When Is the Right Time to Hire a CEO or COO in a Deep Tech Scaling Business?
Most people expect the answer to be tied to a revenue milestone, funding round, or team size. In reality, it usually has far more to do with operational complexity than company size.
One of the simplest ways to think about this is:
Fleur Clough, Sprout People, Principal Consultant | Executive Recruitment SpecialistYou hire leadership when your ability to deliver starts to exceed the capability of the current team structure.
We see this a lot in deep tech businesses building physical products, pilot plants, advanced manufacturing capability, or demonstration-scale technology. There’s often a moment where the organisation fundamentally changes.
What got the business to this stage is not necessarily what will scale it.
The Early Stage: Science, Technology, and Survival
Early-stage deep tech businesses are often heavily founder-led. One person may be raising capital in the morning, speaking to customers in the afternoon, and helping solve technical problems at night. In many cases, the founder is effectively acting as both CEO and CTO.
At this stage, the focus is usually clear:
Can the technology work?
Can we prove the concept?
Can we survive long enough to get to the next milestone?
That structure often works well while the business is still primarily R&D-focused. Eventually though the company moves beyond proving the science and needs to evolve.
The Shift: From Demonstration to Delivery
The pressure changes when prototypes become products, or when one pilot plant becomes several or when customers, investors, and partners begin expecting repeatable commercial delivery instead of technical progress alone.
This is usually where a gap starts to emerge between advancing the technology and operationally scaling the business.
The CTO role starts to shift
In the early stages, it’s common for technical founders or CTOs to effectively act as both the technical and operational leader of the business. When the company is heavily R&D-focused, that often works well because the operational complexity simply isn’t there yet.
But as the business grows, the nature of the work changes.
Suddenly there are manufacturing timelines, supply chain pressures, quality systems, customer delivery expectations, operational planning, hiring, investor reporting, and multiple functions that all need coordinating at the same time.
At that point, the role naturally starts to split between advancing the science and scaling operational delivery.
The CEO role changes too
Less time is spent directly driving the technology, and more time is spent building leadership capability, coordinating execution across functions, managing investors and stakeholders, expanding into markets, and creating an organisation that can scale sustainably.
This is usually when founders and boards begin asking difficult but important questions:
Does the CTO still own operations?
Who is responsible for scaling delivery?
Do we need a different CEO profile for the next stage?
Who builds the operational engine behind the technology?
Importantly, this doesn’t mean the existing leadership team is failing. The organisation has just become more complex than the current structure can sustainably support. This is when a COO becomes critical.
What Deep Tech Businesses Should Look For in a COO or Scaling CEO
A COO in deep tech is rarely just a generic operator. The role depends heavily on the commercial model, manufacturing strategy, and how the business plans to scale.
If manufacturing is outsourced, the COO may be more focused on integration and coordination across supply chain, manufacturing partners, quality, and delivery.
If manufacturing is in-house, the role often becomes far more operationally intensive. The business may require experience across factory operations, procurement, logistics, systems, production scaling, and multi-site manufacturing environments.
Fleur Clough, Sprout People, Principal Consultant | Executive Recruitment SpecialistOne of the biggest mistakes scaling deep tech companies make is hiring for the business they are today instead of the business they are trying to become.
The better question is: Can this person grow with where we are heading?
Even if manufacturing is currently happening in New Zealand, founders and boards should still be thinking ahead:
Can this person scale internationally?
Have they managed larger operational complexity before?
Can they build systems before they become urgent?
Have they seen this transition before?
Sometimes businesses don’t yet have the budget to hire the perfect long-term leader. But getting clear on the future structure first is still far better than rushing into a hire that creates bigger problems later.
Planning When To Hire
The right time to hire a CEO, COO, or strengthen the leadership team is usually before the business feels fully ready.
Not when everything is already breaking, but when the signs of operational strain are starting to appear:
delivery complexity increasing
decision making slowing down
founders becoming stretched across too many functions
operational pressure pulling technical leaders away from innovation
or growth starting to outpace the systems and leadership capability underneath it
The best deep tech businesses don’t just plan for the next funding round, product launch, or manufacturing milestone. They build leadership capability ahead of it.
Because ultimately, scaling a deep tech company is not just about proving the technology can work. It’s about building an organisation capable of delivering it repeatedly, sustainably, and at scale.
At Sprout People, this is the work we love doing helping founders, investors, and boards think ahead, design leadership structures for scale, and find the people needed for the next phase of growth.
