The Best CEO Succession Is So Boring Nobody Notices It
Most CEO handovers are corporate theatre wrapped around panic. Zevia’s transition ends today without the usual circus — and that is exactly the point.
Most CEO handovers are corporate theatre wrapped around panic. If your succession plan creates a shock, a share-price wobble and a town hall full of nervous questions, you haven’t handed over leadership — you’ve exposed that you never built a business that could run without you.
Today, August 7, is a small but useful marker in that argument. Zevia’s outgoing CEO Amy Taylor finishes the formal transition period with Alexandre Ruberti, the beverage company’s new president and CEO. Taylor resigned effective June 15 to become CEO of Angel City Football Club, but stayed on Zevia’s board and worked alongside Ruberti through today.
That is not front-page drama. Good. The most valuable management decisions rarely are.
Zevia did the sensible thing — which is strangely rare
Zevia appointed Ruberti immediately on June 15, rather than installing an interim chief, announcing a global search and pretending the board had everything under control while the executive team quietly fought over territory.
Ruberti was not parachuted in from a consultancy deck. He had joined Zevia’s board in August 2024, giving him time to learn the business before taking the big chair. More importantly, he has more than 25 years in consumer packaged goods and beverage, including 16 years at Red Bull in senior roles such as president of Red Bull Distribution Company and chief commercial officer of Red Bull North America. Before that, he held sales, marketing and distribution roles with Coca-Cola bottlers.
That background matters because Zevia doesn’t need somebody to invent a new mission statement. It needs somebody who understands the unsexy machinery that turns a drink into a durable business: distribution, shelf placement, channel economics, freight, retailer negotiations, packaging, margin and repeat purchase.
Taylor’s tenure had already pushed the business through a clear operational clean-up. Zevia reported 2025 net sales of $161.3 million, up 4% on the prior year, while its adjusted EBITDA loss improved to $4.7 million from $15.2 million. In the first quarter of 2026, sales rose 21.2% year on year to $46.1 million and adjusted EBITDA turned positive at $0.9 million, compared with a $3.3 million loss a year earlier.
That is why the Ruberti appointment is worth paying attention to. The board did not wait for a wreck to appoint an operator. It made the move when the company had some momentum, a live strategy and enough runway to execute.
Far too many boards do the opposite. They treat succession as an emergency procedure. By the time they start looking for a successor, revenue has flattened, the culture is exhausted, the founder is burnt out and the obvious internal candidates have either left or been politically kneecapped.
Then they call it a search.
The hard part is not picking the next CEO
The hard part of succession is making the company less dependent on the current CEO long before anyone announces a departure.
I’ve watched founders make themselves the approval gate for every meaningful decision: hiring, product, pricing, customer deals, marketing, capital expenditure. It feels powerful. It is also a brilliant way to create a business that becomes fragile as it grows.
A company that cannot survive a leader’s holiday is not a company. It is an expensive job with staff.
Zevia’s handover has a few features operators should steal. First, the incoming CEO had prior exposure to the company as a director. That does not automatically make somebody qualified — plenty of boards are decorative furniture — but it can compress the learning curve if the director has actually done the work.
Second, there was a defined overlap. Taylor remained on the board and worked with Ruberti from June 15 through August 7. That is just under eight weeks: enough time to transfer the things that do not appear in a board pack, but short enough to avoid the ridiculous arrangement where the former boss lingers for a year and everyone wonders who is actually in charge.
Third, the company matched the successor to the constraint. Zevia is operating in a category where growth alone is not a victory. Its first-quarter gross margin fell 1.7 percentage points to 48.4%, largely because of higher aluminium costs. Management said higher fuel and aluminium costs were expected to have an additional $6 million impact, on top of $5 million of incremental tariff-related aluminium costs already included in earlier guidance.
That is not a job for a keynote speaker. It is a job for somebody who understands commercial execution when the input-cost tide is running against you.
Context: this is a turnaround handoff, not a victory lap
There is a dangerous habit in management commentary: calling every improvement a turnaround before the numbers have earned it.
Zevia has improved materially. But it is not floating above gravity.
In 2025, the company still reported a net loss of $11.2 million. In the first quarter of 2026, it recorded a net loss of $2.4 million, although that was sharply better than the $6.4 million loss a year earlier. Its full-year 2026 outlook, issued with first-quarter results, called for net sales of $170 million to $175 million and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million to $4 million.
So Ruberti is not inheriting a finished masterpiece. He is inheriting a business that has earned the right to be judged on execution.
That distinction matters. Leadership changes often fail because boards hire for the story they want to tell, not the operational reality they have. If a company needs cost discipline, channel expansion and sharper commercial management, appointing a celebrity visionary is usually a very expensive distraction.
The best appointment is not the flashiest person at the dinner. It is the person whose operating habits match the next three problems the business must solve.
The overlooked angle: a clean exit is a leadership test for the departing CEO
Everyone talks about whether the incoming CEO is ready. Not enough people ask whether the departing CEO is mature enough to leave properly.
Taylor did not vanish, dump a mess in somebody else’s lap or cling to the controls. She stayed on the board and supported the transition to a person she had known for nearly 15 years. That is grown-up leadership.
Founders and CEOs need to hear this: your legacy is not the speech you make when you leave. It is the quality of the business six months after you stop touching every lever.
There is a fine line here. A former CEO can provide institutional context, introductions and honest historical perspective. Useful. But the minute they become the shadow decision-maker, they poison the new leader’s authority and train the organisation to wait for the old boss.
The best handover has a date, a scope and an ending. Zevia’s transition ending on August 7 is not just calendar administration. It sends a simple message: Ruberti owns the job now.
That clarity is cheap to create and incredibly valuable.
What this means for you
You do not need a listed-company board to run succession properly. You need discipline before you need drama.
1. Name your number two. Not privately. Make it clear who owns what when you are unavailable. If nobody can answer that, you have created a bottleneck, not a leadership team.
2. Build a 90-day handover file now. Include the top 20 relationships, current strategic bets, key risks, decision rights, recurring meetings, financial thresholds and the things only you know because you have been too lazy to document them. Brutal, but fair.
3. Develop successors against real constraints. Do not send a promising executive to another leadership retreat. Give them a difficult customer negotiation, a messy cost problem or ownership of a new channel. See how they operate when the spreadsheet and the humans disagree.
4. Separate continuity from control. An outgoing leader can help. They should not remain the unofficial boss. Set an end date for the overlap and make the new decision-maker unmistakable.
5. Pick leaders for the actual job ahead. Every business has a season. Sometimes you need a builder. Sometimes you need a fixer. Sometimes you need a commercial weapon. Hiring the person who looks best on LinkedIn is not strategy.
The real lesson from Zevia’s August 7 handover is dead simple: succession should feel almost boring because the work was done years earlier. Build a company that can survive your absence, and you will have built something worth owning.