Podcast: Organic Growth vs Marketing

Organic Growth vs Marketing

[Transcript]

Audio File: 2014 Feb 24 – Organic Growth vs Marketing.mp3
Audio Length: 15:19 minutes

Hello, my name is Montie Roland. I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina.

I wanted to see if we could spend a few minutes chatting about the role of organic growth in the growth-year product versus the role of marketing.

At Montie Design, we develop products for a variety of clients from electronics packaging of electronics and applications like high reliability rack mount applications, such as a data center, all the way down to wearable electronics. So we get to see a lot of different products go through.

We also have a mix of products in our portfolio which some are B-to-B (or business to business) products and the others are B-to-C (or business to consumer) products. The B-to-C portion of our portfolio has grown. And so that’s a something that originally didn’t push for. That’s kind of just the way that portfolio has changed over time as the opportunity mix changed. But, so, we also have a lot of products that we design and manufacture ourselves. And they’re called Montie Gear. So, the Montie Gear products are consumer products that we sell directly to outdoorsmen. And they may relate to slingshots; they may relate to camping equipment; shooting; or archery.

We have an approach to our marketing in Montie Gear that has changed over time. For the first four years, we relied almost exclusively on organic growth, and fueled that growth by using a test-and-evaluation program where we identified writers and bloggers and folks and we got products in their hands so they could write about it; make videos about it on YouTube, what have you.

So now what we’ve tried to do is to supplement that program with marketing and advertising. So, it’s very, very important to remember that, as far as it goes, bang for the buck, sending out a press release with some images and getting a magazine to write about that – there is no better bang for the buck, period. It’s just . . . it just works. Advertising is a long term commitment. You’ve got to stick with it. And you’ve got to tweak it. So not only are you paying for those ads, you’re also trying to develop some sort of metrics to gauge the response so that you can actually have those ads pay for themselves and give you a return on investment.

And by selecting good venues that apply to your product, you can definitely find that return on investment. But it takes a good bit of work.

There’s a failure on the part of a lot of organizations, especially small, to rely too heavily on the concept of “I’ve the greatest products in the world and people will beat down my door to it”. Even if you have the greatest product in the world, and people are beating on the door, you’re probably going to still have to put a lot into commercializing that product – getting it out in the market; getting it in a format the market will accept. If you have the greatest product in the world, you may have this very broad patent, but now in order to get someone to write you a check, you still need to have that product in a format or commercialized so that the customer will say I want X-number of units. And that takes a lot of work. There’s a common misconception in smaller companies that once we get it to a point, someone will just buy us and go on. And that does happen. It happens a good bit. You get your product to a point and at some point a company buys you and maybe you can go retire.

Now, the value of your concept and later product and later manufacturing goes up almost exponentially as you get farther along in the process. So the value of a concept is pretty close to zero. The value of a concept with a prototype and a patent goes up dramatically. And then the value of a concept plus a patent, plus manufacturing, plus sales – and brisk sales, growing sales – then all of a sudden, that takes another leap in value. So, what you want to do is figure out where you want to be on that curve. And it may be that you want to be in it for the long term and you want to manufacture and you want to go work and have trucks show up at the shipping dock and ship product; and that may be very gratifying; have some number of employees and even with the headaches – if you have good employees you have less headaches, by the way – you end up with, you know, something you can do for the rest of your life. On the large company side of it all, large companies traditionally have really not pushed organic growth; they’ve pushed marketing-based growth, because they need results quickly. So if you’re Chevrolet, and you have a new car, they’re going to do a mixture. They’re going to provide press releases and pictures and press days. And then they’re going to advertise the daylights out of it. So for a small organization, you spend, maybe, seventy percent towards organic growth, and thirty percent towards traditional marketing and sales (and I’m kind of pulling these numbers out of thin air); and then your counterpart, who’s a larger company, may spend five percent on organic growth and ninety-five percent on marketing.

The problem with organic growth is that you can’t control it. You can push it a little bit by getting product out there for people to write about. You can have events and other things. But it’s still . . . you got to have the right products at the right time in front of the right people, as far as to write about it, to talk about it, to grow. Whereas with marketing, if you do a good job with sales and marketing, then you can drive that growth in way that you couldn’t with just organic. So that is an important distinction because it relates back to what your goals are. If you need to be selling two million cars a year, and you need to be up at that rate in three months, then you need to do everything you can to get the word out about that car. You need to have an organic component. You need to have press days. You need to have a valuation unit out for press and editors and drivers and everybody to test. And you need to be spending a whole lot of money on advertising. If you got time to let it grow more organically and wait on these things, then maybe you spend less on advertising. And maybe you’re happy with a much lower growth and a lower return on your investment.

And this is especially true if you’re a small shop; you have a lower capital investment. And your cash requirements are, you know, small, then maybe that’s perfectly the way to go. And there’s probably something in-between for everybody’s company. You know, where do you fall? We’re not, obviously . . . very few companies the size of General Motors. So, you know, they’ve got a mixture that works for selling cars. But a smaller company’s going to have a slightly different mixture. But I think it’s important to understand that you’ve got to push out in multiple directions.

Now, when you think about marketing, there’s large scale marketing and then there’s guerilla marketing. Guerilla marketing is something that has been pushed by a guy by the name of Jay Levinson. So, there’s a book called Guerilla Marketing. And one of his concepts is that one out of three times an ad passes your face, you actually see it, at some level. And then it takes seven times of that ad passing your face before you make a buying decision. So, what that means is that you’ve got to see that ad twenty-one times, or have it pass your face, before you’re to the point that the average person is ready to make that buying decision. So, depending on the venue of the ad, then that may mean months, or even years. Now, if you’re buying commercials on Hulu or NBC and they are flashing past your face the same commercial ten times during a program – okay; then you watch it for two-and-a-half weeks and if you’re going to buy, you’re going to buy. But, for the most part, most advertising is much slower paced than that. So, you know, magazine ads come out; other things. So, even your organic growth push, just because someone sees something once in a magazine that’s got a glowing review, it still may take twenty-one times before someone sees a review about your product before they actually go buy. So, I think there’s a similar approach. I think now I do think that it’s slightly less if it’s a trusted source. So, if an author they trust greatly says you should have one of these, then maybe that number’s significantly less than twenty-one. And of course it’s graded on a curse, so . . . you know, there’s some number of people that are going to go, “Yeah, oh, I like what this guy’s saying about this; love the product. Let me call and order it first time.” But I think the bulk of your sales still is going to come from that similar curve where someone sees it twenty-one times before they buy.

And at that point, it’s twenty-one times before they start researching to buy, maybe. Because one of the trends that has happened over the past few years is there’s much, much more of an emphasis placed by consumers on checking reviews before buying.

So I hope this has kind of explained some of these differences between an organic model and an advertising-based model, you know, where you’re looking at marketing as something you spend money to do, or directly spend money. Because if you give out samples of product you’re still spending money because you’re losing the ability to sell that and you’re giving away that product – the cost to manufacture it, the cost to ship it, the cost . . . figure out who to place it with; the cost of developing that relationship with that writer or editor. So, either way you’re spending money. The question is it’s just the magnitude and how you go about it. And I think it takes a good mix. I think smaller organizations tend to push way too hard on the organic portion and then larger organizations look a lot harder to find the mix between sales (which is actually someone going out and selling that product), marketing (which is exposing that product to the world), and then organic marketing (which is relying on others to expose it for you). So, it’s definitely a mix. You want to consider that mix. If you totally abandon part of that mix, then you may be not getting the best bang for your buck. And that’s the same thing, too. If you have an idea that you’re turning into a prototype and a patent; and then you want to get that idea to where you can sell it, a lot of time you need a reference design. And a reference design is where you’ve got a product that’s buildable, that you can give someone as a template for them building their own product based on your technology. And so at that point what you’re doing is you’re marketing your technology, and even if you’re going to license it, having that reference design is a big help. Because you’re giving the person’s licensing the ability to go out quicker, or more quickly, and promote that product, because they’re got something that they’re going to . . . it’s more of a product and less of just some piece of intellectual property. So the farther you can get along that curve of concept, prototype, patent, manufacturing, sales – then, the easier it is to license or sell that concept or that product, or that patent.

So, I hope this has been beneficial. Hope y’all have a great day. Montie Roland, signing off.

 

END AUDIO

Podcast: Giving The Go Ahead To A New Product

Giving The Go Ahead To A New Product

———– Transcript —————————

Audio File: 2014 Feb 12 – Giving The Go Ahead To A New Product.mp3
Audio Length: 10:10 minutes
Hello, my name is Montie Roland with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina. We’re a product development firm with core competencies in mechanical engineering and industrial design.

