Custom Production Runs: Holiday Rush is ON!
Our custom production runs have gone-up and that’s because the Holiday Rush is ON! You can separate an entire business year into two distinctive seasons upon which the border lies exactly a week after Labor Day!
A little background…
CNCROi.com has kept growing at an incredible pace, when I first started this custom numerical creativity business, we’d add a new client maybe once every 2-3 weeks but a little more than two years later, it’s now almost DAILY! Not only that, the variety of projects, geographical location and project scales have grown just as dramatically!
Our custom production runs have gotten more efficient in some ways, due to continued investment in equipment and other processes.
There is a MASSIVE need out there for “custom” stuff created specifically for an application. Whether that’s custom metal tags in the shape of a corporate logo which are annealed out of 316 stainless steel or wedding coasters custom shaped with 3D engravings and paint filling.
This blog showcasing lots of custom production runs doesn’t really do justice to the kind of projects we do and the most awesome will never show up on there either as CNCROi.com is a NDA company.
This means, for our corporate, government and institutional customers, none of what we do for them is shown on our site.
Diversification & Continuous Improvement
Why have we grown so fast and wide? Basically, we invest in our clients projects, about half of the time we get a project, it requires us to buy equipment to make it possible EFFICIENTLY.
Sure, we can Mickey Mouse around and find ways to make something happen with what we have but when there is a tool that does a better job, faster and with more precision, we get it.
This has snowballed, as, with each purchase of new equipment, we can use that for other projects as well! That industrial oscillating edge belt sander does wonders with some Cedar wood signage projects we take on but also works great on Corian projects!
Yes, we could spend time changing bits in our industrial CNC router to make holes but a manual drill press is just as accurate and faster! All of these “advances”, no matter how small, really compound onto themselves over time when it comes to custom production runs.
As with any business, there are always holes that need to be plugged along the production cycle but as with most tools, what’s great for one application may not be that good for another or may be just as good depending on the spec.
Diversification in equipment, expertise and knowledge is one of the reasons why CNCROi.com has been growing so quickly.
Thriving in a Fog of War!
You know what happens to businesses that keep doing the exact same thing because that’s the way they’ve always done it? Stagnation. We are in a highly competitive and global marketplace and the challenge has always been focused differentiation.
Sure, there are other laser shops in the world, other custom providers of whatever you want, but to stand-out, you have to do things radically different from initial customer contact through to final custom production runs .
Imagine a business where, quite literally, there is a fog of war as to what you will be doing the following week. That’s the kind of business CNCROi.com is perpetually in.
Other than a few key projects, we really don’t know one week to the next what we will be doing, customers need to send specs, we need to review equipment to make it happen and all this waits for a final go-ahead.
Two weeks ago, we had a massive production run of custom anodized aluminium plates, the week before, it was lots of wood projects and just last week, a Corian production run.
In between this, we did a bunch of polycarbonate stencils, PCB board engraving and a few other things here and there.
What will we get go-ahead on tomorrow? I really don’t know. It can be a client who needs XYZ by ABC date, it can be a government contracts that finally receive the green light or it can be a person needing a custom set of mirrors for their office. Your guess is literally as good as mine.
Passionate About Custom
I’ve been in the custom world for quite a long time, first as a self-taught designer and a little over two years ago, a producer for others (including my own designs).
Whether CNCROi.com is cutting out a bunch of letters from the alphabet onto cereal boxes (video coming soon) or engraving widgets for a manufacturer, they are all fun, challenging and interesting.
Some projects we take on are straight line work, the customer has a very specific spec and that’s what we do for days or weeks on end and other times, the customer tells us to do whatever within a specific application.
Other times, we even do bonus work and surprise our clients with something way above their initial budget just because a spark was lit and I didn’t want budgets or confirmations to get in the way. There are so many permutations when it comes to custom production runs.
September is the Start of the Rush!
So, throughout this year, like previous ones, we experience slow and steady growth and then what happens, like a tap that’s stuck on MAX, a bunch of projects that we quoted throughout the year get approval and everybody wants their stuff yesterday.
This is a great time! Because it’s when our investments throughout the year pay huge dividends.
We don’t just buy any equipment, we buy top of the line stuff, as a result, we don’t have those breakdowns that cause custom production runs to stop.
We can go straight for days and our industrial laser, router, sand blast unit and all the other tools are just waiting for more. This means we can optimize our processes knowing, confidently, that everything will go from start to finish without a hitch.
September (projects get green lit), October (Halloween), November through December (custom ornaments and presents) season has begun. I look forward to helping you with all your custom design, development and production needs.
It will be long days but very much enjoyable, as each custom projects brings CNCROi.com that much closer to a new piece of equipment, a new client and a new challenge!
