Paul Bassat tells: Why I’m stepping down

Paul Bassat says it started gradually. Over the last few years, the joint-chief executive and co-founder of online recruitment giant Seek Limited says that he would stop once a month and think about moving on.

In the last six months, the feeling became even stronger. He started talking with his brother and co-founder Andrew Bassat, and his chairman Bob Waston, about life after Seek, and this morning he announced he will step down at the end of June 2011.

“The fact that I started thinking about it a lot more was a sign,” he told me this morning.

“It’s a job that I have loved and I learned from so much on so many levels. I don’t want to be in a position where I keep doing it for the wrong reasons.”

Bassat says it’s not burnout, but rather a realisation that he didn’t want to lead the company as chief executive.

“I had to separate my passion for the business with my passion for the job.”

Bassat and his brother launched Seek 13 years ago with the aim of entering the fledgling online recruitment space. Over the next decade, the pair became the sector’s dominant players, they floated the company, built annual revenue to $1.7 billion and became very rich in the process – their combined fortune is about $250 million.

Paul and Andrew have always run the company as joint chief executives, something that is rarely seen in corporate circles, and usually only ever where there is two prominent founders.

The model is unusual, but it has proved effective and should help smooth any transition issues.

Andrew will become the lone chief executive when Paul steps down for a 12 months break. Paul will then re-join the company’s board in 2012 in a non-executive role.

“One of the questions is: what changes? And the reality is what changes and the reality is that there is going to be very little,” Paul says.

Bassat admits the cash-starved early days of the company “feel like yesterday” but he’s unlikely to lose that feeling completely – he plans to continue an “active business career” and while he’s unsure what that will specifically entail, he is likely to become involved in a number of smaller ventures after his break.

When asked what are the main lessons he will bring to the small companies he eventually invests in, Bassat puts people and organisational culture at the top of his list, closely followed by the importance of clear, coherent vision that can be aggressively executed.

However, perhaps his best lesson for growing SMEs is the importance of having a single, driving mission.

“In our early years we made a lot of mistakes, but the one thing we got right was to understand the importance of building a large, sustainable marketplace.”

“We saw there would be one dominant player in online recruitment in Australia and we wanted that to be us. That was really our sole focus and it never changed.”