Table of Contents
Hi there!
This post is the living document outlining how to start, launch, and grow an engineering and design consulting company. I’ll repeat, this is a draft!
Basically, consider this a business playbook for how to get it done. You may have noticed that at the time of its writing, I am not currently a 7 or 8 figure revenue-generating company. I am speaking into existence what I’ve been consistently nurturing, developing, building systems for, and constantly growing with respects to my relationships and the breadth of projects, so that one day this comes to fruition. I suppose this is the point right before I shift into hyperdrive.
In reflecting, my first bit of advice which comes to mind is having consistency. You must remain consistent in this field. There are many bigger fish in the same ocean. You can’t see them as sharks. You tapping into your skills while being consistent in them allows you to become a bigger fish. It is massively simple. But not at all easy. The simple part is taking the little step everyday in this act we call consistency. It’s extremely difficult when you look forward, imagining what it could be and comparing it to where you currently are; or worse, comparing yourself to the “after” of others’ work.
Apart from consistency, knowing who you are and what you want are essential. This may not be the right business for you. But chances are good that it is, if you searched the internet and found my humble website and post. The SEO gods have guided you well. So I hope you find value here. Remember, you can reach out to me anytime.
Scope
I built Mario Sultan Designs to operate as this type of business; an engineering and design consulting company. I personally specialize in rapid prototyping and development of products using 3D printing as the avenue to accomplish this.
I target small to medium manufacturing companies, who are always looking for ways to improve their processes or make them more efficient. 3D printing makes the imaginary, physical and tangible. And it accomplishes it relatively quickly, with less waste. My company takes advantage of the technology only to the extent that it is applicable to the needs of a customer.
Technical & Business Requirements
Design, CAD, access to skilled individuals, some sense of human psychology, how to sell
Validating the Idea
You could validate your idea by reaching out to people. Define your people define who it is that would benefit from your particular service while also imagining the scale in which it can grow. What I mean by this is the following. I had cat skills, and I would go so far as claim that I’m pretty good at 3-D modeling and 3-D printing. So I put an ad on Facebook marketplace (link) advertising that I can design in 3-D print to fix broken parts bring ideas to life, etc. for the consumer or regular person. It was essentially a B-2-C business. I realize that it’s really hard to scale this type of work for a direct consumer custom design model. It would just take too long to understand the needs of a person and most of the time the solid modeling was extremely difficult to create. So unless this person wanted to pay me $500 for replicating the remote, or I simply take a giant cut and compensation for the value I brought, it just was not worth it to either party.
It wasn’t until recently in an interview. I was in for a medium size manufacturing and engineering company here in Connecticut that I discovered the viability and potential value proposition of a B2B model.
Problem & Needs Definition
This is the premise. Currently manufacturing facilities can be slow or require additional steps in the manufacturing process that could suck away at their time manpower or money. So imagine a company that consults with these small to medium size manufacturing businesses identifies areas for potential rapid prototyping design and then deliver on that custom solution. The custom solution therefore becomes a matter of solving the same problem of efficiency, (saving a human, a step in a process without having to spend an obscene amount of money and time on manufacturing this solution in a different way). Every company will have different problems, but the solution would be the same basically for all of them.
This allows you to understand the business (assuming you are working with a similar business type and value offering), and you offer a similar solution. You aren’t having to reinvent the wheel with every consult.
Let’s define the type of business. I personally love to mind map using draw.io which is a program that allows you to create flow charts easily and can be shared or incorporated and many different application. How I would do this is start with the main bubble, which could be small to medium size businesses then move outwards to narrow down specific businesses and categories.
Frame all of it as an experiment. Thoroughly test a category and note your observations. Make adjustments, validate, and move on (either to another category if after enough validation, you come to the conclusion that it may not work).
Marketing
From my research and from my observations, custom design work, and rapid prototyping of any solution serves the needs of people. The who and how are the problems you need to determine and solve.
Your marketing is an essential component here. It’s not even a matter of who you talk to, but the manner in which you share your vision for your offering is what matters more. Allow me to explain. A person in need of a custom jig to help them automate a manufacturing process won’t know that they need this particular solution until it has been shown to them with enough specificity so to have them on their own understand their own solution. Unless you were in the business itself, it’s difficult to present the solution on its own.
Therefore, we as engineers and business-minded people must provide enough of an appetizerthat reveals to the client how they could benefit from us entering into their business. In the book, How to Be a Rain Maker, the authors mentions an important aspect of marketing – dollarize your impact. It is much more effective to mention how much money you are saving a company than it is to mention the benefits. If spending $500 on a custom solution yields an additional $5000 in revenue per week, then it makes the most logical (objective) sense to commit to your solution. Versus, listing all the benefits, which yields a subjective decision.
Human psychology dictates that humans hate being told that they have a problem, and we a third-party “has the magical fix to their problem.” So…
How then do we explain our offering?
This is the part of the living document that I will continue to build. The sun goes back to the question of how we sell. People don’t like to be sold things, yet we are sold things every day and we’re mostly OK with it.
For this type of business, I believe showcasing a “gallery of inspiration” tuned for the industry would serve as an effective way to show what you do, while also allowing a company to extrapolate their own thinking and ideas. “Hmmm, this looks similar to a machine and process I use. Maybe we can do something similar.” That’s the goal of this gallery of inspiration.
…still a work in progress 🙂