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Donald B. Hawthorne Donald B. Hawthorne is a Managing Director of NachmanHaysBrownstein, Inc. in its Boston office, and heads the firm’s national healthcare-industry turnaround practice. With over 17 years’ experience in leading turnaround initiatives, he is cited for successes at accelerating the pace of value creation. Mr. Hawthorne has worked with venture-financed companies as an executive, investor, or consultant since 1985. He has been a Partner at Ampersand Ventures, where he was interim COO in the successful turnaround of V. I. Technologies, then a $14 million biologics portfolio company. As an independent consultant since 1999, Hawthorne has served as interim CEO or General Manager of numerous businesses. At Invitrogen’s $30 million oligonucleotide division, a life-sciences research-products business, Mr. Hawthorne oversaw a major improvement in the key metric of on-time delivery to customers, achieving a record level, while also cutting in half both manufacturing failure rates and inventories. These operational successes led to a new sales force incentive plan focused on driving revenue growth. Mr. Hawthorne was hired by the Board of BioTransplant, a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company with severe cash and operational problems, to develop a survival strategy. When a clinical trial failure led to a rapid shutdown in operations and a Chapter 11 filing, he led the reorganization process, resulting in all creditors being paid in full. At Ardais, a $5 million life-sciences IT and services company with a failed business model and in a dire cash position, the organization restructured its business strategy under Mr. Hawthorne’s leadership. In parallel, he implemented a divestiture plan to maximize the value of the previous business model’s assets, while delivering a sixty-percent reduction in operating expenses. A subsequent filing of an Assignment for Benefit of Creditors enabled a newly financed company to be launched 108 days later. Mr. Hawthorne led initiatives that increased revenue and testing volume at double-digit rates at Repromedix, a $3 million diagnostic lab-services company, where he also focused on creating longer-term, high-value, revenue-growth opportunities. In addition to holding management roles since 1999, Mr. Hawthorne has completed multiple consulting projects, including advising the CEO at Closure Medical, a $34 million medical device company, on organizational strategies to deliver sustained revenue growth, and playing a leading role in the sale of specialty-pharmaceutical company Diatide, where the acquisition price represented more than two times the initial enterprise valuation. Mr. Hawthorne holds an M.B.A. degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.S. degree in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College. He is a member of the Turnaround Management Association. |
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