Turnarounds
Reversing polarity
Dave Dutton turned a $336 million loss into a $27 million gain at Mattson Technology by making the hard decisions
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Northern California | June 2008
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Dave Dutton walked into a nightmare when he took over as
Mattson Technology Inc.’s CEO in December 2001.
“The company had just completed a merger, and then, right
after the dot-com bubble burst, went into one of the worst downturns,” Dutton says. “The founder quit and essentially retired.
This all happened three days before an analyst’s conference call,
which I had never been experienced in.”
Adding fuel to the fire, Dutton said the merger hadn’t been fully
integrated, so his business was behaving more like three separate
companies.
“The company had an optimism that the companies would just
fold into each other and grow,” Dutton says. “The reality was the
merger was not a structured business focus, so the company was
losing money. On top of that, the worst downturn in our industry
hit, so that took a weak operating structure and sent it down further.”
Being hit from all angles, Mattson was already on its knees and
still getting hit as it closed out 2001 with a $336.7 million net loss
and only $230.1 million in net sales.
It was now Dutton’s job to heal the wounds, but with those numbers, he couldn’t simply slap on a bandage.
Instead, he needed to completely overhaul the semiconductor
manufacturing equipment provider, so he took to rebuilding
Mattson’s infrastructure by cutting costs and creating a new vision.
“It’s just like anything else in business,” he says. “When you’re in
a difficult situation, a turnaround or whatever, call a crisis a crisis,
get people in the room, start mapping where you are today, make
decisions, and speed of execution is still critical.”
