Chief Operating Officer

MIINC Mechanical Contractors; United States; On-site; USD 350,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

MIINC Mechanical Contractors seeks a COO (Chief Operating Officer) to strengthen and scale decentralized business units. The role focuses on elevating safety performance, improving operating results, and building leadership depth without centralizing control.

Success means stronger BU operators with better decision-making, while avoiding becoming the bottleneck. The COO will oversee safety systems, asset utilization, and planning rhythms, driving growth without eroding accountability.

Qualifications

• Executive operating leadership experience in industrial and commercial settings.
• Direct P&L accountability and responsibility for multi-site operations.
• Experience overseeing field workforces and fleet/logistics.
• Strong understanding of safety systems and asset utilization.

Responsibilities

• Own safety performance across all sites and OSHA compliance.
• Own operating performance of the business units (safety, quality, customer experience, returns).
• Lead BU leadership development and succession planning.
• Develop and manage standardized operating systems with local adaptation as needed.
• Oversee asset productivity, fleet, equipment, and capital deployment.

Skills

Executive operating leadership

Direct P&L accountability

Multi-site leadership

Field asset management

Safety systems knowledge

Job description

MIINC runs on decentralized business units. BU leaders own their P&Ls, their teams, and their customers, and we intend to keep it that way as we grow. That creates a specific problem this role solves. As the company scales, decentralized units drift — toward inconsistent safety performance, incompatible systems, uneven leadership development, and capital allocation decisions made without a view of the whole. The instinctive fix is to centralize. We're not going to do that.

The COO's job is to make our business units more capable and more accountable without taking their businesses away from them. That is a harder job than running the businesses directly, and it is the job.

If in three years our BU leaders are stronger operators making better decisions with less escalation, the COO has succeeded. If the COO has become the person every decision runs through, then the COO has failed regardless of what the numbers did.

How We Work

We've chosen servant leadership as our model, and we run the company on principles in Patrick Lencioni's The Advantage: a cohesive leadership team, overcommunicated clarity, and as little politics as we can manage. Practically, that means we expect our executives to disagree openly in the room and commit fully outside it, to say the thing that's hard to say, and to treat ambiguity about who decides what as a defect to be fixed rather than leverage to be held. We take that seriously enough to hire and fire on it.

What you own

• Safety performance across every site. You are accountable for the safety of everyone working under MIINC's name, including trade partners on our sites. This is not delegable and it is not traded against schedule or margin. You own OSHA compliance, the safety management system, and the leadership behavior that determines whether the system is real.
• Operating performance of the business units. You own the aggregate operating result — safety, quality, customer experience, and returns. You do not own the individual BU P&Ls; your BU leaders do. Your accountability is that they have the systems, capital, people, coaching, and clarity to hit their numbers, and that they experience real accountability when they don't.
• Business unit leadership development and succession. People are the constraint on our growth, not work. You own the bench: identifying, developing, and where necessary replacing BU leadership, and building a pipeline deep enough that a new business unit or branch is a staffing decision rather than a search.
• Operating systems that work the same way everywhere. Field execution, preconstruction handoff, fleet and asset utilization, project controls, and the reporting that lets us see problems while they're still small. Standardized where standardization creates leverage, local where it doesn't — and you own the judgment about which is which.
• Asset productivity and capital deployment. Our returns are driven by how hard our assets work. You own fleet, equipment, and strategic asset capacity: what we buy, what we rent, what we retire, and how fully it's utilized. You bring capital requests to the CEO with a return case.
• Annual planning and the operating rhythm. You facilitate BU planning and goal-setting, and you own the cadence — the meetings, reviews, and reporting that keep [#] all business units aligned without a corporate bureaucracy in the middle. You own whether the "MIINC Way" is a real operating system or a laminated card.
• Growth capability. Standing up new business units, branches, service lines, and capabilities — including integrating acquisitions if we make them. You own whether we can grow without breaking.

What You Don't Own

This list matters as much as the one above, and we mean it.

• Finance, accounting, and treasury.
• HR systems, comp structure, and benefits.
• External strategy, ownership, and capital structure.

Where these boundaries prove wrong, we'll change them explicitly. We won't let them get renegotiated quietly.

How Success is Measured

Primary financial metric: Return on Assets. We chose ROA because our returns depend on asset productivity, not just margin.

What we're looking for

Experience

• Executive operating leadership in industrial and commercial MEP construction, mechanical contracting, or comparable self-perform field work, at or above $300M revenue
• Direct P&L accountability, not staff or functional leadership only
• Multi-site or multi-business-unit responsibility with dispersed field workforces
• Real depth in field asset management, fleet logistics, and safety systems — enough to know when a good-looking report is hiding a problem

How you work

• You've built operators. Name people who run bigger jobs now because of how you led them.
• You've been on the losing side of an executive decision and supported it anyway, visibly.
• You've removed yourself as a bottleneck on purpose and can describe how.
• You give hard feedback directly to the person and not about them to someone else.
• You're comfortable being accountable for results you don't personally control.

Who This Role isn't For

Strong operators who thrive on being the decision point. If your track record is built on personally driving results through direct control, you would likely be effective here for eighteen months and then become the problem. Similarly, if you need to be the smartest person in the room, or if you're looking for a COO title as a waypoint to a CEO seat, this isn't the right fit — and we'd rather find that out now than in year two.