Engineering and MBA Degrees Lead to Business Ownership
Dan Olsen, E’04, mechanical engineering, credits his time at Northeastern, where he also earned an MBA from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, with helping him build a career as a CEO of Mach Machine, a contract manufacturer.
When Dan Olsen, E’04, mechanical engineering, was growing up in the Boston area, he had not one but three paper routes delivering the Boston Globe. He was so dedicated to the job that he eventually received scholarship awards from the newspaper.
That determination stayed with him through his undergraduate years at Northeastern, his return to earn an MBA in 2006 at D’Amore-McKim School of Business, and his successful career as the CEO of Mach Machine, a contract manufacturer that manufactures components and assemblies for customers in the aerospace, defense, semiconductor, and medical industries.
Olsen began his college career at Arizona State University and got married in his sophomore year. Soon after, he decided to transfer to Northeastern, in part because he comes from a family of Huskies; his parents and two grandparents are graduates. But he was also drawn to the co-op program. “I liked the idea of starting my professional network,” he says. “As a student who didn’t really have a whole lot of professional experience, the co-op was an incredibly valuable asset to me.”
He was hired as a co-op at Mide Technology Corp., which at the time specialized
in designing smart materials like shape memory alloy, piezoelectric material, and hydrophilic foams. “They were doing custom projects, and I was exposed to a lot of neat stuff, like designing spacesuit materials and seatbelt parts,” Olsen says.
He had the opportunity to work in the company’s machine shop to implement designs, test them, and draft reports. “It was product development exposure, essentially from cradle to grave,” Olsen adds.
After graduation, he joined a startup near Boston as a design engineer working on optical products for unmanned aerial vehicles and autonomous cars. “This is where I got exposure to developing a design based on customer requirements,” Olsen says.
Then his former co-op employer Mide reached out with a job opportunity, and he returned to work on a project developing shaft seals for navy ships. He was able to apply project management skills like configuration management that he had learned at the startup.
Olsen was tasked with developing a massive test facility where the team could simulate a ship sinking to demonstrate the effectiveness of the shaft seals, which were tested for endurance and eventually approved. Olsen says those seals are installed on Navy ships that are active today.
Having built a strong engineering and product development foundation, Olsen decided it was time to expand his business and leadership skills. He applied to and was accepted in the MBA program at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business and completed his first semester while continuing to work full time at Mide. He finished the as a full-time student, graduating in 2008.
“Getting my MBA opened my eyes to the other aspects of running a business, from operations and finance to marketing,” Olsen says. “But on top of that, I built incredible relationships with people from all different perspectives.”
The experience helped him decide to work independently and ultimately led him to start his own business. “I didn’t want to be a little cog in a huge wheel,” he says. “I wanted to have a lot of influence on the direction I was going in.”
In 2008, he launched Mach Machine. Focused on manufacturing products with long life cycles and minimal revisions, Olsen began building a business that could cater to those customers. “Utilizing automation, we have the ability to adjust volume and due dates through our cell controller without needing to have additional setup and schedule adjustments that occur in traditional manufacturing environments,” Olsen says. “We can synchronize our operations to what our customer demands are.”
He considers his customer focus as key to his success. “It’s about taking care of customers, constantly communicating with them, and always being honest and upfront with them,” Olsen says.
And his success as a Husky is now influencing his family’s next generation. Olsen’s daughter joined Northeastern at the Bouvé College School of Nursing in 2024.