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Who's Who: Ernest Burdette

The president of Triton Systems Inc. gets away from it all by piloting his own single-engine plane over the southern Mississippi coast. The southern gentleman has been at the helm of Triton for two decades.

August 16, 2001

Ernest Burdette, the president of Triton Systems Inc., relaxes in a way that might not be considered relaxing to most folks.

When the pressures of running one of the largest off-premise ATM manufacturers in the U.S. gets to him, Burdette may skip off to the Long Beach, Miss. airport and jump in his Cessna single-engine plane. From the cockpit, he can cruise out over the Gulf of Mexico or the southern Mississippi coastline, clearing his head of issues affecting his 360-employee work force.

Burdette just got his pilot's license three years ago, but he's on a pace to make up for lost time, making his blue yonder escapes an average of twice a week.

"Flying requires intensity and focus," says the 56-year-old Burdette, who started Triton two decades ago with two engineering buddies to build buoys for federal government research projects. "You have to put everything else out of your mind. If it's a hairy week and I need to clear my head, I go out flying."

Oh yes, there's a solid business reason for the Cessna, too. Burdette owns a vacation home in north Georgia, near his company's Atlanta marketing and sales office. He frequently flies the hop, skip and jump over to New Orleans for business meetings.

While those in the industry and on the Triton payroll are quick to credit Burdette's management style for much of the company's success, he's a believer in fortuitous timing.

"Being in the right place at the right time, that's the story of my life," he says, beginning a recounting of a personal history that indeed seems serendipitous. Consider that when the government work of deploying buoys in the Gulf of Mexico was drying up, he helped land a contract with a local bank to build a machine that would teach people how to use ATMs.

He describes Triton's move into the production of scrip terminals in the early '90s as simply a matter of listening to the market. He said there was demand for an ATM-type product outside the traditional banking market.

"A light went off in our head. We just happened to be there and had our eyes and ears open to what the customer wanted," he said of Triton's early '90s focus on scrip machines, which it still makes in limited quantities.

Or consider this. When his efforts at raising capital for an initial private offering were flagging in the late '90s, he was able to find Dover Industries. The $5 billion manufacturing conglomerate last year bought a majority interest in Triton and allowed Burdette the freedom to lead a global organization while escaping the financial pressures of ownership.

"It's not much different than the way I operated before. My boss doesn't have time to come down here and tell me how to sell ATMs," he says. "But with a big organization behind us, we can consider a major investment without raising capital."

Mary Edith Dressel, Triton's vice president of corporate resources and a member of the six-person management team that reports to Burdette, says his hands-off management style has worked well during her 13 years at Triton.

"People believe him when he talks to the company. To a person, and that's a rare thing. There's a sense of integrity. He's got a real sense for people," she says.

At Triton headquarters, nestled across the street from a Little League ballpark in a renovated bingo hall, a few blocks off the beach where casinos beckon, Burdette's southern charm is obvious.

To out-of-town guests, he offers a guided tour that includes advice on the area's finest seafood gumbo during a brief ride across town for lunch at the private Great Southern Club. He guides his six-year-old Chevy Tahoe into a first-level parking space in the sedate downtown of Long Beach, explaining how Long Beach has changed since the casinos came in a few years back, though he hasn't spent his first dime in one.

Burdette has been in the ATM business from the beginning, when he and his partners helped a local financial institution, Hancock Bank, build a training device to teach customers how to use ATMs. Today, three years after co-founders Robert Sandoz and Frank Wilem retired, Burdette remains enthusiastic about the company's future.

"We've inched our way into business a piece at a time," he says, adding that he has no plans to join them in retirement.

In a spacious conference room, Burdette speaks with an entrepreneur's enthusiasm about his company's future. One of Triton's key initiatives is to promote advertising on the ATM. It bought a controlling interest in an ATM advertising agency, Secora, last year, and is in the midst of an extensive pilot program with its full-motion video topper.

"We think advertising is critical to continuing to add value. The key to getting better is to add value," he says. "We can bring value and justify the existence of the machine."

And, he might add, sell more machines. Which is, after all, the whole point of Triton's operation. In 2000, Triton sold 13,557 ATMs, fourth in the world and first among off-premise deployers, according to the Nilson Report.

"I wanted to stay and grow this business. I enjoy leading this company and seeing it grow," Burdette says.

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