Going Back After Selling a Business: Schultz Returned

Going back after selling a business is not a plan. It is a signal — that the sale settled the question of ownership and left the harder one open: what the days are for. A return can still be the right call for the company. It only works for the person when its ending is named before the chair is taken, and most returns never name one.

In February 2007, a memo written to the senior leadership of Starbucks leaked to the press under the title "The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience."¹ Its author had not held the chief executive's job for nearly seven years.² He held the chairman's title only — his role styled as chief global strategist had ended February 2005³ — and from that distance Howard Schultz wrote in granular detail about automatic espresso machines that hid the barista from the customer, sealed packaging that had cost the stores their smell of coffee, and store designs that had stopped feeling like neighborhood rooms. Eleven months later he was chief executive again.⁴ Fourteen years after that, he was chief executive again.

The chairman's title was supposed to settle it

Schultz did not start Starbucks. Three partners founded it in Seattle in 1971 as a seller of roasted beans.⁵ He joined in 1982,² travelled to Milan the following year² and came home convinced that the espresso bar, not the bean counter, was the real business, failed to persuade the owners, left to build his own chain, and in 1987 raised the money to buy the Starbucks name and assets — a price he has put at roughly $3.8 million⁶ — and merged the two. The company that listed publicly in 1992⁷ is the one built from that purchase.

By 2000 he had been running it, in one form or another, for thirteen years.⁸ He handed the chief executive's job to Orin Smith, a long-serving lieutenant,⁹ and kept the chairman's seat. He said he would travel more and work on the partnerships that could carry the brand into new countries and into grocery aisles. The announcement was about the business. The structure was about him. He had resigned the hardest job and kept the two things that make a return easy: a title with no end date, and a standing reason to stay inside the argument.

That arrangement is ordinary, which is precisely why it catches owners who would never compare themselves to the head of a global chain. It offers continuity to employees and reassurance to buyers or investors. It preserves a desk, a title, a seat at the table. And it allows a founder to tell a spouse, a board, and himself that he has stepped back without ever deciding what stepping back means. A chairman attends meetings, offers counsel, is consulted on the large questions. He does not have to decide what to do with a Tuesday morning.

Owners who have sold outright do not have the chairman's option in that form, but they build something close to it from whatever is left. The consulting agreement. The board seat the acquirer offered to smooth the transition. The earnout — the slice of the price paid only if the business hits agreed targets after closing — that keeps one eye permanently on the old numbers. The habit of ringing former colleagues to ask how things are going. Each serves the function the chairmanship served: it preserves the feeling of connection while deferring the decision about what the days are for.

And each produces the same discomfort in time. A chairman who can write that memo has not departed; he has been keeping score from a seat that was supposed to be strategic. Diagnosis without authority is an uncomfortable position. The memo was the diagnosis. The return was the treatment, and it was also an admission that seven years of a carefully designed title had never answered the question it was built to avoid.

A repair with a mandate and no last day

Schultz took the chief executive's chair back in January 2008,⁴ and a sceptical reader will raise the obvious objection immediately. Sometimes the founder is the scarce asset. Sometimes going back is the correct decision for the business, and calling every return a failure of planning is a luxury available only to people nobody asked.

The objection is right about the company. The 2008 return was a serious operating decision, not a mood. Within weeks, some 7,100 company-operated stores across the United States closed for three hours on a single evening so that baristas could be retrained on pulling espresso.¹⁰ Hundreds of underperforming locations were shut, the pace of domestic openings slowed, the food reworked, and the company reoriented toward the store experience rather than the store count. The crisis arrived almost immediately afterward and the company came through it. A board that recalls a still-involved builder to repair a break he has already described in writing is using the person most likely to know which details matter. (None of this is a view on the company's shares, then or now; it is a story about a person and a title.)

But "right for the company" and "a plan for the person" are two different findings, and conflating them is the central error founders make when the pull arrives. The 2008 return named a problem and granted authority. It did not name the date the seat would be given back. It ran a little over nine years.¹¹ A repair with a mandate and no ending stops being a repair and becomes a life again — which is fine, if that was the decision, and disorienting if it was simply what happened.

The mechanism is not particular to coffee. For the years of building, a founder's days are structured from outside. The calendar fills itself. Problems arrive with deadlines attached. Decisions produce consequences that show up in the payroll, the store, the week. Identity, meaning and schedule are all borrowed from the enterprise, and the borrowing is invisible because it never stops. A sale, or even a clean resignation, sends that architecture out of the door with the company. What remains is time, capital, and a person who has not had to answer an unstructured morning in a very long while — the predicament this publication has described as the Friday deadline test.

The pull to return is the old architecture calling. It is strongest when the business visibly needs help, because need supplies the most respectable reason available. But it is present even when the business is fine; it simply struggles to find a form that can be said out loud. Sellers describe it as reading the acquirer's press releases too closely, feeling a flare of possessiveness when a former customer complains, or sketching a competing product on the back of something. None of that is a plan. All of it is the same signal.

Two departures, two titles, and neither one held

If 2008 were the whole story, the charitable reading would stand: a founder stepped back too early, the company stumbled, he fixed it, and then left for good knowing where the line was. That is not what happened.

