Co-CEOs are a merger sedative, not a leadership model

SoftwareOne announced on 14 July that Raphael Erb, its co-chief executive, becomes sole CEO from 1 August and that Melissa Mulholland, the other half of the pairing, is leaving. The Swiss software and cloud provider, which says it has about 13,000 staff in more than 70 countries, ran two chief executives for just over a year, from the day its takeover of Crayon completed on 2 July 2025.

The release is careful with its words. Mulholland “has decided to leave the company as the integration of SoftwareOne and Crayon is now substantially complete”, it says. Till Spillmann, chairman of the board, said: “The Co-CEO model was designed to ensure continuity through the integration of SoftwareOne and Crayon. With that mandate nearing completion, a sole CEO structure is the right next step to sustain focus and accelerate execution.”

Read that twice. The chairman is not describing a leadership model that failed. He is describing one that was never meant to last.

That is the honest account of most co-CEO arrangements, and it is the one I would put to any UK channel business doing buy-and-build. Two chief executives are a sedative. They calm two boards, two workforces and two customer bases through the months when a deal could still wobble. Then the deal settles, the sedative wears off and one person goes.

A year of calm, bought and paid for

SoftwareOne had good reason to want calm. The combination it completed in July 2025 created a business with revenue of about CHF 1.6bn (£1.5bn), according to the completion release, and Crayon’s shareholders were paid partly in SoftwareOne shares: NOK 69 in cash plus 0.8233 new SoftwareOne shares for each Crayon share. A Norwegian company, its founders and its investors were being asked to trust a Swiss acquirer with a business Microsoft called, in the same release, one of its largest partners. Putting Crayon’s chief executive alongside SoftwareOne’s was part of the price of that trust.

It was also a division of labor, and the 14 July release spells it out. Erb, chief executive of SoftwareOne since November 2024 and with the company since 1999, ran commercial operations, the services business and the marketplace. Mulholland, who had led Crayon through its international expansion, took strategy development, customer platforms and global functions. That is a tidy split on paper. In practice it means the person who owns the sales engine and the person who owns the strategy are different people, and each holds a veto over the other.

The completion release also set the clock. SoftwareOne told the market it had identified cost savings of CHF 80m–100m (£73m–£92m) a year within 18 months of completion, with one-off implementation costs in the same range, and it listed the consolidation of legal structures in overlapping countries among the integration tasks. Savings of that size mean duplicated roles going, and duplicated roles include the one at the top. A leadership pair whose stated job is continuity has an obvious end date once that work is done.

The tell in the wording

There is a phrase in the 14 July release worth keeping. The integration, it says, is “substantially complete”. Not complete: substantially. The chairman’s own sentence has the mandate “nearing completion”. The company has chosen the moment when the hard integration work is close enough to done that the second chief executive can leave without the market reading it as a rupture.

That is what “integration complete” usually means in a merger of equals or near-equals. The structure built to get the deal over the line is being dismantled, and one of the two people at the top is the part being removed. Mulholland said in the release that “the time is now right to transition to a sole CEO structure”, and I have no reason to doubt she means it. But nobody should mistake a well-managed exit for a model that worked. The outcome was written into the design.

Erb’s line is the other tell: “The past year has demonstrated the strength of our combined business, and now it’s about building on that momentum.” Continuity was the co-CEO job. Momentum is a sole-CEO job. The release says the strategy and the 2030 financial ambitions are unchanged and that first-half results are due on 26 August. It is hard not to read the timing as a board wanting one name on the door before that day.

The question to settle before signing

The UK channel is full of businesses assembled from three, five or a dozen acquisitions, and a shared leadership title is a familiar way to get a founder over the line. My argument is that it should be treated as a transition with a date on it, agreed before completion, and never as a structure. Three things follow.

First, decide who runs the combined business before the deal closes, and write it into the integration plan. If the honest answer is “the acquirer’s CEO, in 12 months”, say that to the seller now. A founder who works it out a year later will feel misled, and so will the people who followed them across.

Second, if you do run two leaders for a period, split accountability by outcome rather than by function. SoftwareOne gave one chief executive the sales engine and the other the strategy. That guarantees friction over exactly the questions – which markets, which vendors, which cuts – that a merger has to answer quickly.

Third, retire the euphemism. When the integration is done, say who is going and why. SoftwareOne handled the mechanics well: it named the end of the mandate, thanked the person leaving and gave a date. That should be the standard. What it should never be is a surprise to the person leaving.

Calm can be bought. A decision has to be made, and the cheapest time to make it is before you sign.