Interim COO

An interim COO is a senior operating executive who fills a vacant or soon-to-be-vacant COO seat on a near-full-time basis for a defined term — typically three to nine months — while the company recruits the permanent hire properly. Unlike a caretaker, an interim carries real authority: chairing the operating reviews, closing decisions, holding delivery and quality to standard, and keeping the leadership team steady. Unlike a permanent hire, the engagement is built around its own ending — a documented handover to the successor. The role exists to remove time pressure from the most expensive hiring decision an operations-heavy company makes.

The deciding question is whether the load is a vacancy or a gap in the operating model. A vacancy — a real seat, recently emptied, with full-time executive load — needs interim cover: near-full-time, defined term, continuity first. A gap — no COO has existed, and what is missing is cadence, measurement and quality systems — needs a fractional engagement: part-time, ongoing, construction first. Cost follows shape: interim is a full-time commitment for months; fractional is a fraction of that, sustained longer. I have written a fuller comparison at /compare/fractional-coo-vs-interim-coo, and in a first conversation I will tell you plainly which one your situation calls for — including when the answer is neither.

Speed matters more in interim work than anywhere else, because an empty seat decays weekly. Once terms are agreed, the practical lead time is days or a small number of weeks, not months — and the first stabilisation effects should be visible inside two weeks of starting: reviews running to standard, a decision log moving, risks triaged and owned. Full steadiness — the point where the vacancy is barely detectable in the operating numbers — typically takes a month or two, depending on how long the seat sat empty. The honest variable is decay: the longer the cadence has been slipping, the more of the early term is recovery rather than maintenance.

Three to nine months covers most situations, and the driver is the permanent search: a properly run executive search for an operations leader takes roughly six months from definition to start date, and the interim term should bracket it with margin for the handover. Shorter terms happen when a successor is already identified and the need is bridge-and-transfer. Longer terms deserve suspicion — if an interim arrangement is drifting past nine or ten months, either the search has stalled or the arrangement has become comfortable, and both deserve a direct conversation. The end date is agreed at the start and treated as real; it is what separates interim cover from an expensive open-ended dependency.

No — as policy, not preference. An interim who wants the permanent seat is compromised three ways: every visible decision doubles as a job audition, the role definition quietly bends toward their own profile, and candidate assessment becomes competitor assessment. Ruling myself out from the start removes all three. It also changes what you get from me: I can define the role honestly, argue for a profile different from mine where that is what the company needs, and give you an unguarded read on candidates. My practice is fractional and advisory by design; holding permanent seats is not the business I am in.

Yes, and it is often the most valuable part of the term. Having run the seat, I can write the role definition from evidence rather than template: what this company’s COO actually has to own, what the operating model needs next, and what kind of operator the leadership team can absorb. For assessment, I add an operator-to-operator conversation to your process — candidates describe how they would run this operation, and I test the thinking against the reality I am holding daily. I do not replace your recruiter or your own judgement; I add the one perspective a search process structurally lacks: someone currently doing the job, with no stake in who gets it.

Real authority, scoped in writing before day one. The minimum that works: the operating reviews report to me, I close operational decisions inside an agreed envelope, and process owners are accountable to me for the outcomes they own. What stays with the CEO is agreed just as explicitly — typically strategy, senior hiring and firing, and commitments beyond an agreed financial threshold. The scoping conversation is a test in itself: a company reluctant to grant an interim real authority is usually not ready for the cover to work, and I would rather surface that before signing than discover it in week three.

A monthly fee for a near-full-time executive commitment, fixed for the term — no long-term liability, no equity, no severance, no notice-period risk. Against a permanent COO’s fully loaded package the monthly figure is comparable or somewhat higher; against the alternatives it is usually cheap. The real comparison is with the cost of the seat staying empty — slipped delivery, decisions queuing, a founder doing two jobs badly — or the cost of a rushed permanent hire, which routinely runs into a year of package and a year of damage. Interim cover is expensive the way insurance during a known risk window is expensive: priced against what it prevents.

By not being one. Caretaker status attaches to interims who defer everything — "one for the new COO" — and the organisation learns within a fortnight that decisions have stopped. I take the opposite stance: the cadence runs to full standard, decisions inside my envelope get closed the week they arrive, and underperformance gets addressed rather than parked. The team reads authority from behaviour, not from titles or term lengths. What I do defer, deliberately, are the choices that deserve the permanent hire’s own judgement — structural redesigns, senior appointments — and I say out loud which category a given decision falls in, so deferral reads as discipline rather than drift.

Test four things. Scale evidence: have they operated at or above your complexity, with numbers they can show — not managed adjacent functions? Stabilisation instinct: ask what they would do in the first two weeks; the right answer is about cadence, decisions and risk triage, not reorganisation. Handover discipline: ask what the successor receives on day one; the best interim COO treats documentation as a deliverable, not a courtesy. And candidacy: rule out anyone angling for the permanent seat, because the conflict contaminates everything from role definition to candidate assessment. Weight those four over sector familiarity — operating craft transfers across industries; the discipline to leave cleanly is rarer.