Clay Collins' transition from co-founder and CEO to chairman of the boardof the fast-growing Minneapolis company Leadpages could not have been managed any better.
The blog post Collins wrote explaining it all was flawless as he described how he was a good CEO up through $20 million in annual revenue. The company has already shot well past that.
The effective date of the handoff to Chief Operating Officer John Tedesco was Tuesday, but as a practical matter the transition was already well underway. Tedesco had been leading the executive meetings and already had most of the organization reporting to him.
It's worth noting, though, that a carefully planned transition like this isn't an event but a process and one that could still slip the rails. A lot depends now on how co-founder Collins chooses to spend his time as board chairman of the marketing technology company. Hopefully he spends a lot of it out of the office.
The challenge of how to best lead a young company as it matures into a valuable business has spawned a lot of books, blog posts and articles, but the lesson that best applies to a situation like this is hardly a new thought. It's been around at least since "The Canterbury Tales" of Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop."
The primary challenge for founders who step aside as the boss is that they usually don't simply disappear, as would be common when a CEO steps aside at a large company.
More than six out of 10 founder CEOs of technology start-ups who get forced out by their own boards remained involved in the business. In three quarters of situations where a founder steps aside as CEO voluntarily, the former CEO actually remains a part of the executive team.
These observations come from author and professor Noam Wasserman, now with the University of Southern California. Yet from his book, "The Founder's Dilemmas," it's not completely clear how all the former founder CEOs actually keep their days filled with productive work.