Explaining what a consultant COO does in practice

Most of what I’ve seen written about COOs assumes you’re either hiring one full-time or not at all. The reality for a lot of scaling businesses is more specific than that: there’s a particular operational problem sitting in front of the founder, it’s going to take months of experienced executive time to sort out and when it’s done the business will go back to running fine without that person in the seat.

That’s the work a consultant COO does. And it’s a lot of the work I do with my clients.

I’m an independent COO who’s spent more than 26 years in scaling businesses – as a founder, as MD of a digital transformation agency we sold to a UK-listed group in 2018 and then as COO of that group (TPXimpact plc) as we scaled from £31.5m to £83m in revenue across the integration of multiple acquired companies. Those experiences are where my consultant COO work comes from: I’ve been the operator in the room the first time so when founders bring me in now it’s rarely a situation I haven’t lived through some version of.

This guide explains what a consultant COO engagement actually looks like, when it’s the right shape for the problem in front of you and how it differs from the other options – fractional, interim and generic management consultancy.

What a consultant COO is

A consultant COO is an experienced chief operating officer brought in to lead a specific piece of operational work for a defined period. They have a defined outcome and then step out of the business.

The job isn’t to “help think about” the problem. The job is to go in, lead the work that fixes it and leave the business in better shape than they found it. I take a pragmatic, evidence-led approach to doing this. I don’t arrive with a standard playbook. I diagnose the underlying problems, work out how to fix them fast and then solve them collaboratively alongside you and your team.

The difference between a consultant COO and a generic management consultancy engagement is in the delivery. A consultancy engagement usually ends in a recommendation – for example a deck, a model, a roadmap – that somebody else in the business then has to execute. A consultant COO engagement ends in the change having been made. The operator is in the room, on the calls, running the conversations and building the decisions into the operating rhythm. The accountability sits with them, not with an implementation team that forms afterwards.

The difference between a consultant COO and a fractional COO is scope. A fractional COO is usually open-ended – they run parts of the business with you for as long as it’s useful. A consultant COO is time-boxed and outcome-boxed. You hire them for the thing, they do the thing and then they go.

The three shapes of consultant COO engagement

Across the work I’ve done since 2014, consultant COO engagements almost always fall into one of three shapes. If what you’re facing doesn’t match one of these, the engagement probably isn’t a suitable for consultant COO – it’s something else.

1. Restructure

The shape of the business has stopped matching what the business needs to do. This isn’t usually a crisis – it’s usually growth that’s behind the need to change. Functions that made sense at £3m don’t make sense at £10m. Decisions that used to run through one person have bounced around three. The weekly rhythm has turned into a weekly performance, with the same problems being debated in the same meetings because nothing has the authority to close them.

Restructure work is rarely about redundancies, though occasionally it includes them. More often it’s about redrawing reporting lines, rebuilding the exec layer, unbundling a function that’s become two jobs in one seat or merging two functions that don’t need to be separate. The work is sensitive, needs experienced hands and needs to land cleanly because you don’t want to do it twice.

“Following a team restructure, Simon played a crucial role in navigating the complexities that can come with big change. His calm demeanour and intuitive approach made everyone at ease, which gave different personalities the opportunity to speak and feel listened to. The team went from being deflated and uncertain, to being a united, high-performing team with clearly defined roles and goals to look forward to. I highly recommend Simon to any team leader looking for direction, support and guidance across a multitude of business needs.”

Louise Ioannou, Marketing Director at National Geographic Kids Magazine

2. Transformation or system rollout

A big piece of change – such a new ERP, a new CRM, a new service model or a new way of working – needs to land inside the business. You know you can’t run it off the side of an existing exec’s desk because it’ll take nine months and nobody has nine months of spare capacity. You also know a pure project manager isn’t enough because the change touches every function and needs someone with senior experience to make the hard calls.

A consultant COO sits above the project layer, owning the outcome rather than the Gantt chart. Their job is to keep the change moving through the organisation without breaking the parts of the business that still need to run normally while the change is landing.

3. M&A integration or a specific operational problem

You’ve just bought a company – or been bought by one – and two operating models now have to become one. M&A integration is work I’ve done first-hand on both sides: I led the integration of the agency I sold into the TPXimpact group and delivered the earn-out targets ahead of plan, and as COO of the group I then ran operational due diligence and integration on the next wave of acquired companies. It’s one of the places where experience and scars count for more than any methodology.

