Hi Pistonring12:
Increasingly, you need business and finance knowledge to run such a capital intensive business successfully.
Be prepared to hire the expertise you will need to actually run the machines.
Be prepared also to have a few practical guys with experience in your inner circle to advise you on and relieve you of things like quoting, procurement, capital acquisition, resource management etc etc.
None of this needs to be formally set up with department heads and underlings and all that complicated and expensive stuff. but it increasingly all needs to be covered...initially by you and maybe one hire, but eventually by enough guys to be good enough that nothing important gets ignored.
I say all this because, in my opinion, the days of making a good living with a couple of machines in your garage are waning.
I won't say they are over, but they are definitely getting harder and harder to capitalize on, and the margin for survival in the face of major mis-steps is shrinking.
Back in the 1970's a well equipped toolroom had a manual lathe, a manual mill a manual surface grinder and all the bits and bobs to make it run.
A $50,000.00 investment (in the days of $10.00 per hour toolmaker salaries) would make you competitive with anyone except the big shops, and your skill as a maker could allow you to stand out and attract business.
It took ten weeks for pretty much everyone to build a basic mold back then...now your customers demand a 3 or 4 week turnaround, and there are lots of shops who can deliver, but they have amassed ten million in gear and twenty guys to do it.
So now, in the same business you cannot get away with such basic equipment, and you cannot compensate adequately with your personal skill (except in very limited domains), so you have to be prepared to spend a lot to get competitive capability, and that needs a different set of skills to succeed. (like business and financial skills)
If you look at the ratio of capital budget to salary in the toolroom example above, it was about 5:1 back then.
If you call an average toolmaker salary $50.00 per hour nowadays, that would imply a shop budget of around a quarter million in today's money.
You can't even get in the game for that anymore.
How good you were with the turntable on the manual mill could once define your place in a way it simply cannot anymore...almost anyone can buy a machine and a CADCAM setup and make stuff that used to take a lot of skill and experience to pull off.
Little CNC shops are everywhere, and increasingly, they are racing to the bottom if they have nothing more than a couple of toys and a hard worker slaving in the back on them.
They can all make the cool stuff, and purchasing agents know that, so the price and delivery squeeze has become relentless.
I have done this for decades: I deliver a special expertise to my customers and they claim to love me, but increasingly they are still flocking to China and getting OK stuff back in 2 weeks for not much more than I can buy the material for.
I now mostly fix the fuckups.
I'd never survive if I still had machine payments.
So the numbers increasingly do not add up to a comfortable living with that old school, simplistic business model.
You have to find a way to deflect the inherent risk of the big capital budget away from yourself, and increasingly your business has to perform to a high standard, to retain your customers.
That takes planning of a kind you do not learn when you take the CADCAM course or the "how to run my Haas" course.
Cheers
Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com
