Looking at dozens of companies, from fast-growing scale-ups to established multinationals, many are doing impressive things: expanding markets, launching products, delivering strong financial results. But as I dug into their structures, I noticed something.
A surprising number don’t have a COO.
About half of Fortune 500 companies operate without one. The percentage has fluctuated over the years, from 48% in 2000 down to 36% in 2014, back up to 40% by 2022, but the pattern is clear: many large, successful organisations don’t think they need someone accountable for firm-wide operations.
Small companies often manage without dedicated operational leadership. Large ones sometimes assume they don’t need it because the business is performing. Both underestimate what’s being left on the table.
The irony is that when operations works well, no one notices it. Systems run smoothly. Handoffs happen cleanly. Information flows where it needs to go. So leadership assumes it’s happening by itself.
It isn’t.
The cost is measurable. Research shows that 20% to 30% of operational expenditure is lost each year to rework, miscommunication, fragmented systems, and misaligned processes. Over half of businesses struggle with process inefficiencies that drain productivity and profitability.
I’ve seen this at global enterprises operating across the world. Profitable, established businesses with decades of success. But without someone accountable for firm-wide operations, the friction compounds:
➡️ Functions optimising in isolation, creating bottlenecks elsewhere
➡️ The same problems solved differently across regions or business units
➡️ Tribal knowledge instead of documented systems
➡️ Heroic efforts instead of reliable processes
➡️ Risk and compliance gaps that only surface under stress
The business grows. Revenue increases. But so does the waste, the missed opportunities, the operational drag that no one quite owns.
I know operations feels like an expense. It’s not revenue-generating. It’s hard to measure its impact because good operations are invisible. But that 20% to 30% of operational cost being lost to inefficiency? That’s the return on investment sitting right there. And it’s not just about preventing waste. Well-designed operations accelerate revenue growth by removing friction from sales and delivery, increase profitability by eliminating redundancy and rework, and enable the business to seize opportunities faster because decisions and execution aren’t bottlenecked.
The larger and more complex you scale, the more you need someone whose job is to make the operating system work as a whole. Not just fixing what breaks, but designing the infrastructure that prevents it from breaking in the first place.
If things feel harder than they should, even when the business is performing well, this might be why.