Interim CEO Jeff McCreary Discusses Recent Changes at Isola

Estimated reading time: 26 minutes

McCreary: I’m 95% certain that we’ll announce it before the end of the year. But what we want to do is make sure that we evaluate and get the candidate we want. As you might suspect, every individual might have a different set of situations on how quickly they would be available and this is one of the reasons Donald and I stepped in. We didn’t want to choose someone simply because they were available next week. If we found what we felt was a better leader, but it might take a few months to navigate through the sea of change, we wanted to have that tool available that we could apply. We wanted to be judicious with what we were doing, and by Donald and I having the time currently to provide a little onsite leadership, that allowed us to do it. There’s urgency, but whether it is thirty days from now or sixty, it doesn’t matter.

Matties: When you look for a skillset in the leadership, are you looking for somebody that’s more systems based or marketing based? What sort of lens do you focus with?

McCreary: First and foremost, we did decide that we wanted someone who had proven experience based in the world of electronics. They didn’t have to be a laminator or a fabricator or an EMSI guy or a semiconductor gal, but we felt that somewhere in that food chain was very important. We wanted somebody who had demonstrated a lot of hands-on capability, had some turnaround experience, and had experience with complexity. We talked to a couple of people who had a primary product that they had tremendous success with. We were more intrigued by candidates that had to deal with hundreds of things, some of that complexity, and we wanted somebody that we felt had a deep appreciation for the business in Asia because so much of it is in Asia.

The other thing with Gordon, our former CFO, and Ray is they’re highly seasoned executives. I think we wanted to find somebody that would bring a cultural shift. Maybe a different level of energy that sometimes only youth can bring, but somebody that really likes getting in and energizing cultures, who is hands on, and has dealt with some product complexity and experience turning things around. Those are the things we are looking for.

Matties: Great, well I’m sure you’re down to a short list by now if you’re looking at making an announcement, so good for you guys. Thanks for taking the time to share what’s going on.

McCreary: Yes, thank you.

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