Whether you are in the business of board fabrication or board assembly, the fact is that you are not building your own products. You are building your customers’ products which means that you are in the business of helping your customers be successful. The better your services are, the better their products will be, and […]
Manage Your Sales team Like You Would Manage A Sports Team
Managing a sales team is just like managing a sports team. You strive to put the best team on the field and then manage them to greatness. It means just like a sports team you must deal with all the team members as individuals figuring out how to handle each of them from the prima […]
Does Your Plant Look As Good As You Think It Does?
It’s all of those little things that make a big difference How good do you think your company is? How do you think you’re doing? What do you do well? What do you need to work on? What do you people think when they walk into your lobby? These are questions you should be asking […]
The Other Side Of The Story
We ended last week’s column with a group of designers from a high-tech company asking me the ignoble question, “Why do all PCB shops suck?” And, I promised, I would not only address that question but also explain why there are two sides to that story. First, let me say that the designers who asked […]
Book Recommendation – The Camino Way: Lessons in Leadership from a Walk Across Spain
A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu. The Camino Way: Lessons in Leadership from a Walk Across Spain By Victor Prince Copyright 2017 Amacom Price $21.95 Pages: 199 with Index What a story! I didn’t even know about the Camino Way until I read this book. Then I had to find out how reading about this […]
A Frustrated PCB Customer Speaks Out
I recently got an e-mail from a good friend of mine. He has been in the industry even longer than I have, and that’s a really long time. He works for one of the most high-end defense and aerospace companies in the world. His company has also used their technology base to branch out and […]
Five things Contract Manufacturers Can Do Right Now To Get More Business
Everyone is struggling to fill their factories these days, as the fight for more business heats up. It used to be that contract manufacturers had a good solid base of good customers, they could depend on year after year. Many of them were satisfied to pick up a couple of customers a year as their […]
Contract Manufacturing: Winning Those Big Accounts
Contract manufacturing is a service not a product. As CEMs, we are actually building someone else’s product, someone else’s baby. Our customers are putting the fate of their companies in our hands. If we build the product incorrectly our customers will be the ones to pay. In the end they are the ones who have their name […]
Marketing Your Contract Manufacturing Company
Does anybody know your name? Unlike PCB shops where there are now less than 200 left in North America, there are well over 1000 contract manufacturers of all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows the big guys from Celestica, to Flextronics, to Sanmina to Plexus all of them doing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, […]
Better Relationships With Your PCB Vendors Will Yield Better Boards
We have talked a lot in this column about how board shops should treat their customers. How they should try to get to know their customers and their needs. So now let’s switch things around and talk about how customers should treat board shops, how they should work with board shops to get the best […]