The other version of this category is the specific operational problem that has defeated the business for twelve months: margin is leaking somewhere and you can’t find where, a key function is underperforming and the incumbent leader is struggling to fix it or the business has outgrown a specific process and needs it rebuilt from the ground up.

These engagements are the most varied, but they share a structure: there’s a defined thing that needs to change, an experienced operator is the right person to lead the change and when the change is done the business can absorb it and move on.

When a consultant COO is the right call

I’ve noticed four signals that suggest the problem in front of you is a consultant COO shape:

The outcome can be named. You can finish the sentence “at the end of this engagement, the business will have…” with a concrete thing. A new org structure. A landed system. An integrated operation. A fixed process. If the best you can do is “the business will be running better,” you probably want a fractional COO, not a consultant.
The work is bounded but not small. This isn’t a three-week sprint. It’s a three-to-nine-month piece of executive work that needs the weight of an experienced operator. Anything shorter and you’re looking at an interim operator or a specialist consultant. Anything longer and the work is probably really an ongoing fractional engagement in disguise.
The existing team can’t do it on top of their day jobs. Not because they lack capability (although that might be a factor) – but because they lack bandwidth or because the work cuts across functions in a way that would put any single function head in a difficult political position. A consultant COO brings the horizontal authority the existing org chart doesn’t have.
You don’t need an ongoing COO afterwards. When the work is done, the business goes back to running fine with the leadership team it already has. The COO role was temporary and everyone involved understood that from the start. That removes a perceived threat to existing permanent team members.

Consultant COO vs fractional vs interim vs management consultant

The boundaries do blur in practice, but the useful distinctions are:

Consultant COO: defined project, defined outcome, experienced operator in the room, finite engagement. Typical length: 3–9 months.

Fractional COO: ongoing operational leadership on a defined number of days per week, open-ended. The goal is running the business better, not finishing a specific thing. Typical length: 6-12 months plus.

Interim COO: full-time executive sitting in the COO seat, usually because the full-time incumbent has left or the business is between hires. Time-boxed, high-intensity, full-calendar. Typical length: 3–6 months.

Management consultancy: typically a team from an external firm producing analysis, recommendations and implementation plans, often with junior consultants doing the research and partners fronting the client relationship. Hands-off the day-to-day. Strong on analysis, weaker on shipping change into a live operating model.

If the shape of the problem wants “a senior operator in the room for a few months to lead a defined piece of work,” that’s a consultant COO. If it wants “twenty smart graduates producing a two-hundred-page deck,” that’s management consultancy. They’re different tools for different problems. Neither is necessarily wrong; they’re just rarely interchangeable. Most businesses I work with don’t want management consultancy.

What a consultant COO engagement actually looks like

Every engagement is shaped by the problem, but there’s a common pattern underneath and it’s what I use in every engagement I take on.

The start – diagnosis, plan and align. I get properly under the skin of the business before suggesting anything. Read the numbers. Meet the people. Understand the context. Pressure-test the scope I thought I was being hired for. A lot of consultant COO engagements start with the founder believing the problem is X and finish week two with everybody agreeing the problem is actually Y. Better to find that out in week two than in month three. Then we co-produce a plan – short, sharp, and specific – and take the leadership team through it. We agree what’s in scope, what’s out, what good looks like and what decisions the engagement will own.

The middle. Execute. Lead the work. Run the meetings. Make the calls. Write the decisions into the operating rhythm so they outlast the engagement. This is the bit where a consultant COO earns their keep – not by producing new analysis, but by making sure the change actually lands and sticks inside the business.

The last month. Hand over. The team picks up the new structure, the new process, the new system, the new way of working. The consultant COO steps back with a clear set of notes for whoever is picking up the running of the thing going forward. A good exit is visible – you don’t want to be the operator who quietly becomes permanent because nobody said out loud that the engagement was done.

