On Fri, 02 Oct 2015 10:05:59 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Thu, 01 Oct 2015 15:33:27 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:44:07 -0700, Gunner Asch
wrote:

On Thu, 1 Oct 2015 08:01:44 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 11:36:27 PM UTC-4, jon_banquer wrote:
On Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 6:17:33 PM UTC-7, Ignoramus14408 wrote:

I could create high precision parts if I wanted to. Fortunately, for
me, I do not want to, and instead enjoy weekly auctions of bankrupt
"high precision" job shops.

i

Wrong. iggy could not.

iggy is bull****ting himself again.

In addition, iggy doesn't make the kind of money
that successful high-end SoCal machining job shops
make.

I disagree. Now I don't know business in the machining field very well, but if you work out of NY or Chicago, you should be able to rival that kind of money (at least if you go all out - that's the whole reason for going into high end areas).

I closed down yet another "sucessful high-en SoCal machining job shop"
a couple weeks ago, and I picked up another customer
yesterday..another "sucessful high-end SoCal machining job shop" who
is about to fail

That makes 29 and 30 such "sucessful high-end SoCal machining job
shops" in the past 4 yrs

Gunner

One thing I've learned about machine shops in my 40 years of covering
them is there is a tremendous range from nearly bankrupt to wildly
successful, and that goes on all the time. California was riding high
for many years, due to government aerospace; Michigan and northwest PA
(mold shops) ride high when the automobile industry is doing well; and
so on. Jobbers are always dependent on the health of the industries
they serve. When there's a lot of growth in those industries,
everybody does well. Then the customers fall off and the weak ones --
the ones that aren't well managed, or that are undercapitalized (the
two tend to go hand-in-hand) go belly-up. That's probably what Gunner
is running into. They can do great work but wind up broke.

The *range* of success rates, in average times, is huge. And 90% of
that is the variation in the quality of management. Some people are
excellent craftsmen but are not cut out to run a business. A few can
do both, and they're the ones who tend to survive the downturns and
make a bundle while others are struggling.

But that is pretty much true in any business, isn't it?

I think that machine shops are an extreme case.


The company I worked for in Indonesia was started by a guy with a
Master's Degree in computer Science and another with a Master's in
Economics that got a small contract to set up a computer system for
the Indonesian Statistics Department and after they got their feet on
the ground realized that there was a vast market for technical
training in Indonesia and ended up a success.

I once asked them how a financial guy and a computer guy could get
into all this industrial training and one of them commented that "if
you can get the contract and the financing you can always hire a
technical guy to do the work" :-)

True.

--
Ed Huntress