Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1288481
16 PCB007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2020 have the right selling strategy." Toward the end, when HP was faced with that, it spun the company off and became a major stockholder in an autonomous legal entity company, where it could make up its own rules. That proved successful. You couldn't change HP for one reason or another. The company didn't throw away what they had. They spun it, gave it a new name, and let them continue to work on their core competencies not hindered by com- pany history. That proved to be successful with Agilent and HP. If you look at some of these most successful companies, they are former HP product man- agers. If their product didn't get the approval of HP, but they were sure it was going to be successful, they asked if they could take the product and make it under their own name or a new name. HP said, "Sure, because you're going to sell it." Many times, these proj- ects were personally financed by HP. People thought these entrepreneurs were creat- ing companies that competed against HP, not knowing they were HP products that the company decided not to sell for one reason or the other. I saw that over and over again because I worked on the prototypes. HP decided not to go into that business because it didn't match our test, measurement, or computer core com- petencies. For example, a project manager I worked with at HP asked if he could form his own company using a prototype and got their blessing. They learned not to throw stuff away but to rebrand it or repackage it, put another name on it, and then keep its vintage a secret. People didn't realize that it was an HP technol- ogy with a different brown wrapper around it and a different name. Johnson: For any PCB fabrication company looking to expand and grow, is it better to aim for a smaller specialty niche that's high profit, or go for larger volume and narrower margins? Holden: It depends on how good you are at your financial connection with banks or investors because if you're going to go volume, you're going to need money. If you want to get close to your product and customer, then staying smaller-focused is better. If you have trouble, hire people who are smarter than you are, who do this for a living, to help you find out which path is best for you. How many years do you want to work? Is this a family business, or is this going to become a corporation? What are the long-term goals? You have to do it fast. This is a really fast- moving industry, and the technologies keep cropping up. Look at VeCS, for example. It po- tentially offers higher density and lower cost. That's the kind of thing that we'd look at. We'd say, "Is this what I need to compete with the big companies that have lasers? I don't have money for all these laser drills. With this technology, I can do the same kind of density as them without buying laser drills and have higher reliability, etc." Johnson: Part of your benchmarking process is figuring out what you can't do. If you want to get into higher density work, but you don't necessarily have the tools nor the investment and capital for tools, then working with an al- ternative that can be done with a lot of the ex- isting mechanical tools is an incremental step into higher-margin product. Holden: That's what I mean by benchmarking or technology awareness. Have you kept your head up to see what's going on? If you haven't, talk to an expert who has. Who's the best at crystal ball gazing in terms of what electronics are going to do in the future? Johnson: Before you start the roadmap, not on- ly do you need to benchmark your capabilities, but you also need to analyze the technologies to know the emerging technologies to pay atten- tion to. Your decision may be to stand pat with exactly what you're doing, or you may decide to step into some new technologies and add new capabilities. Then, you can roadmap it. Holden: If your self-assessment is that your yield loss is 80% due to scratches and han- dling errors, then you realize, "I have to min- imize handling. Should I buy conveyors? Is