One of the interesting things that happens working with clients from bigger companies or medium-sized companies – or even smaller ones that are, you know, are growing – is that we’ll design a . . . whatever. And so we’ve designed this project, we’ve gotten to know our contact at that client, and one day after a design review that client looks across the table and says, “You know . . . I’ve got some stuff I’ve been working on in my basement”. It’s interesting that it’s very likely for a client that’s in charge of – or enabling; in charge of, also – product development for his company often will have something that they do on the side. And it’s interesting; so they may enjoy their job and they work very hard at it; at the same time, when they talk about the thing they’re making in their garage, there’s usually this big smile. And so, then what happens is they look at us and say, “That’s why I respect what you did so much with Montie Gear; because I know how tough it is”. And Montie Gear’s our product line that we created four years ago of our own products. We manufacture them; we sell them; we distribute them; we maintain the website . . . well, Daniel helps us. But, so it’s our own products, though. And it’s become kind of this company fascination. But, we’ll have clients that have this emotional connection to our Montie Gear products. Maybe it has nothing to do with the products; it’s just the fact that they really like coming up with new stuff. And so they see us doing it and having a good time and it’s a common situation that we’re both having a good time doing new products.

And so, there’s a couple of thoughts I want to throw at you. And we’ll talk about it from the perspective of an entrepreneur, but this also can apply from the perspective of a big company. Because, if you look at a big company as an organism, some of the same thought processes, many of the same thought processes, apply. They’re modified in some ways but, at the basic level they’re pretty similar.

So, one of the first thought processes is to go after the whole enchilada. It’s go big or go home. Well, the good side about that is that if you go big and you win big, then you profit big. And so, that’s a good thing. So if you go for a product where you’ve stretched what you can do or what your company can do, and it’s a product that can change the market or can take over a market or can grab market share, then Woo Hoo! That can be a big winner because the upside to that is that you can have some big profits. The downside is that you’ve invested a lot in it and you’ve also not invested in other products. Now, form an entrepreneur standpoint, we’ve had one single owner, single employee companies where the owner of the company said, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to go big. I’m going to injection mold this. I’m going to sell these all over the country” and, you know, “Either help me or get out of my way”. And so, the one I’m thinking about at this moment had the funds to back it up. He had the money in the bank to do what he needed to do, and so, he wrote checks. We helped him out. He did other stuff and now he’s got a product that’s starting to take off like crazy. So the upside is going to be huge for him, I think. Good product. Great salesman. Good attitude. Thinking about the business. And thinking about, you know, how he’s going to make all this happen on a big scale and, hey, let’s . . . we helped him push.

And so, we have other clients – and like I said, this can apply to an entrepreneur or to a company – where they’re not in a position yet, for whatever reason, to go for the big score. And so for them the medium-sized score or the smaller score is a much better option. Maybe because of cash flow; maybe because of other resources. Maybe because of time resources. Maybe they’re very business doing something else. So if they go after this major product, then it may take years to get there because they got so much on their plate. Well, the other possibility is to go after a bunch of smaller products, or smaller, I should say, lower effort products. And, then that gets them into that new market. That gets them experience in that market. And one nice thing about that is if you’re tightly resource-constrained, then that experience can help you make wise use of that money by having a less feature-rich product; a simpler product. Maybe instead of having this medium-scope project, you say, “I’m going to do something that we can do in the next eight weeks.” Get that out there; start selling it; see what happens; get some experience. And that’s a call you’ve got to make. You know, we have clients that are going to go for the big score; and that’s what they need to be doing. They’ve got their resources; they’ve got the people; they’ve got the time; they’ve got the talent; and they’ve got the motivation. And we just help them do that. And we have other clients that are much, much better off coming at it from much more of a cottage industry approach. And so, in this case, they’re going to put less capital out and they’re going to sell less. And you know the upside – and maybe two orders of magnitude smaller – but at the same time, they’re not risking other things to do it.

And so that’s kind of where you have to decide is that, you know, what are you going to do? You just got to man up and go. And, I think the trick there is there’s some things to consider. And this is kind of the podcast from a little while back. Where, you know, do you have the funds to do it? Do you have the time? Do you have the energy? Do you have the motivation? Do you have the people? And do you have the people that are in the right spot? And so, there again, this is why all products live or die by the management team. Because that’s where you can make good decisions or bad decisions that, you know . . . if you’re not careful, you’ll make a decision that means you have a product that requires so much effort, it takes you so long to get there, that then there’s a risk you’ll never get there. I would say that with product development, generally, the longer it spreads out, the less likely it is you’ll ever get there. Now, there are exceptions to that, but for the most part that’s true.

