Cover of The Second-in-Command Advantage: How a Great COO Lets Founders Scale Without Burning Out | Derek Fredrickson

The Second-in-Command Advantage: How a Great COO Lets Founders Scale Without Burning Out | Derek Fredrickson

The Second-in-Command Advantage: How a Great COO Lets Founders Scale Without Burning Out | Derek Fredrickson

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In this episode of Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom, Kim Miller-Hershon sits down with Derek Fredrickson, founder and CEO of The COO Solution. With over 16 years as a second in command and COO, Derek helps seven and eight figure business owners streamline operations, build high-performing teams, and scale sustainably without burning out. He leads a team of 15 fractional COOs serving companies across many industries. He also happens to be a New England boy who has called Paris home for the past 10 years, a move that he admits makes no sense on paper yet turned out to be exactly right.That Paris story is more than a personal footnote. Derek went virtual with his team back in 2015, a full year before the move and years before "pivot to online" became a pandemic cliché. Living six hours ahead of his US clients forced him to build operations, systems, and communication habits that most businesses only scrambled toward much later. He was, in his own words, ahead of the curve, and the discipline it demanded shaped how he runs everything today.The conventional wisdom Derek followed early on was that his lane was set. He studied business, worked on Wall Street for big investment banks, and believed the corporate ladder was simply what you were supposed to climb. Watching his wife, a business coach, come home lit up by the impact she was having, he realized the corporate track was feeding his bank account but not his sense of mission or purpose. So he took the leap into entrepreneurship, not overnight but after a year of reflection, even with a new house and a third child on the way. He is careful to frame it as his journey rather than a prescription, but for him the pull toward something more meaningful was undeniable.Derek's core leadership insight is that growth requires separating your ego from the engagement. In his early days running The COO Solution, he felt he needed to be in every room, in every client meeting, personally part of every solution. He came to see that instinct as his own old mindset left over from his days as an individual fractional COO. Clients now hire the results, the methodology, and the roster of brilliant COOs he has assembled, not Derek personally. The more he inserted himself, the less room his COOs had to do their best work. Learning to feed his own need for significance without being in the room was, he says, night and day from where he started.That led him to a contrarian belief: business owners are not meant to run their own businesses. Most founders, he argues, build something where the tail wags the dog, slowly becoming the operator of a company they started out of passion. The identity shift from operator to owner frees them to be the rainmaker, the visionary, the relationship builder, which is how companies grow exponentially. You cannot scale, he says, when the founder is still stuck in all the day-to-day.Asked where he still wrestles behind the scenes, Derek is refreshingly candid. His biggest current challenge is a scaling problem he has not solved. His 15 COOs are exceptional, and many of them also serve clients outside his firm, which he genuinely applauds. The rub is consistency. If every COO does the work their own way, the model is not uniform and not scalable, because you cannot scale complexity, only simplicity. Yet clamp down with rigid guardrails and the best COOs feel reduced to project managers. He is still searching for the balance between a shared methodology and enough room for talented people to flex, and he is honest that it remains a work in progress.This episode explores:Why going virtual in 2015 put Derek years ahead of the remote-work curveMoving a New England family to Paris for one year that became tenWhy the contrarian truth is that business owners are not meant to run their own businessesThe identity shift from operator to owner, and why it is the key to exponential growthThe real, unsolved challenge of scaling a team of brilliant, independent COOsWhy you can scale simplicity but never complexityOvercoming the belief that you are "not a salesperson"Reframing selling as providing an opportunity, not applying pressureWhy people love to buy even when they resist being soldQuieting the imposter voice by selling the collective, not yourselfHow better questions often matter more than direct experienceWhy the fundamentals of leadership stay the same no matter the revenueThere is something quietly instructive in how Derek holds success and uncertainty at the same time. He has built a scalable firm, moved his life across an ocean, and conquered a fear of selling, yet he speaks openly about the problem he has not cracked and the voice that still whispers doubt. That honesty is the point. Growth, for him, is less about arriving and more about continually separating what is truly yours to own from what is not, in business and in life.Connect with me here:Website: https://www.kimmillerhershon.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/...
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