New CEO Jeff Waters Outlines his Roadmap for Isola

Estimated reading time: 26 minutes

What I suspected and what I saw last week as I met with our three biggest worldwide customers is that we have a very strong reputation with a very strong set of relationships there. There’s work to do, but the foundation is there, the assets are there, and for me coming in, I see several things that we can capitalize on to make it even more successful.

Matties: When you start at a new company, obviously coming in and learning is one of the first steps. What sort of strategies do you bring to a situation like this?

Waters: It's interesting. Although I was with National for close to two decades, I got moved around quite a bit from business to business and organization to organization. I have a lot of experience in coming into a new group that has, like all groups, a lot of good things going on and has its challenges going on. What I've learned is that you must try to really understand the guts and the reality of what's happening within a company or organization, and there are really two means of doing that.

The first is getting out and talking to the customers. You hear things that have objective or maybe less than objective biases thrown into them when you talk to people about the work that they do internally. Getting to talk to customers gives you more unfiltered feedback on what's really going well, what the real assets are, and what the real value proposition and differentiation is for what you do as a group. Certainly getting out and talking to customers is a critical piece.

The other piece, though, is talking with the employee base. It's important to talk with the outgoing leadership and management team. But I'll tell you even more important is to get out and talk with the direct employees. I find that you can get a pretty good perspective when you talk to people higher up in the organization, but you'll learn as much, if not more, when you talk to people that are deeper into the organization. That combination tends to give me a healthy sense for where the company really is and what kinds of things we need to do to get the company and the employees positioned in the direction we need in order to be successful.

Matties: What is that direction?

Waters: I'll give a caveat that this is day four of week two here on the job [Laughs]. So check back with me again in six months. That said, I think I can say this pretty confidently, because I've heard very similar feedback from both the employees and from customers, that this is a great company. It's a company whose products are mainstays of the industry and very well-respected for its technology. To some extent, it's fallen off the wagon over the course of the last five years or so. From what I've seen and from the conversations that I've had, if I were to summarize it I think it really comes down to getting disconnected from the customer. I know that that's a bit of a tried phrase that's used quite frequently. "Well, we need to get more customer-oriented."

In the case of Isola, it's really true. It's not just on the more obvious sides, from the commercial perspective, but you even see it filter into some of the issues we've had with product development and the efficiency and effectiveness of us getting new products out into the marketplace. Very quickly, we've been making a transformation to become more customer-connected and maybe get a little more humble around the customers, in terms of the co-development that we're doing with them. That already is resulting in some great progress for us. We're already seeing some significant steps forward on the product development side that is just a strong foretelling of a great future for us on getting new products out.

The other piece of it, going back to that takeaway about us losing our customer orientation, is the company was increasingly narrowing itself down to where it had been successful. A lot of successful companies do that. You tend to focus on what you're good at. The problem is that if you stay focused on what you're good at for too long, from a market perspective, the market changes as market dynamics change. All of a sudden, you find yourself increasingly focused on a niche and you’re not evolving in the ways that you need to service the changing market.

For us, I think that we've lost sight of big pieces of the market that can be very well-leveraged to take advantage of what we do for the areas where we've been successful. You're going to see us start to service more of that market now. That's good not only from an ability to drive more revenue, but it's good also for the markets and the customers that we do serve. If you're a company like a Cisco, or a Juniper, or even a Microsoft or a Google, you want to work with somebody who has that cutting-edge technology to enable the highest performing systems that you have. You also ideally want that partner to be there with you as those designs then transition into even higher volume manufacturing and into more of a mature part of the product cycle.

As a company, we weren't moving with our customers as their products went through that life cycle, and that’s something that we have the ability to do. We have the ability to innovate and collaborate with customers in our most demanding products and the most cutting-edge products. Because of the footprint that we have in China, we have the ability to manufacture at worldwide, best-in-class costs. As their products need to get costed down, we have the ability to make that transition, which is something we're going to take full advantage of as we move forward.

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