A post from the Brim Blog

I’m an engineer by birth. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t going to be an engineer. Like many other budding engineers I took stuff apart at home when I was young, and there were always bits left over when (if) I put them back together. Imagining things and building them from whatever is available has always been what I do. For most of my career I focused on the technology and architecture of products, keeping involvement in the “boring” business end to a minimum, but now I find myself widening my vision to include all the business of providing a new product.

I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve actually enjoyed the business end of the business. In various previous incarnations I’ve been happy to leave most of that to a partner while I focused on the technology, but this time around it’s different. Of course the technology of our new power meter is what drove us to start this, and is what we’ve spent most of our time on for over two years, but over the last 6 months or so we’ve been giving increasing attention to the business needs.

I like to think of the whole project, including company structure, plans and finance, as a big and interesting engineering design problem. The system requirements need to be specified, the organisational parts need to be designed, the resources need to be identified, and the construction plans need to be laid out. It’s just that the system we’re dealing with here isn’t hardware or software, it’s people and activities and finance. Thinking about it like this means that I don’t have to ditch my engineering thinking, just reshape it to a different context.

So we’ve been making plans for people, production, test, marketing and sales. The biggest aspect to all these plans is, of course, resources, and particularly finance. Increasing the financial resources available to the project requires that we convince other people that we’ve got a winner, and that requires putting together a lot of documentation to back up our claims. Market research, market analysis, company plans and financial projections are all done and we’re in talks with various people and potential partners who will help us to implement our big plans to get the power meter out to you (and if anyone else is interested in talking to us now is the time to step up!).

In parallel with ramping up the business structures the technical development and testing continues. We hope to have a bunch of interesting hard information to give you in a month or two, but right now it’s hammer down 7 days a week in Brim Brothers (except for time off to go cycling). We know our technology is a winner. We’ve just got to get it to you.

Happy St Patrick’s day!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 18:55 and is filed under Barry's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.