[Elecraft] Big Rigs?

[N2EY at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/9/07 1:41:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
forums at david-woolley.me.uk writes:

> N2EY at aol.com wrote:
>  
> > Many good companies have been damaged or even destroyed by trying 
> 

(to grow too fast)


> There are also problems associated with growth at any rate. The biggest 
> of these is that it generally forces you either to become a B2B 
> (business to business) company or a mass market company, neither of 
> which are compatible with supporting niche consumer products.  It also 
> tends to result in extreme industrialisation of the support process, 
> i.e. the use of low skilled staff working from scripts.
> 

The trick is to stay just big enough to do the job. 
>  
> > There's also the fact that the existing Elecraft product line isn't going 
> > away, and needs to be supported all through this time. 
> 
> However, if the company becomes too big, the venture capitalists' 
> management consultants will almost certainly insist that support for it 
> is dropped, as it is incompatible with the high volume, mass market 
> organisation that you need to be big.  (That will also happen if the 
> company gets taken over.)
> 

Which means keeping the company just big enough to do the job.

Also, most small companies that succeed were founded by folks who have the 
right mix of business and product/design smarts. Too often, if a company grows 
too fast, the founders wind up leaving the product/design stuff to others 
because of the business demands. 

> Although the analogy isn't perfect, consider Apple, which was built on 
> the basis of Steve Wozniak's ability to play tricks with minimal 
> hardware, but he dropped out in favour of Steve Jobs when it got big, 
> and what one now has is essentially a fashion, rather than engineering, 
> based company.
> 

Sure.

But consider what has happened to PC hardware, particularly processors and 
RAM. The price has imploded while the performance has exploded. The need for 
machines that can do a lot with limited hardware is limited to special 
applications now.  


> Big companies can't compete with Elecraft because they are big companies!
> 
> 

Exactly

73 de Jim, N2EY


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