So, I hope that you can take something away from this. And, look at it from the standpoint of right-sizing that product for your capabilities, your resources. And there’s nothing to say that if you do a simple product, you can’t come back with a complex product. So, just kind of decide. Think it through.

We’re happy to help you all the way through. Big. Small. Little. Massive. Disruptive. Incremental. We’re the engine that helps you push. And we get in, we help you push and we help you take it from that concept to the shipping dock. And we fill in the holes that you need along the way to get you there. Sometimes they’re small gaps; sometimes they’re big gaps. But, our job is to get in there and push.

I hope this helps out. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to give me a call, shoot me an email, visit our website. It’s 1-800-722-7987 – or – 919-481-1845. montie (M-O-N-T-I-E)@montie(M-O-N-T-I-E) .com is my email. Or just visit our website – www. montie.com. Thanks. Hope you have a great day. Bye-bye.

END AUDIO

Podcast: Design Process Steps Funnel

Design Process Steps Funnel

[Transcript]
Audio File: 2014 Feb 25 – Design Process Steps Funnel.mp3
Audio Length: 12:01 minutes

Good Morning. My name is Montie Roland with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina. I’m also with Montie Gear in Morrisville, North Carolina, as well.

Montie Design is a full-service product development firm. We provide everything from taking your concept all the way to a fully designed, fully engineered, ready-to-manufacture product, and helping you get that on the shipping dock. We can provide a value from the engineering side, from the industrial design side, to the project management aspect, and also from product validation, all the way to introducing you to contract manufacturers, and as-needed service liaison between your organization and the contract manufacture to make sure that it’s a win-win for everybody.

The design process has several steps. Those steps are intended to create a funnel. That funnel helps you to minimize the cost of the design process by starting out with a lot of ideas and a lot of concepts and boiling them down to the concept that is going to be the winner in the marketplace.

So, the next question becomes, well, how do you do that? So, if you use the funnel metaphor, with the funnel you’ve got a wide top. Let’s say you’re putting oil in your car. So you’ve got oil coming out of a jug, which is similar to the thought of ideas coming out of your staff, your constituents, your customers, and your stakeholders. And so, you pour that oil into that funnel, and the idea behind the funnel is you’ve got a big target. So all the oil you pour in starts running down the funnel. Well, the same thing; what we want to do is capture those great ideas, capture those concepts – written, verbal, unstated – capture those rules, because you know the design of your product has a lot of rules. And that’s because you’re in a market space where you have experience. So, as you put that experience to use, those rules have value because you don’t want to repeat any missteps in the past and you want to build on successes in the past.

So, what we do is the first step is to do research. There again, the research is akin to putting a second jug of oil in there. So we want to do research, understand what the market’s about. And then also make sure that we’re completely oriented to your market, and hopefully do a lot of the nuances of your market – some of that we have to rely on you; others, we can look at trends and research. So, that design research is the first step. And then the second step is to start pulling out concepts, thoughts, what we call “space shuttle ideas”, and do some ideation. And the initial ideation gets kind of everybody thinking, but I don’t want to pin any super solid concepts down yet; just get everybody thinking. And then what we want to do is do some brainstorming. So, now we’ve done some research, made a few sketches, enough to throw some stuff up on the wall and chew on it. And then we use brainstorming. And brainstorming is where there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Most people use a brainstorming session as a planning session; and it’s not. It’s a good way to ruin your brainstorming. Because some of the crazy ideas don’t work exactly as stated, but may lead to some really solid innovations. So, we brainstorm. Take that brainstorming results and then start doing ideation. Now, one of the steps that I just blew right by here as I was talking is we also want to create a style board. And we do want to do that in the beginning. That’s so that we can understand what you’re thinking. And a style board is to get your thoughts. With a style board, you bring us images, pictures, magazine clippings, polaroids; what have you. And show us things that you like. And, also, concepts that may be difficult for everybody to convey that doesn’t do this for a living, or just may be difficult to convey or it’s just a lot quicker with a photograph. For example, you may see a device on a piece of machinery. Take a picture, bring it to us, and say, I like how this device works; this could work great in our application. Or, I like the color; I like the shape; it could be the rear end of the Audi TT. Wow, these proportions are nice. So, we take that style board and we use that in our ideation. And we’ll also probably create one of our own. So, the brainstorming and the style board are very valuable tools.

