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It’s Only Common Sense: It’s in Your Hands

No matter what happens in the world, success is up to you.

There are about 230 boards shops left in North America, and out of those, about 175 of them are at $10 million or less in revenue annually. Of those, about a 100 are at $5 million or less and 25 are at $1 million or less. For those who want to do the math, that leaves only about 55 that are doing $25 million or more.

So, most of the board shops left in North America today are $10 million or less, and most are much smaller than that.

Now, the global PCB market is just shy of $60 billion. Considering that the North American market is about $12 billion with about $4 billion of that being built here in North America, there is still plenty of business to go around, especially for those shops that are under $10 million.

Our North American market still has about $4 billion being built domestically. This means that those smaller board shops have very little riding on what the rest of the world is doing. Of course there is the trickle-down effect, but by the same token if you are the sales manager of a $6 million American board shop, stop complaining about China. Your success is in your hands.

If you run a $6 million shop and you are doing defense and aerospace work, you are in even better shape because your business cannot be imported. Thus you are in even better shape than your commercial board shop counterparts who have no protected business.

So, what is my point? It’s simply that the success or failure of most board shops in this country is completely in their owners' control. The real factors they should be concerned with are simple business factors.

If you find yourself in this space, here is what you should to be concerned about:

1. Quality: Is your quality in the upper 90^th percentile, like 98–99%? Are your customer returns minimal, somewhere between next-to-nothing and nothing? Because if your quality is less than that, you are throwing your money away faster than you can make it. I can also safely assume that you are burning through customers as well. In this high-performance age, if your company is not performing at peak, then your customers are not going to stick around. As Ford likes to say: Quality is job one.
2. Delivery: Companies—your customers—need their boards on time, all the time. If you can’t do that consistently then you are going to lose customers at an alarming rate.
3. Price: Sorry, but we need to talk about price. I know that is tough to hear, but the price of something is based on what the market is willing to pay for it. It is not based on anything else. Our job as business owners is to provide a price that is competitive and, most importantly, marketable. By the way, if your quality and delivery are not where they should be, neither will your price. To compete in the world today, you must be as efficient as you can possibly be and that means there is no room for poor performance.
4. Service: Customers are going with vendors who are easy to work with. So much can be overcome by great customer service, including the competition. Ours is an industry whose customer service is down around the service level of the department of motor vehicles so it would not take much effort to out-service the competition!
5. Sales and marketing: You must tell everyone who you are and what you do, and you must have a clear and focused sales strategy.

Think about these five things. There is nothing difficult here. There is nothing extraordinary here. Everything mentioned above will only benefit your business and ensure that your company thrives in this economy.

And guess what? If everything mentioned above is working, you will not have to worry about the Chinese or your competitors or your demanding customers; you will be ahead of the game and running your own race to success.

It has become too easy to blame outside elements for the difficulties we face. Referring back to the beginning of this column, if you have a board shop that is currently doing $6 million and you want to get to $7 million a year, it is entirely up to you, based solely upon how well you run your business. Putting things in perspective, if you are trying to get $1 million more a year in revenue, that translates to a little over $83,000 per month. In a global marketplace, that is $60 billion a year; in a North American marketplace it is about $4 billion a year. So, your $1 million growth is entirely in your hands.

It doesn’t matter what the Chinese do, it doesn’t matter what your competition does, and it sure doesn’t matter what goes on in Washington. All that matters is what you do, how you perform, how you price, and how easy you are to deal with.

It’s only common sense.