In today’s economical environment, making money on a job is getting more and more challenging. Those years when businesses just like mine were essentially marking money are long gone.
The Good Ol’ Days
You probably do not have this point of reference; it’s been one downturn after another for your entire adult life if you are under 30 years old. For us older folks, times were really good back then. So, what occurred?
You happened, as well as a million others just like you, or so it seems. In other words, the market is a little bit of cramped now and a lot more competitive, which reduces our profit per job. And if you’re old college and have not expanded into the here and now, you will always sense the profit pinch.
There was a time when PCB designers might name their price and folks would pay off it, principally because their PCB design options were limited. This is not true any longer. Right now, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a PCB designer, or at the very least somebody who believes he understands how to develop a board.
This is the competition we all face, and it’s the reason it is so difficult to validate our prices. We’re rivaling with every designer sitting in a home office in his pants, drinking coffee and having toaster breads, while diminishing us by as much as 50%. Customers are driven by their own profit goals, and a low-ball quote is appealing when they definitely don’t understand the real cost of using cut-rate resources.
How do we make more money while saving money for our customers? The only reason to be in business is to make money, and that is a two-way street.
OEMs use companies like mine as they don’t need the overhead of supporting an in-house design engineering division. That was not the case 15 years ago. Seemed like everyone wanted to capture the engineering in-house. Nevertheless, when business slowed down, this very first thing many OEMs did was push us out the door as they did not realize the value of the task we did.
There was a time when PCB designers could name their price and people would pay it, primarily because their PCB design choices were limited. Now, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a PCB designer, or at least someone who thinks he knows how to design a board.
How do we make more money while saving money for our customers? OEMs use companies like mine because they don’t want the overhead of supporting an in-house design engineering department.