In a 50-person company the owner usually still approves the purchases, settles the argument between sales and delivery, and is the only person who knows why a number moved. A COO exists to take that weight off one desk. This article sets out what the role actually covers at that size, what it does not, and how to tell whether you need the full-time version, a part-time one, or neither yet.
The short answer
A COO in a 50-person company owns three things: the operating rhythm (how the week and the month run), the controls (how you know something is going wrong before a client tells you), and the people who run the day-to-day. They do not own the strategy, the product vision or the biggest client relationships. Those stay with the owner. If the job description you are drafting mixes the two, you are hiring for the wrong problem.
What a COO does at 50 people
1. Runs the operating rhythm
At 15 people the rhythm is the owner walking around. At 50 it has to be written down: a weekly meeting with a fixed agenda, a monthly review against a handful of numbers, and a clear owner for every recurring decision. The COO builds this and then keeps it running, including the weeks when everyone would rather skip it.
2. Builds the controls
A control is anything that tells you early that something is off: an order that has been waiting too long, a project over budget, a cash balance falling faster than plan. Most 50-person companies have the data somewhere and nobody reading it. The COO decides which five or six numbers matter, makes sure they arrive on time, and acts on them.
3. Manages the managers
The heads of sales, delivery, finance or the warehouse report to the COO, not to the owner. That is the part that frees the owner’s time, and it is also the part that fails most often, because it only works if the owner actually stops taking those calls.
4. Turns decisions into process
When the same question reaches the top three times, the COO writes the answer down as a rule, a checklist or a system setting, so the fourth time it is answered lower down. This is where tools and automation earn their place: not as a project of their own, but as the cheapest way to make a decision stick.
What a COO does not do
- Set the strategy. They shape it with evidence and they execute it, but where the company goes is the owner’s call.
- Replace the owner in sales. In most companies of this size the largest clients buy the founder. A COO can protect the owner’s time for those clients, not take them over.
- Fix a broken business model. If the margin is wrong, better operations make the loss arrive more efficiently.
- Do everyone’s job. A COO who becomes the person every problem is escalated to has simply become a second owner, and the bottleneck has moved, not gone.
What it costs, and how long it takes
Our own costing for Latvia in 2026 puts a full-time operations executive at about EUR 9 846 a month in employer cost, EUR 118 147 a year, before recruitment fees. A search typically takes four to six months from the decision to a start date, then two to three months of ramp before the new person changes anything. The working is in what it really costs to hire an operations executive in Latvia, and you can change the assumptions in the cost of hiring calculator.
For scale: the Central Statistical Bureau reported an average gross monthly wage of EUR 1 886 for the second quarter of 2026. A senior operations hire therefore costs roughly what four average employees cost, which is why the decision deserves more than a job advert.
Do you need one? Three questions
- Does the same decision reach you more than once a week? If yes, you have a process gap, and a COO, full-time or not, is how it gets closed.
- Could you name the five numbers you would want on one page every Monday? If not, the first job is building the controls, which is a defined project rather than a permanent salary.
- Is there enough work for five days a week, every week, for two years? If the honest answer is two days, a full-time hire will either be underused or will invent work.
If the answers point to a real need but not a full week, the comparison in fractional COO vs full-time COO vs interim manager sets the three models side by side. If you are not sure the problem is the role at all, start with five signs your company needs an operations audit.
Where I come in
I work as that operations lead for a set number of days a month: building the rhythm and the controls, managing the managers until the structure holds, and putting the tools and automation in place so it keeps running without me. What that looks like in practice is on How I help.
Which of the four COO jobs above is still sitting on your own desk?
Related: Recruiter fees in Latvia: what you pay and what you get.
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