What I Would Do – Providing COO-as-a-Service

Supporting Startups with COO Services

Startups often grow faster than their internal systems can handle. Whilst reflecting on this, I considered my own position: I want to engage with growing startups and scaleups, bringing 20+ years of experience in business process development. My aim is to provide COO-as-a-Service. Flexible, experienced support that helps founders scale with confidence.

Helping Businesses Find Their Flow

If I stepped into your business, the first thing I would do is help you find flow. Growth doesn’t usually stall because of a lack of ideas—it slows down when processes and agreements aren’t baked in. My role would be to create clarity without adding unnecessary complexity, so your team can move faster with less friction.

Seeing Processes as Agreements

I see processes not as rigid rules, but as agreements: how decisions get made, how teams collaborate, and how priorities move forward. When these agreements are clear, scaling becomes smoother and more sustainable.

Coaching Instead of Telling

Whether I’m working as a partner providing COO-as-a-Service, or more deeply integrated as a Founder COO, I don’t arrive with a fixed playbook. Instead, I act as a leadership coach, helping leaders and teams evolve agreements that fit their culture. This ensures that the practices we create are owned, lived, and sustainable.

Decoupled Domains for Startup Growth

As companies grow, I believe they benefit from evolving into three decoupled domains:

• Business (strategy, finance, partnerships)
• Product (customer value, features, roadmaps)
• Development (engineering, delivery, quality)

These domains form the backbone of the company, enabling supporting functions like Sales and Marketing to perform at their best. When they are decoupled but aligned, each domain can grow without holding the others back.

Why Decoupled Domains Are Essential

Startups often begin with a single “pipe,” where business and development are tightly coupled. In this early stage, the product is built directly alongside sales conversations or with customers already committed to future purchases. This works well at the beginning, it’s fast, direct, and keeps everyone close to the customer.

But as the company evolves, this single pipe creates bottlenecks and queues. Knowledge flow gets blocked, and the lack of systematic processes means urgent needs start driving decisions. Over time, the company can slip into a debilitating spiral where reactivity replaces strategy.

The good news is that this can be avoided. By adopting systemic thinking and intentionally decoupling the domains -> Business, Product, and Development. With strategic intent, startups can preserve flow, reduce friction, and build a structure that scales without stalling.

Building Trust and Movement

The real power of COO services is not only efficiency, it’s trust. Customers buy from companies that stand for something and deliver consistently. By aligning agreements and enabling flow, a business builds credibility and can even spark a movement. Customers don’t just buy products; they believe in the company behind them.

Turning Vision Into Action

This is what I would do, whether as your COO-as-a-Service partner or as a full-time Founder COO: translate vision into agreements, embed them into daily practice, and free up energy so your business grows with less friction and more flow.