You know him as “Hey it’s Anthony from RevZilla!” in the online motorcycle store’s popular videos on YouTube, but Anthony Bucci is also the CEO and Co-Founder of RevZilla, and is part of the reason why the nerds are taking over the motorcycle industry.
Today, RevZilla announced the departure of Bucci as its CEO, effective on January 13, 2017. After that point in time, fellow RevZilla Co-Founder Matt Kull will take on the job as interim CEO, while RevZilla continues to look for a full-time replacement.
RevZillians shouldn’t worry too much about the leadership change though, as Bucci will continue his customer-facing activities with RevZilla, and he will also remain an integral part of RevZilla’s advisory team.
This announcement also doesn’t affect Bucci’s position on the Board of Directors for Comoto, the holding company that oversees both RevZilla and Cycle Gear.
This move though does come at an interesting time for RevZilla, which just earlier this year came together with Cycle Gear, under the Comoto holding company, that is partially owned by the RevZilla founding team and private equity firm J.W. Childs.
Talking to Bucci about his departure as leader of the ZLA Army, he said “I was looking at what we needed for the next leap forward – you know phenomenal run, proud of the foundation we’ve built, all the things we’ve done – but really looking at my playbook, the next steps, and what more we needed.”
“So, ultimately I said ‘can I have a different capacity in the business that’s still high-impact and protects the thing that we love, but also allows us to continue to scale?'”
“It’s one of those natural business life cycle types of moves. It’s been over nine years for me, so I made a personal choice, but collectively we have a good plan in place that we’re going to rock and roll with it,” explained Bucci.
That might sound like a bunch of business double-speak, but in truth this is a common stage in any startup’s life (as Bucci points out), where there is a leadership evolution that comes from the founding team being replaced by seasoned veterans.
This takes many forms, but in well-operated transitions, it usually means that the founding team is then freed up to go back and innovate within the company, and take on more hyper-focused roles and projects while “the suits” continue to count the beans and keep the gears moving.
RevZilla Co-Founder, and soon-to-be interim CEO Matthew Kull explained to us that a lot of RevZilla’s success has come from the high cadence of work that Bucci has brought to the company, and that the company will have to look carefully for his replacement.
“Anthony has been doing seven days a week for a long time, but brute force stops working at some point. So, maybe there is someone that has a different level of experience that can do this with a different level of finesse, which leaves Anthony to focus on all the pieces he is great at: strategy at the board level, the product, and on the media side. Anthony has been wearing a lot of hats for a long time.
In order to grow and keep momentum, RevZilla is seeking another high-energy leader, who can compliment the founding team, and take some of the heavy-lifting off their shoulders when it comes to running the business operations.
“We are looking for someone who has entrepreneurial blood, who gets us from a culture perspective, who understands what has made this business successful and what got it to where it is at…but also someone who is not going to come in and re-invent the wheel,” explained Kull.
“…native digital, understands enthusiasts, understands scaling a business from 200+ people,” added Bucci. “I wish I was the guy to push it all the way, but right now, it is a moment to exhale and to think about building stability for the next 50 years of this brand.”
With common ownership now with the largest brick and mortar entity in the US motorcycle space, the coming years will certainly be interesting for the RevZilla crew. It will also be interesting to see what Bucci and his team come up with next, and how RevZilla’s new leader executes that plan.
In the meantime, we are going to send-off Bucci in the only way we know how. So, here is an animated GIF of RevZilla’s fearless leader, made from random frames of a YouTube video introduction.
Source: RevZilla
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