A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu Find the Fire: Ignite Your Inspiration and Make Work Exciting Again By Scott Mautz Copyright 2017Amacom Price $24.95 Pages: 246 with Index An unbelievably entertaining read This is a fabulous book for when you get those blahs! You know what I’m talking about, those times when you just cannot get […]
10 Things Great Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) Companies Do
The most important space in electronics these days is contract manufacturing. As more of our OEM’s become innovation, and marketing companies, they look to the contract manufacturers to build their products. Just about every company from Apple, to Intel, has yielded the manufacturing of their products to contract manufacturers. And, it is often the company […]
The All Important Intensive Customer Survey
Whether you are in the business of board fabrication or board assembly, the fact is that you are not building your own products. You are building your customers’ products which means that you are in the business of helping your customers be successful. The better your services are, the better their products will be, and […]
Manage Your Sales team Like You Would Manage A Sports Team
Managing a sales team is just like managing a sports team. You strive to put the best team on the field and then manage them to greatness. It means just like a sports team you must deal with all the team members as individuals figuring out how to handle each of them from the prima […]
Does Your Plant Look As Good As You Think It Does?
It’s all of those little things that make a big difference How good do you think your company is? How do you think you’re doing? What do you do well? What do you need to work on? What do you people think when they walk into your lobby? These are questions you should be asking […]
The Other Side Of The Story
We ended last week’s column with a group of designers from a high-tech company asking me the ignoble question, “Why do all PCB shops suck?” And, I promised, I would not only address that question but also explain why there are two sides to that story. First, let me say that the designers who asked […]
Book Recommendation – The Camino Way: Lessons in Leadership from a Walk Across Spain
A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu. The Camino Way: Lessons in Leadership from a Walk Across Spain By Victor Prince Copyright 2017 Amacom Price $21.95 Pages: 199 with Index What a story! I didn’t even know about the Camino Way until I read this book. Then I had to find out how reading about this […]
A Frustrated PCB Customer Speaks Out
I recently got an e-mail from a good friend of mine. He has been in the industry even longer than I have, and that’s a really long time. He works for one of the most high-end defense and aerospace companies in the world. His company has also used their technology base to branch out and […]
Five things Contract Manufacturers Can Do Right Now To Get More Business
Everyone is struggling to fill their factories these days, as the fight for more business heats up. It used to be that contract manufacturers had a good solid base of good customers, they could depend on year after year. Many of them were satisfied to pick up a couple of customers a year as their […]
Contract Manufacturing: Winning Those Big Accounts
Contract manufacturing is a service not a product. As CEMs, we are actually building someone else’s product, someone else’s baby. Our customers are putting the fate of their companies in our hands. If we build the product incorrectly our customers will be the ones to pay. In the end they are the ones who have their name […]