Dollar General has put former CEO Todd Vasos back in the chief’s role again, with board chairman Michael Calbert calling him “the right leader to refocus the Company’s strategic direction and priorities to stabilize the business.” But research suggests that, with some notable exceptions like Steve Jobs at Apple, executives who return to a hero’s welcome to resume their old jobs don’t often pan out.
Vasos, who was Dollar General’s CEO from June 2015 to November 2022 and continued to serve on the board after, oversaw a doubling of the American variety-store chain’s market value, to approximately $58 billion, during his initial tenure.
His successor and now predecessor, Jeff Owen, failed to stop the stock’s drastic plunge over the last year.
Charted: Dollar General’s stock plunge after Todd Vasos
Todd Vasos at Dollar General, by the digits
15: Years that Vasos has been associated with Dollar General. He joined as chief merchandising officer in 2008 and was promoted to chief operating officer in 2013. Two years later, he was named CEO.
7,000: Number of stores that Dollar General added during Vasos’ seven-year CEO stint
60,000: Net new jobs added under Vasos
80%: Increase in annual sales revenue under Vasos
A non-exhaustive list of Boomerang CEOs
📱 An ailing Apple brought co-founder Steve Jobs back a decade after his 1985 ousting for locking horns with then-CEO John Sculley and the board. Jobs turned the company around, flattening the corporate structure and releasing sough-after tech like the towerless iMac, the popular iPhone, and the iPad before his 2011 death.
🥤 Howard Schultz was in the CEO role three times at Starbucks, where he built a corporate success story and later orchestrated a rebound for the brand.
🎞 Disney brought back Bob Iger last year, giving the stock an immediate boost. But nearly a year on, the company’s streaming and revenue woes haven’t abated entirely. During the writers and actors strikes, his reputation has taken a hit for not championing a liveable wage, among other things.
One more thing: Not all boomerang CEOs are successful
Leaders like Jobs and Schulz are exceptions to the rule, experts warn. At several companies such as Procter & Gamble, Dell, Yahoo, and Enron, bringing back a prior CEO did not serve as the fix the companies hoped for. Typically, returns for investors tend to suffer.
“[O]ur data indicate that boomerang CEOs significantly underperform their counterparts suggesting that what may appear to be a smart choice in precept (i.e., bring back prior CEO) may be a poor choice in practice,” suggests a study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review comparing the tenures of boomerang CEOs and new CEOs at listed companies between 1992 and 2017.