The little startup company that could

If the little biomedical company I work for is going to be successful, the next couple of months will be watershed ones. We can no longer depend on investors who believed in us. The products we sell must generate a positive cash flow. We need to make products that generate the belief among customers that our product is worth buying because it meets their needs.

But bringing these products to the marketplace is no easy process. For every two or three steps forward, companies take at least one step back. In today's economy — with accelerated product development times and schedules and investors expecting quick returns on their investment, the entrepreneurial engineer must be able to do more than work harder. We must work faster and with increased focus to meet the expectations of all the parts of the company that depend on us.

The marketing department established a time frame for presenting our product to the marketplace months ago. Engineering knew exactly when this day would come. Still, we had to work late into the night to put together the final parts of our marketing prototypes, which included testing them to confirm that they worked well enough for our company to announce, "Our product is ready for sale."

The next morning — with little ceremony — the devices we so lovingly built were placed in the back of a station wagon to go to the industry's biggest trade show 250 miles away. It will be our one big chance this year to create excitement about our device.

As an engineer, I have always thought that product introductions at trade shows were excessively arbitrary. Still, marketing departments love them and use them regularly. Some companies, especially in the computer industry, even develop and promote trade shows for this very purpose.

As I write this article, the show has been under way for two days, and we have not heard any bad news. So, the engineering and manufacturing departments can only assume that everything is going well. If there were serious problems, our marketers would have called immediately and engineering would have tinkered so the product could be sold. If all goes as well as anticipated, we will get good news in a couple of days.

Soon, engineering and manufacturing will go back to work to resolve the final design, detail and manufacturing issues identified while building our marketing prototypes. There are several issues, most of them minor. Yet they will affect our ability to deliver a safe, reliable, cost-effective product to customers that meets their needs.

Already, we have presold 500 units. Deliveries began last month. As a result, making any changes now becomes crucial. We can take only one or two deep breaths before finalizing the design, so manufacturing here, and in Russia, can ramp up production and deliver our product to the marketplace.

I think we are capable. I think we will be successful.

 

— Niel Leon
Committee on Engineering
Entrepreneurship
leonn@asme.org

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