Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Nolan’s Notes: Finding Your Sweet Spot

I grew up in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, where I still call home. In my early years, the region’s economy was fueled by forestry, agriculture, and fisheries. Tektronix ruled the economic landscape, of course, and Nike was just emerging from the University of Oregon track and field program. Intel wouldn’t remake my hometown of Hillsboro, Oregon, for a few more years, so my upbringing was mostly farmland and fishing boats. My dad worked at Tektronix with a side gig operating a commercial fishing boat in the summer.

In the early ‘70s, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was filmed in Oregon, and a scene where the inmates at the mental hospital go AWOL for a day of fishing was filmed in Depoe Bay. This tiny, picturesque town, not much more than a pass-through on Oregon’s two-lane Highway 101, also has another claim to fame: the world’s smallest natural harbor. While my dad’s usual fishing base of operations was north, about 30 miles, if the salmon were biting down that way, he would trailer the boat, and we’d fish from the harbor in Depoe Bay.

When I was around 10 years old, fishing was an adventure, but the days were grueling. As you might expect, I quite anticipated a visit to one of the taffy shops in town. There, the sticky candy was made on worktables aptly stationed in full display in the store’s large windows, where anyone walking by could stop and watch.

When you walked inside the store, you instantly were hit with the sweet aroma, and a child’s eyes like mine bulged out at the rows and rows of candy, ready for anyone to reach in and grab. Candy was sold by the pound, and with the available white paper sacks, it was easy to fill them up with all your favorite flavors. The store didn’t sell anything else and it didn’t need to. It had found the exact formula to its success.

My visits to Depoe Bay simply weren’t complete without a bag of taffy on the bench seat as we drove out of town, my dad and I taking turns scrabbling around in the bag to find our favorite flavors.

The taffy shop is still there, almost entirely unchanged in all my years. Sometimes, when you find a niche that works, you just stick with it. Taffy is a staple in Depoe Bay and remains so today. But in Hillsboro, where I grew up, it has completely transformed from a sleepy population of 32,000 to a bustling hub of 120,000 and the home of Intel’s largest campus. The moral there is that risking change just may have a big payoff.

This month in SMT007 Magazine, we look at how you’ve found your sweet spot in the marketplace. The taffy shop knew its niche, but do you know yours? Turns out there’s a process to follow in identifying, refining, and pursuing your sweet spot:

• Audit your strengths: Look hard in the mirror and assess your competencies with brutal honesty.
• Understand market trends and gaps: Align your competencies with the high-growth sectors in the electronics industry. Go where the work is.
• Listen to the customer: Find out what your existing customers value most about your services. Find their pain points. Don’t be afraid to dig; sometimes the real pain point is buried under other concerns.
• Define your niche specifically: Take that information and laser focus on your sweet spot. The taffy shop kept its niche sharp and unflinching. You need to do the same.
• Build sticky value-added services: This seems counter to defining your niche, but it isn’t. Value-adds, which are adjacent to and complement your core niche, can create customer loyalty when they bring more of their manufacturing process to you.
• Test, refine, repeat: Test your newly defined sweet spot. Validate it with one new customer or a handful of projects. Make adjustments and if it works, scale it up.

In this issue, we showcase interviews with EMS companies that have had considerable success with finding their sweet spot and developing a healthy, growing business. In these interviews, we dig into how each company achieved the key parts of the process I’ve outlined. What they told us was quite insightful. Spoiler alert: Some take the taffy shop approach, and some strike out on a risky change.

Also in this issue, our columnists tackle a variety of topics. Jennie Hwang’s shares the first part of her experiences at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Tom Yang’s ongoing discussion of globalization looks at the value of digital inclusion in some of the world’s more remote locations. Nash Bell’s column discusses the confluence of end-of-life components and solderability, and Mike Konrad previews a cleaning and coating conference. Finally, Josh Casper dives into smart automation and Industry 4.0, a part of our shop floor infrastructure still very much evolving. Taking a double-dip in the magazine this month, Nash Bell dispatches an article considering some of the toughest rework challenges related to BGAs.

There was so much to cover on this topic, not all of it would fit in just one issue. So, look for bonus content to appear this month in the SMT007 Newsletter. If you’re not a subscriber to the I-Connect007 newsletters that speak to your interests, you should be; the subscription is free.

One of the reasons I love my job is hearing—and telling—your stories; they’re a perk of the job just like that taffy stop was one of the perks of being a kid working on a fishing boat. If something interesting is happening in your part of the industry, reach out. Good stories, like saltwater taffy, are best when shared.

This column originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of SMT007 Magazine.