Schultz handed the chief executive's job to Kevin Johnson in 2017 and took the title of executive chairman.¹¹ The following year he left the company altogether, with an honorary chairman emeritus title¹² and a public farewell. He had a decade more experience than in 2000, a documented turnaround to his name, and every reason to believe this departure was the real one. What followed was a conspicuous search for a role large enough to replace the one he had left, including a public exploration of an independent run for the presidency.¹³

Then, in 2022, with Johnson retiring, the board asked him back a third time as interim chief executive.¹⁴ The context was not romance about aroma: it was a unionization push across U.S. stores, a changed post-pandemic store model, and a succession gap. He held the seat for about a year,¹⁵ oversaw the selection of a successor, handed over, and left the board later that year. The chair has changed hands again since.

On its face the third return behaves better than the second. It carried the word interim, a named problem, and an ending. But look at what the ending did not include. Even that final exit preserved an honorary title and a standing connection to the room. Three times he had held the chief executive's chair. Twice he had converted a departure into a chairmanship. A single return can be explained by circumstance. A pattern of returns is a statement about the person rather than the circumstances: the question of what the days were for had not been answered, and no title was ever going to answer it.

What changes when someone else owns the door

Schultz could be recalled because he had never closed ownership the way a seller does. Public shareholders held most of the company; he held a meaningful stake, a board seat for long stretches, and standing with an institution that made a recall thinkable. The door was partly his.

People who have actually sold do not have that door. Cash has changed hands. Someone else appoints the chief executive. A noncompete, often running several years, may forbid the obvious substitute of starting the same kind of company next door and calling it a fresh chapter, as Ross Perot's long wait after Electronic Data Systems illustrates. Patience under a contract is not the same thing as a purpose, but it is at least a recognition that the old vehicle is gone.

This closed door is usually mourned. It is better understood as a clarifying constraint, because the pull then has to find an outlet that cannot hide behind the company's need. Two outlets are common. The first is hovering: the earnout period, the consulting retainer, the former staff who still call. This is the chairman's role reconstructed from scraps, carrying the identical defect — opinion without authority — in a smaller space. Sellers frequently describe the earnout window as the unhappiest stretch of their working lives, and the reason is rarely the money.

The second is buying another operating business, often adjacent to the old one. That can be a genuine plan and for many founders the right one. But a decision to buy and a reflex to buy are different acts wearing the same clothes. The decision asks whether the next decade should be spent running something. The reflex asks only how quickly the mornings can be filled again.

Michael Dell's record is the useful contrast here, because it runs the other way. He stepped out of the chief executive's job at the company he founded in 2004 and stayed on as chairman¹⁶ — the same structure, a resignation that keeps the key. He returned as chief executive in 2007.¹⁶ He did not then sell and leave; in 2013 he led a buyout of the public shareholders, announced at roughly $24 billion, and took the company private.¹⁷ His return moved ownership toward him. It is the inverse of going back after a sale, and reading it as encouragement to buy back a sold company confuses a takeover with a homecoming. The business repurchased is never the business that was sold. Time has moved, the people have moved, and the check does not buy back the old mornings.

Duty with a date

The sharpest objection is not about founders who hover. It is about founders who are genuinely asked. If a buyer requests help and the business is visibly slipping, is refusal a kind of negligence toward a brand that other people now depend on?

Sometimes it is. Vicky Tsai's case is the closest match to the question, because there was an actual sale. She founded the skincare company Tatcha, stepped down as chief executive in 2018 at her investors' request,¹⁸ and watched Unilever buy the brand the following year.¹⁸ In early 2021 the buyer asked her back:¹⁹ the numbers had gone the wrong way, people she cared about were exposed, and she has described the return as a duty rather than a choice. That version of the pull should not be sneered at. A founder who understands the product, the suppliers and the customer better than the new owners may be the only person who can stop a slide, and staying pure while others clean up a mess one helped create is its own kind of vanity.

What distinguishes her return is its shape. She came back to stabilize the business and find a successor. A new chief executive was named within the year.¹⁸ She stepped out of the chair, stayed near the product and the brand, and let the return end. It had a buyer's request, a deterioration anyone could measure, and a conclusion she allowed to arrive.

That is what going back looks like when it is a job. It is not what it looks like when it is asked to serve as a plan for the decades after a sale. Duty ends. An identity does not, unless someone ends it deliberately.

Naming the ending before taking the chair

The portable test is short enough to apply in a single conversation. What exactly is broken, in terms someone else can verify? Who decides when it is fixed? And on what date does the seat go back, written down, before the chair is taken? A return that can answer all three is a job, and a job is an honorable thing to accept. A return that can only answer the first is the old architecture, wearing a business case.

The same test earns its keep well beyond a literal return, which is why it matters to owners who will never be asked back. The roles founders build after an exit — a board seat, a foundation, a family's investment committee, the standing weekly meeting with an advisor — can quietly become replacements for the company rather than things chosen on their merits. A role with a mandate and a date is a commitment. A role with a mandate and no date is a place to keep the calendar full, and it will be defended as though it were strategy.

None of this makes the harder work unnecessary. It only names it honestly. The sale settles ownership; it does not assign the days, and nothing about the size of the proceeds assigns them either. Schultz had standing, capital, and a succession of titles designed to answer the question, and the question went on being open for more than two decades. For owners in that position, the useful reading of the pull to go back is diagnostic rather than directive: it is reliable evidence that the identity work has not been done, and no amount of competence at running the old business substitutes for doing it.