Product & Business Development the Hard Way!

September 2012 was an extremely busy time in my life. My company's customization business was starting to take root, I hadn't taken a paycheck in 10 months, and my business partner was not happy. Furthermore, my wife and I decided we were going to adopt!

I am not a trust fund kid. I didn't leave some corporate job that helped me sack away a bunch of money. I didn't have angel investors kicking down my door. I didn't take on huge loans, and I did not sell a previous company that was funding this endeavor. I was bootstrapping this thing and had everything riding on its success.

Ring ... ring ... ring goes my phone.

It was a vendor bringing us a customer that was in a pinch at the eleventh hour, and we were their "Hail Mary". We weren't their first call, and we were only called because I had recently pitched our customization services to the account rep.

They needed a vision system that would work in a kiosk at the airport to take pictures of peoples' faces and match them against passport photos. The system had to operate in extreme lighting conditions: Everything from back-lit applications with sunlight coming directly behind the person's head to front-lit applications with sunlight shining directly at the person's face. Super easy layup vision problem ... ??

In vision systems, lighting is typically 40% of the problem or solution. In this case, it was 90%.

Our team of four consulted for the day. We told the client the next day that we could do a feasibility study. They gave us two weeks and would pay a whopping $15k for our services. Great, I thought, just enough to make payroll!

After two weeks we showed a very crude demo of our algorithm that automatically changed the lighting intensity based upon the reflection of light on the person's face. We could also modify camera settings to achieve the optimum picture value. The team was impressed, and we were given $25k to come up with two prototypes in another two weeks.

Two weeks later we were given another task of building five units for further beta testing, and that was supposed to be the end of the contract. Two days go by and we got another call to see if we could build fifty units. We got the order!

At this time, the product had gone from Frankenstein to something that we had to scale for small batch production. In the middle of the build, the customer requested one hundred more units ... in two weeks! At the time, each unit was taking us eight hours to build, test, package, and ship. To achieve this, we either needed to hire more people or redesign the product to make it more manufacturable. Both options seemed impossible.

A week later, the customer called again. "Hey, we hate to do this to you, but we need to increase the order to 500 units, if you can't meet the timeline and quantity, we have to cancel our current order and go with a contract manufacturer. By the way, we need to reduce the cost and have the units UL and CE certified."

A lot of curse words came out of my mouth and my business partner just stared at me. What in the world were we going to do, I thought.

I told the customer we will do it, but with one exception. We get an upfront payment of 25% for retooling and delivery of the first 250 units in four weeks and the remaining 250 would be delivered two weeks later.

We got the deal and had a slough of hurdles in front of us.

1. We needed to hire a lot more people to build, package, test, etc. 28 people to be exact. Oh, and we had to make these hires in two weeks so that we could meet production demands.
2. We needed vendors to put us in the front of the line for product
3. We had to migrate to different manufacturers due to the production capacity. Most of the vendors we sourced were small and boutique.
4. We had to put processes in place that would ensure quality and repeatability.
5. We had to buy production stations. Where are we going to build these units? We only had a guy working out of a garage and an upstairs unit in an office building.

There were many more challenges than the list here and problems we didn't even know existed. But somehow we did it all.

We scaled in two weeks! We hired twenty eight people for various positions. We purchased new software and deployed it. We built production stations and rented the adjacent facility. We designed production manuals that technicians could pull up on a screen by using a barcode scanner. We ran manufacturing in two shifts starting at 7am and ending at midnight.

Our instructions were simple and visual based, since we had various levels of skill and communication styles across our team. I don't have a degree in engineering, vast experience in manufacturing, or a certification in project management. What I did have is an indomitable will and a lot of pressure for this to be a success.

We finished our builds and we were only a week late. We worked extremely long hours, consumed a ton of caffeine, and built a dynamic culture through it all. We delivered a total of 1726 units over the next 2 years.

I started Village B Consulting to help others with the knowledge that I have gained in running companies, building teams, and developing products. If I can be of help to you please click on the image below and book some time with me.