Not Car related, but need opinions. 

"Caleb "If a rally car can do it, so can my Malibu" M. S." (calebms) 05/02/2016 at 10:13 • Filed to: None

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This is what I hope to do with my life, after graduating high school and doing 5 years in the Navy, and I want to know what you think of it. I know some of you are business people and experts in your field, so I would love input, positive of negative.

I wrote this for a business contest a few weeks back for the “theoretical situation” essay:

How would the 3 pieces of this idea work together (People, Planet, Profit):

Let us think for a moment of this scenario: you and three other friends are cycling enthusiasts that enjoy cross-county cycling around your home state of Vermont. You have been trying to design and bring to market an all wheel drive bicycle. Unfortunately, you and your friend’s gifts lie in marketing, business, and mechanics, and none of you are bestowed with the gift of designing and developing an actual product. Between the four of you, you have $50,000 available on loan from your parents. After trying and failing to develop a design, you begin to scour the internet for ideas. Eventually you come across the website of a company that promises to produce a design that caters to your needs, requests, and budget. You are obviously intrigued, and decide to contact the company. A day after you submit your request, a representative from the company calls you and sets up a time to meet in person with a small team from the company.

A week later, four plane tickets arrive in the mail for you and your associates to fly to the company’s headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. Once you land, you are picked up at the airport by another representative who drives you to the company’s headquarters. At the building, you meet with a team composed of a mechanical engineer, patent lawyer, and a cost accountant. The team carefully considers your budget and requirements, then compares them to any existing designs. Before you leave, you meet briefly with the Department Supervisor who speaks with you about your project and where you hope to go with it. After two days, they thank you and you return home to Vermont.

Less than a month after your initial visit, you return via plane to Kansas City where you meet for the second time with the team, and the supervisor with whom you met briefly before. This time they bring before you three separate designs for your consideration that they have taken the liberty of patenting. Out of these three designs, one stands out to you and you ask for more in-depth information. They assure you that the design was made to be as cost effective and environmentally conscious as possible. You are very pleased with the design, and wish to move forward. For one lump sum of $15,000 you now own the rights to the design you liked, and as a gift the company has given you all of the contacts you will need to bring the design to market.

Now let us look at the exact same scenario, but from the perspective of a company employee: You are a supervisor in the company who went to four years of post-secondary education at a private college for a mechanical engineering major and a business minor. The company had scouted you out while you were a sophomore in college, and you were legally employed for the entirety of your senior year.

By the third year of your employment, you had received a promotion from developer, to Department Supervisor of the Mechanical Engineering Department. Along with the promotion, the company decided that you were a valuable asset, and you agreed to a five year contract with the stipulation that they paid off your remaining college debt.

Not too long after your promotion, an interesting project came across your desk. A start-up out of Vermont was trying to make an all wheel drive bicycle, but did not have the resources available to them to create a functioning design. You contact the prospective customers and arrange a meeting in person with them at the company headquarters. To prepare for the meeting, you assemble a typical team of an engineer, cost accountant, and a patent lawyer. The team meets with the customers, who detail exactly what they want to have designed, their price range, and other specifics. Before the customers leave, you personally sit down with them and discuss their project in depth as to further understand what they hope to accomplish with it.

For the next three weeks, the engineer, cost accountant, and lawyer work together to come up with a set of feasible designs. You give the team a budget of $7,500 to fund the project, and they work tirelessly.

This team is one of three in your Department, and your Department is one of six in the company. Each Department works separately, except for the lawyers and cost accountants, who travel between the individual Departments as they are needed.

After three week’s time, the team you assigned has successfully sketched, built, and patented three separate designs of all wheel drive bicycles. To build the optimum bicycle, the engineer looked at it from three different perspectives: Function, Formula, and Form. The bicycle is very capable off-road, and the power is distributed evenly between both the front and rear wheels.The bike is to be constructed of aluminum that is manufactured in a way that produces less industrial waste. As for Form, the bike is visually striking and pleasing to the eye.

You invite the customers back again and show them the completed designs, patents, and prototypes. They are delighted, and agree to purchase one of the designs. After some time spent negotiating, the rights to the patent and design are sold for $15,000, doubling the money you put into the project. As a “thank you” before they leave, you supply the satisfied customers with the contact information of some of the best fabricating and supply companies in the nation, to help them along their way.

The $15,000 is divided accordingly: 50% ($7,500) is returned to the Department budget. 25% ($1,875) goes to the company’s fund to continue funding other projects. 25% ($1,875) goes to you as the Department Manager. The remaining 50% ($3,750) is split evenly between the engineer, cost accountant, and lawyer.

As for the other two all wheel drive bicycle patents, they sell at an in-house patent auction together for $20,000, which is split following the same division as the other. In a total of one month, one project earned the company $6,875, you as the Supervisor $6,875, and three employees $4,583.34 each. Besides this project, the team was assigned to three others, and the Mechanical Engineering Department as a whole was working on 11 different projects, both commissioned and un-commissioned.

This has been a brief overview of how a single project would flow through my company, and how my company as a whole would benefit the people it works for as well as people that work for it, how my company would benefit the planet, and how we would earn a profit. Thank you for your time and consideration on my project.

Dr_Watson > Caleb "If a rally car can do it, so can my Malibu" M. S. 05/02/2016 at 14:39

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What you’re describing is called “Engineering Process Outsourcing” (EPO). It’s big business in India. Might want to do a ton of research to find a niche to plug. Going to be really hard to start small.