Can I trust a COO who also owns accountancy firms?

The fear, named plainly

It’s a fair question and worth asking out loud: if my fractional COO also owns accountancy firms, am I letting a competitor look inside my business? You’ll be sharing how you price, who your best clients are, how your team is structured and where you’re weak. The worry that any of that could be used against you — or that your people or clients might be approached — is legitimate. The answer isn’t reassurance; it’s a relationship built so the risk can’t materialise.

What confidentiality actually looks like

Confidentiality shouldn’t rest on goodwill. It should be written down and enforceable before any work begins:

• A signed NDA covering everything you share — client lists, pricing, financials, systems and strategy — with obligations that continue after the engagement ends.
• Information barriers so your data stays inside your engagement. It isn’t pooled, benchmarked by name against other firms, or carried into anyone else’s practice. What’s learned in your firm is used for your firm.
• Named-firm exclusion where it matters. If you compete directly for the same clients in the same patch, that can be dealt with plainly — scope, geography, or an explicit carve-out — so there’s no grey area.

None of this is exotic. It’s the same discipline your own firm applies to client confidentiality every day, pointed back at the person you’re engaging.

No poaching — of your clients or your staff

This is usually the sharper worry, so it deserves a direct commitment rather than a soft one. A fractional COO engagement should include an explicit non-solicitation undertaking: your clients are yours, your team is yours, and neither will be approached during the engagement or for an agreed period afterwards. Put it in the contract, not just the conversation.

It’s worth being clear about incentives, too. An operator who runs their own firms doesn’t need your clients — they have their own pipeline — and their reputation depends entirely on being trusted inside other people’s practices. One whisper of poaching would end that work permanently. The commercial incentive to behave well is far stronger than any short-term gain from behaving badly.

Why an owner-operator beats a generic consultant here

The instinct is that an outsider with no other firms is “safer”. In practice the opposite is often true, because the risk with a generic consultant isn’t confidentiality — it’s relevance. Someone who has actually run an accountancy firm brings things a career consultant can’t:

• They’ve lived the year-end crush, the WIP that won’t bill, the review bottleneck and the key person who’s off sick in January — and they’ve had to fix it with real money and real people on the line.
• They know what a compliance job actually costs to deliver, why advisory stalls, and which software promises never survive contact with a real team.
• They’ve made the mistakes already, in their own practice, which is a far cheaper place for you to learn from them than yours.

That lived experience is exactly why this model works: the person improving your operations has solved the same problems in their own firm, not read about them. It’s the difference set out in fractional COO vs management consultant — ongoing operator versus one-off adviser — and it’s the core of what a fractional COO is for.

The risk worth watching — and the one that’s overblown

It helps to separate two very different risks, because they tend to get muddled. The overblown one is that your operator quietly builds a file on your firm and uses it to compete. In a small profession where everyone talks, that behaviour is career-ending — and it’s guarded against by the NDA and non-solicitation clause in any case. The risk actually worth watching is subtler: an operator so wedded to how their own firm runs that they try to bolt their template onto yours. Good practice travels between firms; specific answers rarely do. The safeguard is to insist the work starts from your firm’s reality — your clients, your team, your systems, your constraints — rather than from a playbook lifted wholesale from somewhere else. A good operator will already work that way, because they know their own firm is a source of judgement, not a set of answers to copy across.

How to satisfy yourself before you start

Don’t take any of this on trust. Test it. Before you engage anyone in this position, ask — and expect straight answers:

• Will you sign my NDA and a non-solicitation clause covering both clients and staff, with obligations that survive the engagement?
• How do you keep what you learn in my firm separate from your own practices and your other clients?
• Do we compete for the same clients in the same area, and if so, how do you want to handle it?
• Can you point to other firms you’ve worked inside who’ll tell me, candidly, whether their information and their people were respected?

A trustworthy operator will welcome those questions and answer them without hedging — because a well-defined relationship protects them as much as it protects you. If the answers are vague, that tells you what you need to know. If they’re clear and documented, the conflict you were worried about turns into the very thing that makes the engagement valuable.