How Do You Know When It's Time to Leave?

Even successful founders can stay at their companies too long, beyond the point when giving your all means hurting yourself beyond repair -- or even damaging your company beyond reconstruction. How long is too long? Too often the founder is the last to know

It was 10 o'clock on a brisk November night. Jan Pringle, 47, cofounder of the Atlanta ad agency Pringle Dixon Pringle (PDP), was sitting at her desk, staring at the wall in front of her. Being there at such a late hour was typical. For 20 years she'd regularly clocked 12-hour days, six days a week. She had a presentation due in the morning for one of the biggest radio stations in town. The yearly budgets for two of her largest clients were due. She had 10 client meetings in the next five days.

But that night all she could do was stare at the wall. She couldn't get up. She couldn't leave her desk. She couldn't call for help. Her husband and PDP's cofounder, Jim, innocently phoned to ask when she'd be home. She mumbled, "I can't come home. . . . I can't leave." The next thing she remembers, her teenage son appeared at the door, physically pried her away, and took her to the hospital.

After exhaustive testing, doctors concluded that Pringle suffered from a stress disorder that would require her to take an extended leave from her company. Back at home, she lay down on the living-room couch and thought to herself, "I just want to die. I don't care if I ever return to my company."

But a year later she did. That was three years ago, and every day since then, Pringle has wrestled with one of the toughest questions a leader can face. Is it time for her to move on -- to leave behind the company she started building 20 years ago?

How can she tell if the company she founded, believed in, and built has had enough of her? She says it's hard to know. The company gives no clear signs. No doctor says, "Slow down." No spouse threatens a divorce. If profits slip, it can be blamed on a bad year or an errant client. "This isn't about whether the widget I make is outdated," she explains quietly. "It's about whether I am."

For Jan Pringle, it wasn't always this difficult.

Back in the 1980s PDP was one of the hottest shops in Atlanta -- "the kind of place where breakthrough work was being done," declares Dan Scarlotto, PDP's creative director of five years. The momentum and excitement of the day were perhaps best captured in a pro bono campaign against drunken driving that PDP did for the governor's safety council in 1983. It featured stark black-and-white photos of tombstones, a man in a wheelchair, and a body in a morgue. The entire city of Atlanta -- from taxicabs to police cars -- was blanketed with a campaign that blared the slogan "Drunk Driving Is Just Murder on Our Roads." The impact was irrefutable. The state's alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped by nearly 40% that year. The campaign was recognized as one of the best public-service spots in the country and was repackaged for markets as far off as Tokyo and Moscow.

Founded in 1973, PDP had in Jan and Jim Pringle a compelling duo. With a Southern tell-it-like-it-is charm and infectious enthusiasm, Jan handled public relations and was the front person for the firm. Conversely, Jim, tall and lanky, with a Cary Grant kind of reserve, oversaw the advertising creative work and was behind the scenes to make the agency deliver on its promises. In a crowded market -- cluttered with more than 60 shops -- the Pringles offered "integrated marketing services," combining public relations, marketing, and advertising. At the time, it was an approach that gave the firm some differentiation.

What also set the agency apart was Jan's unusual commitment to the value of pro bono, or public-service, work. "Jan has always done more than almost anyone else for the city," says Greg Stone, general manager of ABC-TV's affiliate in Atlanta. "She genuinely cares and commands great respect." But public service is undeniably smart business -- especially for an ad agency. There is no client budget to confine pro bono work, since the agency typically assumes the cost, which gives it unusual ability to flex its creative muscle in a very public setting. The campaign against drunken driving for the state, for example, cost PDP $70,000 to produce, but a year later Georgia moved $400,000 worth of advertising business over to the agency. Within four years, that account alone had grown to $4 million. In later years PDP, with Jan leading the charge, spearheaded campaigns for many other civic causes, from saving the Atlanta Zoo to saving the inner cities. Says a former employee, "Jan has always been very smart about going after high-profile public-service work."

And for other clients, she has always known how to stretch the ad dollar, says Preston Ridlehuber, a onetime client of PDP's. Ridlehuber recalls his beverage-distribution company's spending around $15,000 with the agency but garnering easily a half million dollars' worth of publicity. "'Entertainment Tonight' did a feature on us," he explains.

Beyond attracting as clients well-known giants like McDonald's and Contel, then one of the largest cellular-communications companies in the country, PDP's good work also attracted smart, hardworking young employees hungry to work in a "creative shop." The staff, or "family," as Jan prefers to call employees, was growing. And for many, Jan was more cheerleader than chief executive.

In a business that demands an almost unnatural ability to hopscotch from financial services to tire sales, and to approach them both with an equal amount of creativity, knowledge, and zest, Jan was a tireless source of energy and enthusiasm. Curtis Zimmerman, former senior vice-president at PDP and once its number one rainmaker, says, "Jan's enthusiasm was unusual because it was genuine." He adds, "I called Jan 'the big sell' and brought her on as many sales calls as possible."