Now, for some products, we need to do a personalities and personas session, where, kind of like a style board, we want to dig out a vision. So, with personalities and personas, we’ll design a product for an individual customer, and then we’ll go on to do this for a suite of customers that are very different – demographically, what they’re looking for, what they earn, who they are. You know, in some cases with some products we’ll throw in race and religion because there may be a cultural influence that we want to capture in our product development. And, yes, it’s important that you don’t design products for vanilla people, because vanilla people just don’t exist. So, what we have to do is look at the culture where our product’s going to be sold. If it’s a worldwide product, then we have to look at multiple cultures. What we don’t want to do is to create a product that won’t sell well in a given country because we’ve violated some cultural norm, and that’s really important.

So, then, we’re making sketches. We take those sketches and we review them. And it’s important to spend a lot of time looking and thinking about those initial sketches, because this is the inexpensive part of the project, relatively. Sketches are quick. So then we take those; we narrow a whole wall full of sketches down to a few concepts; work on those concepts. And the whole time we’ve been creating this design buffet. So what we want to do is create all of these concepts and all of these pieces, and then we can pick and choose from those pieces and some of those may integrate well together in the final product. So, there again, we’re starting out with a lot of ideas and then we’re narrowing it down as we go. So now we’ve got sketches of a bunch of ideas; we’ve narrowed that down to, say, one, two or three; and then we take those and refine those. And then we do a review again. Then narrow that down. So, the whole time, everybody’s getting a chance to provide input. If possible, we want to create a massing model. A massing model is a simple prototype that just reflects size and shape – simple, inexpensive, quick, you know, blue foam type prototype. Not something you show to the CEO unless he’s really hands-on. But something you can pass around between the product manager and the engineers and just in a, kind of, a closed circle of review.

And then we take that and narrow it down to one concept. Take that one concept and refine that concept. Get it signed-off. So, everybody needs to sign off, all the stakeholders, that this is the concept we want to move forward with. We take that concept and we go to the engineering stage. In the engineering stage we work out the nuts, the bolts, where everything goes. It’s important during the engineering stage to maintain the vision so that the engineers don’t lose track of what’s the aesthetic vision, what are the values, the, you know, it’s not just a collection of specs and bolts and nuts; it’s a product for a living, breathing people.

Somewhere in that stage we want to build a prototype. We want to build prototypes as soon as possible and as often as possible. So, once we have an industrial design concept and we’re starting to commit this to a solid model, a lot of times its good to build a cruder prototype, but one that’s actual size that may have some of the functionality as we’re going through the engineering process. At the end of the engineering process we want to build a functional prototype; maybe even an alpha unit. We’ve made drawings; we’ve gone out for quotes, created a bill of materials. As early in the process we want to start our bill of materials so that we’re starting to get an idea of what this is going to cost in production. From there, we transition to manufacturing. Make those introductions – Who’s going to make your product? Are you going to assemble it yourself? Is it going to come in a box, ready to go, from a contract manufacturer? We got to think about packaging. We may need to design you some packaging. Got to think about – Is it shipped over the Internet? Or is this a point-of-sale type product, where we need to have point-of-sale packaging?

And so we work through these issues and these challenges and opportunities, and create for you this product. And those are, in a nutshell, the basic steps. If you’re a Fortune 100 company, or an entrepreneur that’s selling your second product, you’re going to follow the same steps – maybe not as formally, but in general – you’re going to follow those same steps. As you can imagine, a change on a sketch early on is inexpensive; a change after you’ve fully engineered the product gets more expensive; and a change after you’ve started producing it is painful. So, what we want to do is pull out that vision; we want to get the stakeholders to weigh in, make sure that important parts of the product and those aspects are fully realized; and we don’t trip over something. Like, for example, an unknown requirement. So, by going through these steps, we minimize the risk of that unknown requirement popping up. And that’s one of the reasons you want to prototype early because usually when you lay something on the table, some of those unstated, understated or just not known products requirements start coming out.

So I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to give me a call – 1-800-722-7987. It’s Montie Roland. Or, montie (M-O-N-T-I-E)@montie(M-O-N-T-I-E).com. Or www.montie (M-O-N-T-I-E) .com is our website.

I hope you have a great day. I hope this is beneficial. Montie Roland, signing off.

