Economy of Scale. Mass production. Monopoly. Standard business theory maintains two core fundamentals: You must make profit to grow, and growth provides opportunity to reduce the cost of production.

 

I'm not going to argue with all those PhD's whether Volkswagen can make a car cheaper than I can or not. Even I understand that if you buy a million widgets, there is a strong chance you'll get a better price than the person buying only one.

 

But at what volume-point does each individual widget start to become less important than the entire batch? When does price begin to over-ride quality? I have always been told that "Value" consists of three components. 1) Price, 2) Delivery, and 3) Quality. I may be alone but I feel that in some industries the emphasis has been put on price and delivery, at the expense of quality. And I'm OK with that, if that is what the customer truly wants, but there will always be a minimium line of quality which we will never stoop below.

 

As a result, some businesses seem focused on growth, for growth's sake. The problem with that is many businesses put all their eggs in one basket - one product, one customer, one industry. They begin to see anything that looks like an order as more revenue to feed the growth. Next thing you know, they are big, but they don't do any one thing particularly well. Or the growth has occurred at such a rapid rate there was no time for refinement of processes or effective training of staff. It's like Larry the Cable Guy says, "Git 'er done!". Some things just take time, and being good at something is one of them.

 

It might sound like sour grapes since we are not among the "bigger" players in our industry, but we have chosen to focus more on getting better at what we feel are the important things, in lieu of getting bigger. Or, at least when we decide its time to get bigger, we'll be prepared to do it right. Rome wasn't built in a day (although we feel with some of our standard building designs, it could be done in a month!).

 

One of the most effective ways to get good at something is to listen to your customers: