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—- Transcript ——————————-

Audio File: 2014 Feb 12 – Growing Montie Design or Your Business.mp3

Audio Length: 13:10 minutes

Hello, my name is Montie Roland and I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina. We’re a product development firm and we have core competencies in mechanical engineering and industrial design. And we, basically, take concepts and turn it into products that are ready to be manufactured. And then help clients take it through the manufacturing process to where there’s products on the dock.

So, one of the things about being a design firm is that we have to be responsive to clients, but at the same time, design is an industry that in some ways is very similar but other ways changes rapidly. As business conditions change, we have to change our business with it.

One of the things I’ve been doing for the last few months is to sit back and say – How do we grow to the next level? We’ve kind of been at a similar size for a little while and we’ve determined that we want to achieve some goals. And so, in the process of evaluating where we are, I also realized that, Hey, I need to grow as well. I think anytime the president of a company is not willing to grow, that company’s got problems. So, I’ve been taking classes and getting help from mentors and one of the companies that’s helped us a lot is a company called 360º Profit Masters. And so what they’ve done is they’ve helped us restructure our books and also mentored us through how to better look at our customer segments. And also how to restructure our books around the customer segments we’ve identified, that we serve. Which was definitely a challenging proposition to do for yourself. It’s one of those things. Doing it for somebody else is easy, but doing it for your own business is sometimes interesting.

So, one of the tools that we’re now exploring and working on how to implement is to start looking at our sales process in a more structured way. We have a process now that is very much focused on, you know, what are the client’s needs; how do we meet those needs; and what’s the cost. But, in the past few weeks, I’ve learned that maybe we need to look at this differently, because I think that sometimes it’s really easy just to focus on what you’re good at. And focus on things like, you know, how many hours of engineering for this and that. But, when it comes down to it, as part of the sales process that’s only part of the ballgame. So, we’ve got different sections of that sales process, and some things get done intuitively and are just standard practice. But, I think it’s important that we start to document that so that, A) our results are consistent, and it also protects our profitability (and I’ll explain why in a minute); and then also, too, as we grow that gives us the capability to train a salesman much easier.

So, when we think about a job, let’s say that we’re going to do a project where the client’s right down the street; it’s something we’ve done a hundred times before; we have a good relationship with the client, they always pay on time – everything’s just wonderful. So, that’s a job that we can jump in and knock out. Get a good idea of, you know, what the pitfalls are because we’ve been there before, and that’s great. But then there’s other times where we have jobs where there may be other criteria that become important to how the job is performed, which inevitably affect the bottom line and should be considered in the quoting process. So, for example, issues might range from, you know, concerns about payment, to where the job’s located. If we’re doing a project and I’ve got to put four guys in the Himalayas for six months, there’s a c