END AUDIO

Podcast: About Montie Design

About Montie Design

Montie Design was founded in 2006 by Montie Roland (pdf resume, word, html), a practicing engineer looking for an outlet for his desire to design and engineer great products. Montie Design moved to Morrisville, NC in 2007 to add additional space and locate closer to customers in the Research Triangle area.

As Montie Design has grown, we have been fortunate to work on a variety of awesome projects in diverse markets from electronics to sporting goods. One quarter we’re designing rackmount equipment to go in data center. Another project, we find ourselves designing an environmental test chamber for Aberdeen Proving Grounds to test equipment before it goes out to the warfighter. We’ve created consumer products like the Invisi-ball and the Fog Thief. This type of variety is great because no two projects are ever the same.

Look to us for help with:

  • Mechanical Engineering / Product Engineering / Product Development
  • Industrial Design
  • Prototypes
  • Electrical Engineering / Firmware / PCB Layout
  • Consultation on Product Viability
  • Project Management
  • Product / Brand Management

Our President has this crazy passion for designing equipment to make life in the outdoors more fun and more comfortable. This passion was put in motion in 2009 when we started the Montie Gear product line. This was originally started as our own skunkworks for fun. In 3-1/2 years it went from a few concepts to a six figure a year operation. Today Montie Gear is a separate company and has over 30 unique products. While we are very passionate about designing products for camping, shooting and the great outdoors, we stand ready to put that same enthusiasm and knowledge to work designing and engineering great products for you. If you are looking for a shooting rest or slingshot, please www.montiegear.com.

There are several areas where we really stand out with the services that we provide.

Designing and Engineer Low-to-Medium Volume Products

Montie Design excels in the difficult area of designing low and medium volume products. We are experts at balancing capital / tooling expenses with product costs. With decades of experience in product engineering, we are ready to deploy our process and move your product from concept to market.

Electronics Enclosures and CFD / Thermal Analysis

The design phase is critical to keep electronics cool, avoid EMI / EMC issues, and predict thermal issues. We perform thermal analysis in-house using state of the art CFD (computation fluid dynamics) tools for accurate and reliable results.

Outdoor Equipment

We enjoy building rugged equipment for outdoor sporting and downrange applications with experience in shooting sports such as firearm accessories and slingshots. Camping, hiking, shooting and backpacking are passions of ours. We pour that passion into your product! This includes designing accessories for firearms, military, tactical and slingshots.

Gathering Social Reviews for Clients

We connect your new product to active bloggers, writers, and lead users to allow those experts to lend their credibility to your product. This is vital, because most customers now check internet reviews before purchasing. We can assist you in creating this base of reviews that are so critical for customers.

Strong Vendor Network

Take the risk out of receiving your prototype on time! Our great vendors, that we have successfully worked with for years, allow us to extend great service. Our responsive vendors provide a range of services that include waterjet cutting, rapid machining, rapid sheetmetal, paint, powder coat, rapid prototyping, rapid tooling and CNC machining. If we can’t do in-house, we generally have a local vendor that can respond quickly and help us make your prototype, or limited production run, a reality.

Sustainability Analysis Tools

Our easy-to-understand report shows your customers exactly where you stand when it comes to sustainability. There are no difficult to understand metrics. Our common sense approach will update your customers on the success of your product sustainability.
Read more at https://montie.com/#U6K8ukfuzCG59KDV.99

[Transcript]
Audio File: 2014 Feb 17 – About Montie Design.mp3
Audio Length: 11:08 minutes

Hello, my name is Montie Roland. I’m the president of Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina. I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce you to Montie Design.

Montie Design is what we call a full-service design firm. We provide mechanical engineering, industrial design, and we also build prototypes. There are also requirements that we need to fulfill for electrical engineering and software development and firmware development. And so we can help with that as well.

Our core competency is those first three – mechanical engineering, industrial design and prototyping. What we do is fill in gaps. We take your project and we go from an estimate to a completed job. Usually a kind of a workflow, when it comes to a project, goes through several stages. The first stage is the information gathering and understanding. Well, what we want to do is understand what you need us to accomplish so that we can put together a proposal. And that proposal is usually an estimate with stages to it. Sometimes we work against an estimate on a time-of-materials basis, and other times we work as a firm fixed price.

