A lot of RIAs wait too long to hire operational leadership. That’s understandable.
In founder-led businesses, operations often gets handled by whoever is most capable and willing to absorb the complexity. Usually the founder. Sometimes a senior admin who became indispensable. Occasionally a service leader who keeps everything held together through force of will.
That works for a while. Until it doesn’t.
The First Sign Is Usually Founder Time
One of the clearest signals that a COO is overdue is when founders are still spending too much time solving internal execution problems. If leadership is regularly getting pulled into:
- workflow bottlenecks
- onboarding issues
- service escalations
- technology implementation decisions
- internal accountability conversations
…it usually means operational leadership hasn’t scaled with the business.
Founders should absolutely know what’s happening operationally but they should not be the operating system.
Growth Starts Feeling Harder Than It Should
This is another common inflection point.
A firm can be growing revenue, adding advisors, bringing in clients—and still feel increasingly strained. That’s usually an operations story.
Growth adds complexity faster than many firms expect. More clients means more touchpoints. More reporting. More compliance coordination. More internal communication. More process failure points.
At some stage, “figuring it out as we go” stops being a growth strategy.
Heroics Are Not Infrastructure
We’ve seen plenty of firms running on institutional heroics. There’s always someone who knows how to fix everything. The operations lead who keeps the trains moving. The admin everyone depends on. The founder who gets involved whenever something breaks.
The problem is that heroics don’t scale.
A strong COO replaces dependency with systems.
Client Experience Starts Becoming Inconsistent
Sometimes the issue becomes visible externally before leadership fully recognizes what’s happening internally; client onboarding gets slower, service execution becomes uneven, things that used to feel polished start feeling reactive.
At that point, operational leadership is no longer just an efficiency conversation. It’s a brand conversation.
AUM Isn’t the Right Metric
People often ask what AUM level “requires” a COO – there isn’t a clean answer.
We’ve seen relatively streamlined billion-dollar firms operating without one longer than expected. We’ve also seen firms below that threshold where complexity clearly justified operational leadership much earlier.
The better question is: Has complexity outgrown the current leadership structure?
If the answer is yes, the exact AUM number matters less.
A Good COO Is Not Just an Ops Manager with a Bigger Title
This distinction matters. A true COO should be able to think organizationally, not just administratively.
That means:
- building scalable workflows
- driving accountability
- improving service infrastructure
- managing cross-functional execution
- supporting technology modernization
- creating operational leverage for leadership
The right hire changes how the business runs. The wrong hire just creates another layer.
If You’re Thinking About It, You May Already Be Late
That may sound aggressive, but it’s often true.
By the time founders seriously start discussing COO-level leadership, operational strain has usually been visible for a while.
The strongest firms tend to make this move before pain becomes obvious.
