Burtis Group helps make the best of the best even better. Whether you are organizing a new company or a new project, Burtis Group can help with your strategy for organization, development, market positioning, staffing, and strategic alliances. If your company needs a little boost, Burtis Group can help with reorganization, revamped product strategies, and new product roadmaps. If your growth is through mergers/acquisitions, we can evaluate potential targets, especially identification of technical capability and key contributors. Or if you just need to accommodate a short term resource overload, Burtis Group can arrange for highly skilled hardware and software engineering contractors with proven performance.In addition, Burtis Group's lengthy career experience at leading technical contract negotiations can bring you better value for your technology, or allow you to acquire new technology at a lower cost.Sample projects completed by Burtis Group include a preliminary avionics architecture for a new twin jet aircraft including a "how-to" manual for their new hires, electrical design architecture for one of the world's most innovative LSAs, proposal evaluation for one of the oldest names in aviation, strategic advice to help a major multi-national company grow into a new product area, help with setting up four start-up businesses, and negotiation advice for an aircraft parts supplier. Other programs undertaken by Don include products to meet FCC and UL requirements; and programs in industries requiring extreme reliability and accuracy such as unmanned satellite payloads and consumer banking systems.

Titan was creating a new High Altitude, Long Endurance (HALE) unmanned aircraft with a mission goal of 5 years at 65,000 feet. I used my experience and skills to help the team reach its goals. Whether it is program management, skills in hardware and software engineering, dealing with suppliers, or just adding a touch of wisdom learned over a decades-long career, a startup such as Titan can always benefit from a few people who have been there, done that in related fields. During my 2 years at Titan and Google, I created a team of diversified program managers who helped coordinate activities across the many engineering disciplines needed to create a HALE aircraft. I also created the avionics architecture for the next version of Titan's aircraft an with my team of program managers, helped the engineers create the requirements documents and schedule.

I was responsible for advanced research on avionics and electronics architecture and features for future Eclipse aircraft. I created requirements for aircraft data collection and retrieval; I created the architecture for the Aircraft Data Center to gather, store, and distribute the aircraft data. I also lead negotiation teams for contracts with some suppliers, and advised senior management on issues with problem suppliers.One notable accomplishment was resolution of a complex data license contract that had been in unsuccessful negotiation by others for four years. After I took over as lead negotiator, I was able to resolve all issues in less than four months.

I staffed and ran the Avionics and Electrical Engineering group, reporting to the CEO of Eclipse. Part of my job included overall responsibility for the avionics architecture of the Eclipse 500 aircraft.

I acted as drop-in management and technical consultant for Vulcan Ventures. Typically, I would become acting VP Engineering for one of their investments for a period of 6 - 18 months.I also evaluated potential investments, such as TiVo and ReplayTV, using my checklist of attributes including identifying the visionary, the de-facto leader, analysis of market for their products, competitive position, barrier(s) to entry for competition, effectiveness of marketing and sales, and future trends that may help/hurt them.

My responsibilities included all corporate marketing activities for the four divisions of the company, including trade shows, press releases, coordination of divisional collateral, policing logo usage, giving presentations about the company's products, and training the parent company's sales force concerning PCSI's products and key benefits.

Part of my role at General Magic was to coordinate development at all strategic hardware partners (including Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips, and others) to maintain the platform nature of the General Magic personal communicator. Talk about herding cats!!