How Much Does Hiring a Full-Time COO Cost vs. Fractional COO?

Companies looking to hire an operations leader within the next year have to weigh the cost differences between hiring a full-time COO vs fractional COO.

Hiring a full-time COO, if you go the route of an executive search firm, can cost you upwards of $40,000.

Additionally, the process will take six to nine months. This will take a lot of your time and resources and so the actual hiring cost is far more than the above figure.

Regardless of salary, hiring a fractional COO can be free through Shiny. We don’t charge companies anything for finding and hiring someone fractional through us. As well, we’ve already taken care of the vetting so you can be sure that every COO you speak with via Shiny is pre-vetted and then matched to you specifically.

This means you can either pay $40k or more to hire a full-time COO, or you can hire a fractional COO for free. But this was just the hiring part; let’s now look at the salary estimate.

According to Glassdoor, the average base salary for a COO is $158,826 per year, with an additional cash compensation (commission, bonus, stock options, etc.) of $35,615.

That means, to hire a full-time COO, you have to pay them around $200,000 per year, and you should expect to pay $250k+ for a very experienced COO.

Let’s now look at how much the cost will be when bringing a fractional COO onboard.

If you’re using Shiny to hire a COO fractionally, you could fill the position in 1 to 2 weeks. Our fractional COOs typically charge anywhere in the range of $100 and $250 per hour (the average being $150 per hour).

Let’s say you hire a fractional COO for 20 hours per week. In this case, the monthly payment comes out to be $12,000, which makes it $144,000 per year. That’s $56,000 less than a full-time COO’s salary. Combine that with the savings of using Shiny and that’s enough to bring in an Operations Manager full-time!