Didn’t mean it as an easy answer. There is no easy answer, just work. Making your own product sounds nice, but it can go away too. I’ve experienced that one and am sitting on several thousands of dollars worth of inventory to prove it. It was a good run while it lasted and it more than paid for what is left, but it seems somehow more painful to get rid of than something you make for someone else’s gizmo
You have nothing on my Dualkit disaster. I have told this story quite a few times on PM. I fell into selling dual alternator kits when the customer I was making brackets & pulleys for stiffed me out of $30K, and used my money to help bring production in house by getting a Haas lathe, mill and hiring a machinist. He flat out told me I wasn't even close to his largest creditor and said he would file bankruptcy if anyone sued him. The war was on! This was a guy who had a decent income, but was terrible with money and lived way beyond his means.
Knowing little about charging system upgrades and no desire to do a lot of wrenching on cars I poached his installer/tech and we redesigned everything for ease of manufacture and install. I also wanted to focus on volume sales to educated customers to eliminate a lot of the customer service issues and hand holding. So the target customer was limousine builders. The installer had a close contact with a local builder so we had a source of various vehicles for R & D work in exchange for free product.
It was a slam dunk, the only other competition that made an in house product had someone who lacked our design skills and the machinist was nothing more than B grade at best and appeared to just make what he was told, with no input on design improvements. We knew all of this because of their website, showing their manufacturing process among other things. the boasting over nothing was comical.
All our sales were done cold calling and by attending conventions. The good, sales were growing in leaps and bounds, at the peak hitting 23 active customers. The quick growth in the dual kit sales made it impossible to job shop and other product development was put on hold.
Cutting to the chase, most limousines are bought by transportation companies. Limousine use was very common in SoCal at the time fueled by a real estate boom unseen in most parts of the country pre 2008 recession. People were cashing in home equity and living it up. Strip clubs in Las Vegas were hiring limousine companies to attract and transport customers. I once saw a limousine that had an outside jacuzzi, strippers in bikinis would be in it to attract customers, cruising the strip.
The market for limousines started tailing off quickly as the real estate market peaked and then descended, we were steadily gaining market share, but the market was shrinking so fast sales were dropping. Within a year I was down to one active customer and their volume dropped down to next to nothing. There were two customers other still in business, but they switched their business model to police car conversions that did not require our products. 20 customers closed their doors never to return. Today only one of the 23 customers survive making limos. The industry never rebounded, it boomed on a false economy, went bust and stayed busted.
I made the mistake of holding on too long to employees, stocking the shelves with things I wrongly thought I could sell later on with the rebound that never came. I don't even want to think of all the items that went in the dumpster or to the scrap man, and the pallets of alternators
I sold for 25 cents on the wholesale dollar. If I rewatch the game film a couple times, Dualkit ended up being a $400k to $500k mistake.
I had set up machining cells for products and that equipment was no good for a one man job shop, so it had to go, all sold at the height of the recession 30 cents on the dollar for what I paid for it. That was the end of selling my own product.
