Aqua America boss replaced, as he wished
When is it time for the boss to move on? "I know you enjoy what you do, but at some point, you got to step aside," Wells Fargo analyst Jonathan G. Reeder told Aqua America CEO Nicholas DeBenedictis when the company didn't name his successor on schedule at its May 6 shareholder meeting.
When is it time for the boss to move on?
"I know you enjoy what you do, but at some point, you got to step aside," Wells Fargo analyst Jonathan G. Reeder told Aqua America CEO Nicholas DeBenedictis when the company didn't name his successor on schedule at its May 6 shareholder meeting.
At 69, DeBenedictis has spent one-third of his life building and running the Bryn Mawr-based for-profit water and sewer company. He was older than his board members (including a couple of other Philadelphia CEOs, already retired).
It was taking longer than expected, DeBenedictis said, to review all of the candidates to replace him from "throughout the utility industry."
On Wednesday, the company named the new boss: Aqua executive vice president Christopher Franklin. A onetime student-government president at West Chester University, Franklin is a protege of DeBenedictis, who holds a master's in engineering from Drexel. Both worked in government and were Chamber of Commerce executives before joining the company.
"You had said you were going external, and now you filled it internal?" shareholder Robert Costello, head of Costello Asset Management, Huntingdon Valley, asked in the shareholder call after the news.
"We were looking at internal and external candidates," DeBenedictis said. "Sorry for any misunderstanding you may have had."
Was the boss too close to the search?
"I participated as one of Aqua's eight board members," DeBenedictis told me in a statement, and he's pleased with the result.
Franklin told investors he'll make just "minor tweaks" at Aqua. And he plans to reach out to "folks who own our shares and follow our stock."
It might be too late to reach Ryan Connors, utilities analyst at Boenning & Scattergood in West Conshohocken and previously for Janney Capital Markets in Philadelphia. He had covered Aqua closely since 2006 but dropped coverage after DeBenedictis pushed back against Connors' cautious reports last year.
"All CEOs want the 'buy' rating. But what made Nick unique is he wasn't afraid to use his position to actively push for more positive coverage," Connors told me. "He came up in a different era and never adjusted to the new world, where that's no longer appropriate."
In a statement, DeBenedictis said he counted 10 analysts still covering Aqua - "six buys and four neutrals" - more than any water stock except its
larger Voorhees-based rival, American Water.
In 2011, DeBenedictis accused then-Inquirer editorial writer Paul Davies of "setting out to sabotage" the Convention Center, whose board DeBenedictis chaired, by writing an opinion piece decrying the center's failure to fix labor-management issues. "We should all be rooting for the home team," journalists, too, DeBenedictis wrote.
Davies, now an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, says he felt DeBenedictis' reaction "played a role" in his replacement by the paper's then-bosses. (At the time, Mark Block, a spokesman for the newspaper's owners, "respectfully" denied the assertion.)
DeBenedictis told me the center's later improvement of its labor issues (since he stepped down as chairman) shows his optimism was well-placed. He still says "to publicly debate the future success" of the center made it tougher to attract conventions.
Will Aqua shares rally or lag with its longtime boss retired? Too soon to say. DeBenedictis remains Aqua's board chairman. This summer, he'll also be a senior adviser, "to ensure a smooth transition."
215-854-5194@PhillyJoeD