board reporting that takes you three days to prepare. And the data isn’t where it needs to be to do it in three hours.
- You’ve signed at least one commercial contract in the last six months that you regret. Bad payment terms, uncapped liability, an IP clause that came back to bite.
- There’s a gap between what sales sells and what delivery can actually do at the agreed price. Margin leaks through the handoff. Customers grumble.
- You have no functional KPI dashboard. What you have is a quarterly Google Sheet someone manually updates and nobody trusts.
- You can’t name your top 5 operational risks off the top of your head. Or you can, but no one has written them down or assigned ownership.
- You’ve hired someone senior in the last 12 months who hasn’t worked out. The team is starting to feel it. You’re avoiding the conversation.
- Compliance, HR, and finance are all “covered” by people doing it as 20% of their day job. None of them is a specialist. All of them are stretched.
- You know there’s at least one process held together by a single person, a Slack channel, and hope. If they left, you’d have a fortnight of pain.
What your score means
- 0–2 hits. You don’t need a COO yet. Stay focused on product and growth. Revisit this in 6 months.
- 3–4 hits. You need senior operational thinking, not necessarily a hire. An Ops Audit at £5,000 is the right move. You’ll either fix it yourself with the roadmap or know exactly what kind of help you need next.
- 5–7 hits. You need a fractional COO. Two days a week embedded, building the systems, getting the team to 80% autonomy in 90 days. Full-time isn’t economic at your scale yet. See the Fractional COO page.
- 8–10 hits. You’re past the point where fractional fixes it. You need a full-time COO, or at least an interim with a clear runway to full-time. Start the search. In the meantime, a fractional engagement bridges the gap so the business doesn’t slide further while you recruit.
The pattern that’s specific to Series A
A few signals are particularly Series A.
Your board has started using words like “governance” and “operational maturity.” Translation: they want to see proper KPIs, a real risk register, board-ready reporting, and someone other than you accountable for operational delivery. They want this before the next raise.
Your sales team has grown from 1–2 to 5+ people in 9 months. Whatever pipeline process you had has stopped working. The CRM is half-populated. Forecasting is theatre.
Customer success was an afterthought, and now churn is creeping up. Nobody owns it. The founder gets escalated for every retention call. This is one of the cleanest signals that you’re past the founder-only operational stage.
You’re planning a Series B in the next 12–18 months. Due diligence is going to be brutal on operational rigour, contract risk, and reporting quality. The cost of fixing it then is 5x the cost of fixing it now.
Full-time vs fractional at Series A
If you scored 5–7 and you’re between £1M and £5M revenue, fractional is almost always the right call. The maths and the dynamics both point the same way:
- A full-time COO at £160K base is 5–10% of total opex at your stage. You can’t absorb that and the equity dilution.
- The role at Series A is internal build, not external representation. Fractional fits that perfectly.
- A fractional engagement gives you the optionality to step up to a full-time hire 9–18 months later, with a clear handover and a known set of working systems.
If you scored 8+ and you’re approaching £10M revenue, the search starts now. A fractional COO can bridge the 4–9 months it takes to recruit and ramp the full-timer. Then they hand over and step out. We do this regularly.
For the full framework on the choice, read Fractional COO vs Full-Time COO and the related Fractional COO vs Interim COO.
What happens in the first 90 days of a fractional COO engagement
Once you’ve decided, here’s what a 90-day fractional engagement looks like at TEP:
- Month 1. Intake. Top 5 operational risks identified. 2–3 quick wins shipped (a dashboard, a contract template, a meeting cadence). Baseline State of Operations report delivered.
- Month 2. Priority systems live. KPI dashboard running. Commercial contract review framework in place. Sales-to-delivery handoff fixed.
- Month 3. Team trained to own the new systems. OKRs running. Documented handover. Decision point on whether to continue, move to Strategic Adviser, or recruit full-time.
Full method here: How We Work.
Also worth reading
- What Is a Fractional COO?
- 5 Signs Your Startup Has Outgrown Ad-Hoc Management
- How Much Does a Fractional COO Cost in the UK?
- Why Every Scaling Founder Needs a 30-60-90 Operations Plan
If you scored 5 or higher and want a 30-minute conversation about what to do next, book a discovery call. No pitch. We’ll work out whether you need an Ops Audit, a fractional retainer, or to start the full-time search.