Chief Operating Officer Search (COO)

The husband and wife founding team of a self-funded accounting SaaS company engaged N2Growth to find its next Chief Operating Officer. The ultimate goal of this search was to have the placed COO later become the Chief Executive Officer of the business as the Co-founders worked to remove themselves from the day to day operations over a one to two year period. The Co-founders were specifically looking for someone with a strong operations background, SaaS expertise, and a leader that could grow their business from $20m in revenue to $50m in a three-year time frame.

Our client, an accounting SaaS start-up with a mission to help accountants raise their value and relevance, required the addition of a COO. The Co-founders had self-funded the business after a previous successful exit, and they had built a second technology company with $20m in revenue and a 30% profit margin. Given the company’s current position in the market, they needed a COO who would be able to come in and help grow the business 2.5x in three years. In working to find the client’s COO, N2Growth played a pivotal role as advisors to identify the best leader to grow the company, fit the company culture and lead the Co-founder’s second company towards another successful exit.

By heavily investing time, energy, and resources at the beginning of the search, and by gaining clear insight into what our client was looking for in a COO, our team was able to recruit the candidate that would ultimately get the position in the first three weeks of the search. The candidate that was later hired was part of the search team’s first group of new candidates introduced to the client. The client is headquartered in the greater New York City Metro area, and the search was conducted during the spring of 2020 when NYC was the epicenter of the country’s Covid-19 pandemic. The N2Growth team worked in partnership with the clients to determine the safest and most effective interview process to achieve an outcome that resulted in the execution of an employment agreement with a candidate introduced to our client in the first round.