The Vital Role of a COO in Construction: When to Hire and What They Should be Doing

I get asked about this one often, on calls, after speaking events, and in messages from people who found me online. I have touched on pieces of it before in videos and other posts, but wanted to lay out the full picture here in 1 place.

But first, check out this quick video clip I made for you regarding this topic…. 

COO Role <- Click the link

The Challenge

Contractors usually hit this point once the org chart has grown a few levels deep. Multiple project managers, multiple supers, more jobs running at once than any 1 person can fully track. And the day-to-day operations that the owner once held onto tightly, the stuff that felt too important to hand off, now have to move to someone else. That shift is not easy. Letting go of control that built the company in the first place rarely feels natural, even when it is exactly what the business needs next.

The Impact

When that delegation does not happen, the strain shows up across the whole organization, not just at the top. Supers and PMs end up waiting on direction that used to come quickly. Projects start competing for the owner's attention instead of getting it. And the structure that worked fine with 3 projects running starts to crack once it is 10 or 12.

The threshold where this becomes real usually falls somewhere between $20 million and $100 million in annual revenue, and it moves around a lot depending on whether the company is a general contractor or a specialty contractor. That range exists because the complexity of the work matters as much as the revenue number itself.

Here is the part that gets missed. Communication and accountability are not things a company just has. They get built the same way any muscle gets built, through reps, every day, over time. A growing contractor without those reps in place is not weak, they just have not had the structure yet to build that strength.

The Shift

This is where a COO steps in. Think of the role as the liaison between the owner and the operations side of the business. They take the strategic direction the owner has already set and turn it into real structure, real process, and real follow-through across the organization. In a lot of ways, they become the owner's right hand, the person trusted to carry decisions forward without every single one needing to route back to the top. If communication and accountability are the muscle a company has to build, a good COO works almost like a steroid injection, speeding up a process that would otherwise take years of trial and error to build on its own.

Owners generally have 3 paths here, and each one comes with real tradeoffs.

Promoting from within means putting someone who already knows the company's culture and people into the role. The upside is trust that is already built. The downside is that being a great super or PM does not automatically translate into being a great COO, and that gap can take time and some costly trial and error to close.

Hiring a full-time COO from outside the company brings in someone who may already have the exact experience the role calls for. The tradeoff is they walk in without any of the trust or cultural knowledge that took your current leadership years to build. That gap often shows up fast, especially if the team was hoping the role would go to someone promoted from within. Resentment can build quietly, and it can slow down exactly the kind of alignment the role was brought in to create.

Bringing in a fractional COO takes a different approach. I will be honest, I have a bias here; this is the work I do. But I believe in it because I have watched it work. It is someone who specializes in this exact role, brought in to build the structure now while also developing whoever inside the company might eventually step into it full time. That person gets trained alongside someone who has already done this work, instead of learning it alone through mistakes. This is a big part of why this profession has grown so fast lately. It brings the company together in a way that costs less and creates a lot less internal disruption than the other 2 paths.

As for what a COO actually spends their time on, most of it comes down to keeping the operation running the way the owner intends, even when the owner is not the one in the room. That means making sure supers and PMs are aligned on priorities, keeping communication moving cleanly between the field and the office, and staying on top of cost control on the field side, where inefficiency quietly eats into a job without anyone noticing until it is too late. That is the piece I focus on. I stay out of the accounting and finance side entirely, since that is not my lane, and I always point clients toward people I trust for that part of the business.

The Closing

The contractors who work through this transition well come out the other side running a business that does not depend entirely on the owner's bandwidth. Decisions move faster because they are not all waiting on 1 person. The field and the office stay coordinated instead of drifting apart as the company adds more projects and more layers. And the owner gets back the time to focus on where the business is headed, instead of getting pulled into every operational detail along the way.

There is no single right answer between promoting internally, hiring from outside, or bringing in fractional support first. It depends on where your team and your structure actually stand today.

If this is something you are working through in your own company, I am always glad to talk it through.

Gerard Aliberti
Pro-Accel, Owner

EXCITING NEWS

Patrick Shurney and I are thinking about building a Builder-to-CEO Peer Group to help self-perform, labor-intensive construction business owners transition from the builder-to-CEO mindset and with financial and operational matters. If you’re interested, please join the interest list by clicking here https://waitlist-builder-to-ceo-peer-group.scoreapp.com/

ALSO, check out the new updated website at www.pro-accel.com. We updated the training page, pricing, speaking, and more. 

Ways We Can Work Together

Role-Specific Training Bootcamps  — Pro-Accel offers role-specific training workshops for Estimators, PMs, Superintendents, and Field Engineers focused on accountability, decision-making, and ownership. Reply if you want to talk about your team.

Bid Handoff Accelerator Process — A structured handoff system that closes the gap between estimating and field execution, dramatically improving project success.

Consulting & Strategic Advisory  — From organizational assessments to strategic planning and leadership development, we dig into how your business actually operates, identify where the breakdowns are happening, and build the systems and structure that drive real growth.