Founders looking for external operations support will no doubt have come across the services of a fractional operations manager and fractional COO. In large businesses, the two titles describe different roles: a COO provides strategic thinking and leadership, whereas an operations manager focuses on execution and delivery.
But in smaller businesses, the responsibilities of both tend to converge because the business doesn’t have the budget or workload to justify two separate hires. This article explains where the titles differ, why they perform similar roles at the small business level and what small business owners should focus on instead.
Although their responsibilities can vary by industry and business size, the traditional view is that one focuses mainly on leadership and strategy, and the other on delivery and running the business.
The COO generally concentrates on strategy and the big picture. They turn the founder or CEO vision into something the business can deliver by defining the operating roadmap, designing the organisational structure and leading the operating rhythm. They own outcomes rather than activities, so their week is spent managing priorities, people and business performance, instead of carrying out tasks themselves.
The operations manager focuses on execution. They own delivery and run the business day-to-day by resourcing projects, keeping work to schedule and managing clients and suppliers. In smaller businesses, they’re usually the person implementing the systems and processes that make all of that possible.
This division is at its clearest in larger businesses with well-established structures. However in the fractional market for small businesses, these lines begin to blur.
Operations leadership first becomes relevant somewhere between 5 and 15 employees. This isn’t a hard rule so much as the point at which founders find operational complexity too much to manage alongside their other work.
A business of this size needs both the strategic and execution aspects handled, but rarely has enough work to justify a dedicated hire for each. Splitting the two means paying for two people and then managing the coordination between them, so the practical answer is instead to hire a single person who can cover both. Combined, the strategic and execution work at this size usually adds up to a day or two a week rather than a full-time role.
Fractional working is built to allow you to bring in that one person at the right cost. Both fractional operations managers and fractional COOs bring the breadth of skills to handle strategy and execution together. The main difference is background rather than capability: fractional COOs often come from larger or more heavily governed organisations, which can be useful if your business has both scale and complexity.
As the founder of a small business, you don’t have to get caught up with titles as both can cover the level of support you need. You should instead focus on establishing a good fit, by evaluating the candidate based on their experience, personality and whether their skills are complementary to your own.
To help with this, identify the core problems you want solved and where you want the business to go. That gives you the basis to judge whether a given fractional operations manager is the right one to support you.
For most small service businesses, our fractional operations service can provide the correct sizing of strategy and execution support.