That's COO

If you ever find yourself in need of a reminder that you don’t have to have everything figured out at the beginning in order to be successful, you can look no further than the career of Mitch Sanders, COO at Thread.

Mitch’s time at Thread started in 2018, when they had just passed the $1 million mark in revenue and were looking for some help with customer service.

“Little by little Colby, the CEO, started handing off different tasks to me… Really just like early stage startup stuff, everybody doing a little bit of everything. And then a couple months later Colby came to me and started talking about operations. I had no idea what that even entailed. He was like hey, do you want to be our COO? I don’t know where he got that idea from, but I quickly did a Google search of, okay, what does a COO do? And I said, alright, well, let’s give it a shot. Let’s try.”

That was six years ago and since then the company has grown to $20 million in revenue while increasing the size of the product line and establishing multiple distribution channels, so it seems safe to say that things worked out pretty well.

One of the things that stood out to me in talking with Mitch was his ongoing willingness to challenge himself with the unknown, confident in his ability to learn new things and rise to the occasion. At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside.

Internally, just like any other humble, intelligent person, Mitch has continually been questioning whether his own abilities and knowledge were sufficient. When I asked him about how it has been to journey from operations neophyte to proficient COO in a relatively short amount of time, his answer was pretty simple.

“I mean, a lot of feeling like an imposter. Especially the beginning. I remember going to meetings with 3 PLs… Pulling up and being like ‘These guys are gonna see right through me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.’”

So again, an important reminder that what looks like a meteoric rise from the outside is actually rife with self doubt on the inside. As to how he overcame some of the doubt, there were two main factors that helped.

“Definitely the business succeeding has been helpful. I’ve also learned a lot from mentors and that’s been really helpful.”

This is a recurrent theme in most conversations I have with people who’ve achieved a lot, especially in a space that was new to them. Almost nothing can accelerate growth more than the willingness to reach out to ask questions of people who’ve been there before.

Of course, it’s not that they can give you all of the answers you need, because those are going to be specific to your own situation.

“Even with talking to others, you know… There’s not like one way to do it. That’s sort of what I’ve learned. I remember going to Google all those years ago when I first heard what a COO was and, even then it was never clear what a COO does. It was like, ‘Well, some do this, some do that, some don’t do that, sometimes the CFO does that.’”

As it happens, I’d had a pretty similar experience some years back and it turns out we had both landed (along with probably most other people who conduct this search) on an influential article in the Harvard Business Review titled Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer that outlines seven COO archetypes. I think we both agree that the article captures a lot of valuable insights but, in many ways, there are actually as many types of COOs as there are companies with COOs.

As is the cast for any COO, Mitch’s job is largely shaped by his relationship with the CEO. “It’s him setting company direction most of the time and then it’s my job to go out and help execute it.”

As for the details of how that works, Mitch paints a picture that would likely be familiar to most COOs. “Colby is very much a visionary. ‘Hey, I want to do all these different things. This is where the business is going to be in 5 years.’ And then I’m like ‘Okay, wait, wait, wait, let’s go one step at a time. Map this out for me. How are we going to get there? Okay, have you thought about that…’ His job is to set the vision and then I’ll build the road.”

It seems to me that another one of the key contributors to Mitch’s success is his flexibility and his willingness to embrace uncertainty. “It’s always messy, that realization has helped. There’s no one right way. It’s all based on the situation and what the company needs… Nobody’s got a crystal ball, we’re all just figuring it out. We’re always going to be wrong, but how do we be wrong less?”

As far as the hardest part about Mitch’s job, his answer will also sound familiar to most operations professionals. “It can be a little bit thankless. You don’t get attention until things are going wrong… When 95% of the time things go smoothly and you only hear about the 5%, sometimes that can weigh on you.”

The flipside of all that accountability, though, is the satisfaction that comes from being elbows deep in the moving parts of the business. “What I do like about operations is it’s really easy to tell if I’m doing my job well… If we’re landing our product at the right price at the right time and we’re getting it into our customers hands on time, that’s successful.”