MikahB
New Contributor
Just joined this forum, glad to have finally found an active forum with lots of small business minds participating! I'm at an interesting point in the evolution of my business and wanted to hear some thoughts from other points of view. Trying hard to keep this from being a novel but there are a fair number of important points.
My company is a 100% B2B company that does design engineering work and private-label manufacturing for the automotive performance aftermarket. We are at that common tipping point where we have more work to do than we can get done but not enough profit to bring on another really good design engineer. 65% of our profit comes from selling parts, the rest from straight design work (where we do not end up manufacturing the parts). Only about 20% of my productive (read: not on the phone) time is used to assemble/package/ship parts with the rest being design time.
We are growing like crazy - in fact just got off the phone with another new, international client who wants to send us a ton of work immediately. This is good, but this is also the problem!
I have a client who has been persistent and creative in his attempts to hire me to work for his company which is in a similar space as mine though not competing. His company is well-established, financially backed (actively) by a 10-figure investor, and needs someone with exactly my skill set. He's finally made me an offer that would accomplish these long-term goals:
- Provide enough cashflow (in the form of salary and incentives) for me to bring on both a part-time design engineer (who I've been mentoring for a long time) AND some assembly help on an as-needed basis
- Provide an opportunity to cleave my younger brother - who would be a huge asset to my business - away from his high-paying corporate job. The company in question is hiring us both as a "super-team" package
- Allow me access to some technology that would be very helpful to my company but that we cannot, on our own, justify (roughly $200k investment). Turns out the company hiring us not only needs the same technology, but needs us to help them acquire it, run it and has (in writing) stated we have free access to all of it during the 16-hours per day the plant is not running
So, it removes all the current hurdles I have to getting more skilled people fully engaged in my own business. The caveat, obviously, is that a large chunk of my time will be taken up trying to modernize my clients facility.
Having looked at this long and hard, my conclusion is that it's worth it. I need to learn to have my business lean on other people besides myself, this will force me to do that while at the same time providing the capital I need to do so and then some. But, I imagine myself on Shark Tank standing in front of Mark Cuban and Mr. Wonderful explaining how in order to grow my business I am taking a full-time job, and the things they say in my imagination are not very nice.
So, would love to hear thoughts, questions, or stories if any of you have been in a similar situation. Thanks again and sorry for the looooong post!
My company is a 100% B2B company that does design engineering work and private-label manufacturing for the automotive performance aftermarket. We are at that common tipping point where we have more work to do than we can get done but not enough profit to bring on another really good design engineer. 65% of our profit comes from selling parts, the rest from straight design work (where we do not end up manufacturing the parts). Only about 20% of my productive (read: not on the phone) time is used to assemble/package/ship parts with the rest being design time.
We are growing like crazy - in fact just got off the phone with another new, international client who wants to send us a ton of work immediately. This is good, but this is also the problem!
I have a client who has been persistent and creative in his attempts to hire me to work for his company which is in a similar space as mine though not competing. His company is well-established, financially backed (actively) by a 10-figure investor, and needs someone with exactly my skill set. He's finally made me an offer that would accomplish these long-term goals:
- Provide enough cashflow (in the form of salary and incentives) for me to bring on both a part-time design engineer (who I've been mentoring for a long time) AND some assembly help on an as-needed basis
- Provide an opportunity to cleave my younger brother - who would be a huge asset to my business - away from his high-paying corporate job. The company in question is hiring us both as a "super-team" package
- Allow me access to some technology that would be very helpful to my company but that we cannot, on our own, justify (roughly $200k investment). Turns out the company hiring us not only needs the same technology, but needs us to help them acquire it, run it and has (in writing) stated we have free access to all of it during the 16-hours per day the plant is not running
So, it removes all the current hurdles I have to getting more skilled people fully engaged in my own business. The caveat, obviously, is that a large chunk of my time will be taken up trying to modernize my clients facility.
Having looked at this long and hard, my conclusion is that it's worth it. I need to learn to have my business lean on other people besides myself, this will force me to do that while at the same time providing the capital I need to do so and then some. But, I imagine myself on Shark Tank standing in front of Mark Cuban and Mr. Wonderful explaining how in order to grow my business I am taking a full-time job, and the things they say in my imagination are not very nice.
So, would love to hear thoughts, questions, or stories if any of you have been in a similar situation. Thanks again and sorry for the looooong post!
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