I have a completely different take on this. Before that, a bit of a background about me. I am the cofounder of one of the leading fashion ecommerce companies. I started and have scaled the venture to over 150 employees with multi-million dollar revenues. Before this, I worked with a large company for over 10 years.
Before you think about taking your hands off of internally running a tight organization and bringing someone to do it(be it a COO or a CEO or a MD, you should really think of implementing a very strong performance management framework. I have learnt this the hard way when I had to scale from 25 people to over 100 people in under a couple of months. Culture, performance and goals went haywire.
Give it a thought, your 31st employee that you hire will not have the same passion as you. For him its just about being in a job and taking home a secure salary.
You need to build a robust framework for performance monitoring in real time which also accommodates a way to keep people motivated and aligned with your goals. You also need to have some kind of a structure where compensation is linked to performance.
I implemented OKR in our organization. This is what is used in Google, LInkedin, Intel ect. Its very strong and robust. I tweaked it a lot to make a solid framework that is also very simple.
Once you have this in place, you could look at hiring a COO and you can start focusing outside for either bringing in investments or looking after distribution and alliances.
Your COO and your framework will ensure that the organization is aligned with your and your board's goals. and will be able to deliver results and at the same time, you will have a performance oriented culture in the company.
Hope I have been able to articulate my thoughts clearly. Please feel free to revert to me if you need any inputs on this. I would be happy to help you in actually implementing and monitoring this.
Regards
Vivek
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