“Simon is an amazing strategist to have in your corner—he breaks complex problems into digestible chunks that give people clarity, accountability and help teams thrive. I’ve often turned to Simon when faced with tough, frustrating challenges. Whether it’s restructuring a team, refining a business model, or navigating the transition from start up to scale up, Simon approaches everything with a level of level-headedness, integrity and empathy that’s rare. He joins dots and through his network is an incredible connector of people. If you’re a scale up business, Simon will be a trusted guide and an invaluable asset. He’s made a lasting impact on our business.”

Georgia Branch, Co-founder & CEO at We Create Popular

What it costs

Consultant COO engagements are usually priced as a fixed project fee or a monthly retainer with a defined end date, depending on the shape of the work.

For a typical three-to-nine-month engagement working with a £1m–£15m UK scale-up, total fees will usually sit in the £15k–£50k range. That’s less than a management consultancy would typically charge for a project of similar scope because you’re not paying for a team and a partner layer on top – you’re only paying for the operator. It’s meaningfully more than you’d pay for a pure project manager, because the value is executive judgement not just coordination.

Compared to the cost of the problem not getting solved – things like a restructure that drags for a year, a system rollout that stalls, an integration that leaks margin – the engagement usually pays for itself several times over if it’s scoped correctly. The failures happen when scoping is wrong: too narrow means the work doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem; too broad means the engagement turns into a fractional relationship that nobody actually signed up to.

How to spot a good consultant COO

The same three things that matter for a fractional COO also matter here – operator track record, relevant experience at your stage and a willingness to push back – plus three additional signals that are specific to project work:

They interrogate your scope before they accept the engagement. The worst consultant COOs say yes to whatever you describe in the first call. The best ones spend the first conversation probing what you actually want, which means they sometimes tell you in week one that the scope you proposed is wrong and needs redrawing.

They know how to exit. Ask them directly what the last month of the engagement looks like. A good consultant COO has a clear picture of handover – who owns what afterwards, what notes they leave behind and how they make sure the change outlasts them. If they can’t answer this question, they haven’t done enough of this work before.

They’ve lived inside businesses like yours. The skill of leading a restructure, a transformation or an integration doesn’t transfer cleanly from one industry and one scale to another. My operator experience is strongest in agencies, SaaS, technology-centric businesses and professional services because that’s where I’ve actually run things. If your business sits outside those sectors, I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right fit.

When a consultant COO is the wrong call

When the problem isn’t really bounded. If what you’re describing is “the business is a bit of a mess” without a specific change you can name, don’t hire a consultant COO – you’ll waste the first six weeks of the engagement trying to define the work. Either do that definition yourself first or hire a fractional COO who can live inside the ambiguity to work out the answers.

When the real problem is the CEO. A consultant COO can’t fix a business whose biggest operational problem is the founder’s own judgement or bandwidth. That’s a coaching and/or advisor conversation not an operational engagement. The symptoms will look operational but the work certainly isn’t.

When you actually want somebody to stay. If what you really want is an ongoing operator who becomes part of the fabric of the business, hire fractional from the start. Hiring a consultant COO and then extending the engagement every few months is the most expensive path to the same destination.

How I work as a consultant COO

My consultant COO engagements are project-based, with a scoped outcome, a scoped timeline and a fixed fee. Most sit in the three-to-six month range. I only take on work where the outcome can be named clearly because I’ve learned the hard way that vague engagements produce vague results.

The work I do as a consultant COO includes organisational design and team reviews, operational audits and improvements, sell-side and buy-side M&A preparation and execution, leadership succession and transitions, integration and major organisational change, operating model design and specific operational improvements that have been defeating the business for months. The unifying thread is that every engagement is about shipping change into a real, live, scaling business not producing a deck about what the change should look like.

The first conversation is always diagnostic – I’d rather tell you in week one that your scope isn’t quite the shape you thought it was than discover it three months in. If the problem turns out to be better suited to a fractional engagement, a coaching conversation or an advisory relationship, I’ll say so. Part of the job is helping you pick the right tool, even when that tool is a different one to the one we started discussing.

When I take on a consultant COO engagement, I’m usually in the business the way a full-time operator would be – in the meetings, on Slack, making decisions in real time. The difference is the time-box. We both know, from day one, what the engagement is for and when it ends. Good consultant COO work is visible in the quality of the exit as much as in the quality of the middle.

The consultant COO guide: project-based operational leadership for scale-ups