Projects go from, you know, creating that estimate to . . . the next stage is usually the industrial design stage. The industrial design stage is where we sit down, work with you to understand your vision. And then take that vision and commit it to concepts on paper. Sometimes those are hand drawn sketches; sometimes those are computer generated assets. But what we want to do is take your vision and pluck that vision out and then get it down on paper so we understand it. Then we also want to take our understanding of other industries and see where we can bring other techniques, other technologies and other approaches to bear. So what we’re trying to do there is to make sure that your product has the benefit of the knowledge that we’ve gained over the years doing projects for other people.

And that way you’ve got a broad perspective on your next product. We want to look and see what, you know, what are people doing in your industry and what are people doing across other industries. Bring that into the product development process so that your product is robust, fits the market, and also, you know, we’ve looked to see where we can bring value to your product and to your customer by bringing in other technologies and other approaches and other thoughts.

So, we take that; generate sketches and additional assets, depending on the project. And then we may build what’s called a “massing model”. And a massing model’s a prototype where it’s really only meant to show size and shape and just general, is it the right size. So, you can hold it. It’s usually not functional, but it gives you a feeling; you can actually put it in your hands, turn it, show it to people. A lot of times what that also does between that and the sketches and the renderings, compare that to your spec or, if need be, we can develop that spec for you. And once you put something down on the table, that’s also when the unwritten requirements come out. Because that’s when someone says, “Hey, Montie. We need to do this” or “No, this can’t be more than two inches tall” or twelve inches or one-six pounds or it needs to do that. And those undocumented requirements are understated requirements then have this opportunity to flow out; we can capture those early on because finding out that the product didn’t perform as advertised at the end of the project is not good. So, we want to capture that in the beginning so we build in success from the front.

 

We go from there to an engineering phase. As soon as we can we want to build a prototype. In the engineering phase we take our mechanical engineers, start making solid works, solid models. Testing those models with computer-aided tools like finite element analysis or computational fluid dynamics (or CFD) for airflow and thermal analysis. We use that to, I guess, prototype digitally and then pretty quickly we want to build a mock-up. And depending on the project and the scope, some mock-ups may be to test a particular thing; for example, airflow. We might build a mock-up that’s aimed completely at testing airflow to verify and validate our CFD results.

So, then we go through there and build models in the computer (SolidWorks). And then build a prototype. And as we go forward our prototypes, you know, the cost of these prototypes increases. Obviously, if you’ve got a block of foam that someone worked on for an hour its much less expensive than if you have, you know, a fully functional, fully developed engineering-grade prototype that tests out functionality, aesthetics, manufacturing concepts. So we want to match the prototype to your needs, or the needs at that point. There again, so we want to make sure that we’re containing costs where we need to. And make sure that we’re providing you with high value for the money you’re spending.

So, build a prototype. Test that prototype. Make any adjustments to the design based on that testing. And then go out for quotes. So we go out for quotes and come back with a costed bill of material. So you now know what it’s going to cost to build your product and production.

So, we’ve added some tremendous value in several areas here. One is that we’re helping you to leverage our relationship with vendors and component manufactures, contract manufacturers. So we’re taking our relationships, introducing you to the people you need to be introduced to. And then also working with them to generate this costed bill of materials that tells you what it’s really going to cost to manufacture your product at the quantities you want to sell it at. And that’s something we’re good at. That’s something we bring a tremendous amount of value to the table with. Because of those relationships, because of our understanding of how to make this happen, and also, too, to help save you money because you’ve got folks that are on your side (us) and helping you work through questions with vendors and contractors. And so we’re putting our experience to use. And also, you may have all this experience in-house. At the same time, it may be what we’re simply doing is providing a relief for your staff, so they can be doing other potentially higher-value activities, or things that they’re better at, and then we can work on the things we’re good at and get those through your pipeline quicker, and to where they’re on the shipping dock and you’re selling them and you’re adding to your bottom line.

So, at the end of the day, our job is to help you drive towards improving your bottom line. We want to have products that are robust and that are profitable and that are manufacturable. That’s Montie Design. We take you through that process. Our job is to serve you and help you turn that next product concept into that next product winner.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to give me a call – it’s Montie Roland, 1-800-722-7987. Visit us on the web – www. montie.com. Or shoot me an email – montie (M-O-N-T-I-E)@montie(M-O-N-T-I-E) .com. And my staff, as I say, we’re here to serve you; do a good job for you, and add a tremendous amount of value to your product development and engineering process. Please give me a call and let’s talk about that project that’s on your desk, or the one that’s going to be on your desk soon, and let’s make your life a little easier and your company more profitable. Montie Roland, signing off.

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