Not All COOs Are Created Equal: Hiring the Right One for Your PE-Backed Company

Ask five portfolio companies what their COO does, and you’ll get five different answers. In one company, the COO runs daily operations. In another, she’s leading a post-merger integration. In a third, he’s effectively the company’s builder-in-chief, standing up new capabilities, markets, and infrastructure from scratch.

The ambiguity in the title complicates the COO hiring process. When PE sponsors and portfolio company boards treat “COO” as a single job category, they routinely hire the wrong person for the moment, paying for it in missed EBITDA targets, derailed integrations, and leadership churn. As Harvard Business Review’s seminal research on the role concluded, the COO is one of the most contingent and contextual positions in the C-suite, and its value is inseparable from the specific situation it was hired to address.

​At ECA, we think about the COO role through three distinct archetypes: the Operator, the Integrator, and the Builder. Each is genuinely excellent, but each excels under completely different conditions. Getting this wrong is one of the most common and costly mistakes we see in PE-backed leadership hiring.

The Operator: Mastering What Already Exists

The Operator COO is the engine of a mature business. This person’s superpower is making complex, multi-layered operations run faster, leaner, and more predictably. They thrive on KPIs, process discipline, and removing friction from systems that are already largely in place.

Operators are the right hire when a company has strong fundamentals and a clear value creation thesis centered on margin improvement, operational efficiency, or EBITDA expansion. If your investment thesis is essentially “this business runs well but could run better,” you want an Operator in the COO seat.

Where Operators fail is in ambiguous, high-change environments. Ask them to build something from scratch: a new go-to-market motion, a shared services function, an entirely new line of business, and many will instinctively try to systematize before there’s anything worth systematizing. They can become blockers in transformational moments rather than accelerants.

The Integrator: Making Two Plus Two Equal Five

Post-merger integration is one of the most technically complex and consequential leadership challenges in private equity. McKinsey research consistently shows that roughly 70 percent of mergers fail to deliver their expected value, with leadership misalignment and unclear operational accountability among the leading causes. The Integrator COO was built to address exactly this.

Integrators are exceptional project managers and organizational translators. They understand how to map legacy processes onto new structures, navigate cultural friction between combined entities, and align cross-functional stakeholders around shared milestones. In a roll-up strategy or post-acquisition scenario, they are invaluable. RHR International’s research on PE portfolio company executive teams reinforces that achieving buy-and-build goals requires specialized expertise that neither the CEO nor CFO can provide alone. This is precisely the gap a skilled Integrator COO fills.

The risk with Integrators is that their skillset has a natural expiration date within any given company. Once the integration is complete and the dust has settled, many Integrators become restless, or worse, they start re-integrating things that don’t need to be touched. If your hold period extends well beyond the initial integration, you may find yourself needing to transition to an Operator or Builder in that seat.

The Builder: Creating Value Where None Existed

The Builder COO is the rarest of the three archetypes and, arguably, the most misunderstood. Builders are hired when a business needs to create something substantively new: a new market entry, a product line that doesn’t exist yet, a shared services platform being stood up for the first time, or a company being professionalized out of founder-led chaos.

What distinguishes great Builders isn’t just entrepreneurial energy. It’s disciplined ambiguity management. They can operate with limited information, build momentum before infrastructure exists, and attract talent into organizations that can’t yet fully describe what they’re becoming. In a PE context, this often maps to platform companies at the early stages of a buy-and-build strategy, or businesses that have been acquired specifically to serve as the foundation for something larger.

The failure mode for Builders is predictable: they resist the structure and processes they themselves built once it’s time to scale and stabilize. Sponsors who place a Builder in a mature operations role, or who keep a Builder in the seat too long after the company has scaled, often find that what was once creative energy has curdled into dysfunction.

The Right Question Isn’t “Who Is the Best COO?”

It’s “What does this company need in the next 24–36 months?”

The most common mistake we see PE sponsors and boards make is evaluating COO candidates against a generic standard of excellence (impressive background, strong operational pedigree, good presence in the room) rather than against the specific demands of the value creation journey ahead. McKinsey’s research on PE portfolio company leadership shows that companies that get talent right in the first year achieve 2.5 times the return on initial investment, underscoring just how much the right hire in the right moment matters.

Before you begin a COO search, the most important investment you can make is in clarity. Clarity about where the company is in its maturity arc. Clarity about what the value creation plan actually requires at the operational level. And clarity about what success looks like in year one versus year three.

We’d also suggest planning for transitions. Russell Reynolds’ analysis of industrial portfolio company leadership highlights that the right talent profile for a given company can shift significantly over the hold period, and that PE firms increasingly recognize this, building more deliberate sequencing strategies into their talent planning. A Builder in years one and two, followed by an Operator as the business stabilizes, is a legitimate and increasingly common approach. Designing for that transition from the start, rather than hoping the initial hire can flex into it, is the more disciplined path.

What This Means in Practice

When ECA runs a COO search for a PE-backed company, the first conversation we have with the sponsor and CEO isn’t about candidates. It’s about the business. We want to understand the value creation thesis, the current state of operations, the CEO’s actual gaps, and the key milestones over the hold period. Only after that conversation do we know what archetype we’re looking for.

This might sound like a minor distinction, but it changes everything about the search. The sourcing strategy shifts: Operators tend to come from large industrial or services platforms; Builders often emerge from founder-led or hypergrowth environments; Integrators frequently have M&A-heavy backgrounds in corporate development or consulting. The interview framework shifts. The reference checks shift. Even the compensation structure shifts, since different archetypes are motivated by different incentive designs. McKinsey’s work on PE operating groups further affirms that talent-focused PE firms outperform their peers precisely because they bring this kind of structured, archetype-aware thinking to leadership selection.

The COO title is not a job description. It’s a blank canvas that takes its meaning from the company’s specific moment in time. The firms and leadership teams that understand this, and that build their search process around it, consistently make better hires, onboard faster, and drive more value.

Dan Baker is a Senior Director at ECA Partners. He can be reached at [email protected].​​

​Even Metzger is a Project Manager at ECA Partners. He can be reached at [email protected].​