Know when to let go.

• Author: Shackelford, Susan
• Position: Hand Held Products Inc. founder Mike Weaver turned over management of company to Hank Bennet

Founder Mike Weaver realized Hand Held Products' reach was beyond his grasp.

Letting go of the reins reminded Mike Weaver of when he and his wife packed their kids off to college. "It's a real mixture of emotions," says Weaver, who built Charlotte-based Hand Held Products Inc. into a $50 million-plus computer-technology company before deciding the business needed a new boss. "You're turning them loose to follow their destiny. It's a good feeling, but it's sad."

It's also risky. Just as some kids have trouble in college, some successful companies founder under new management. In North Carolina, at Cato Corp., Guilford Mills and several other companies, the old bosses had to step back in to save the day.

"It's very, very precarious," says Olin Broadway, chairman of Broadway & Seymour Inc., a Charlotte-based software-development company that has brought in new management several times with mixed success. "Generally, the vision is held by the founder, and unless professional management shares the vision, you lose the uniqueness of what the company does."

Far from losing under new CEO Hank Bennett, Hand Held Products has gained. Sales at the company, which specializes in programmable, battery-powered devices to scan and store bar codes, increased by more than 10% to $60 million in 1991 -- the first fiscal year since Bennett's arrival. That's according to Karen Horowitz, an analyst who follows the portable-computer industry for Frost & Sullivan in New York. (Hand Held does not disclose financial information.)

Bennett, who took over Hand Held two summers ago, thinks he knows why the transition is working. "Mike made it so easy for me," he says. "I've been brought in by banks and parent companies and had to dodge intentional elephant traps. That's been conspicuous in its absence. I've never come in and felt so at home."

If Hand Held is his new home, Bennett is clearly head of the household. He brought a new style of managerial discipline. "This is as loud as I ever speak," he says in a voice that would make you lean across his desk if he spoke any softer, "but I can be very firm, you know, like, 'If you do that again, to the best of my ability I'm going to beat the living hell out of you with that chair or any device in this room, and you'll curse your mother for giving birth to you.'"

By combining that firmness with a little positive reinforcement, it took Bennett only a few months to establish himself and redirect the company. The way he tells it, it was an easy chore. "Hand Held was a small company needing to grow into a professionally managed company," he says.

What he did at Hand Held is a case study in how a business doctor, as he likes to call himself, can diagnose and treat what ails a going concern without compromising the entrepreneurial energy of its employees.

For years, Weaver had been telling his employees that he planned to pass the management baton. Most didn't believe him, and he understood why. "I created |the company~ from the living room of my house," Weaver, 48, says. "I was CEO, president and chief worrier from the beginning. But you have to distinguish between ego and the desire to create long-term wealth."

Back in 1982, when Weaver was running a computer consulting company, he wasn't worried so much about wealth as finding a good use for an expanded-memory calculator he and Jim DeArras, a computer engineer from Richmond, Va., were trying to market. That's when he read...