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Inventor's Corner
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Mechanical Engineering
Professionals works to enable each customer to sucessfully meet their
engineering goals through professional, creative, engineering design
and development.
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At
Mechanical Engineering Professionals, we rarely with
inventors and individuals in developing their ideas and bringing them
to reality. This is because the majority of inventors who call us have not been exposed to product development and the
design and manufacturing costs that it entails.
Developing a product is a serious business and bringing a
product to market cost tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of
thousands or millions. This is not a process for the faint
of heart or the casual person as most new products rarely cost less
than
one hundred thousand dollars to develop. The everyday products
you see at Walmart for just dollars or tens of dollars usually required
millions of dollars to develop. As an example, Gillette spent 750
million dollars developing its Mach 3 line of razors. Myths in the
culture
abound about people getting rich quick off of simple ideas, but this is
just that, a myth, and in reality most successful inventors work very
hard in
selling their ideas or raising the capital to manufacture them.
Developing an invention is very much like starting a business.
In fact, if you are looking to profit from your invention, it
is starting a business. Before coming to an engineering firm
or other manufacturer, an inventor should, at the minimum, perform a
market analysis to establish the market value of their product (to
understand how much the product is worth) and lay out at least a rough
business plan. The business plan could be that the inventions
are to be sold to other companies, but that is still a business (a
business of creating and selling invention ideas), and the inventor
should be ready to invest time and money in selling those ideas.
If you would like help in doing a market analysis or creating a
business plan we can certainly help as consultants. However,
if you are capable person, the Small Business Administration
provides an excellent resource for writing a business plan (http://www.sba.gov).
Another good resource that we advise all of our individual
clients to look into is SCORE
(http://www.score.org)
which provides free couseling to small business owners. Score
keeps local offices throughout the country but also can help over the
phone or through their website.
If pursuing the development of your invention is still of interest to
you and would like Mechanical Engineering Professionals, LLC to create
an estimate and help with the feasibility of the project we have a minumum new project fee of $25,000 for individuals.
If you have an established company and these don't seem to suit you,
please see the information for our corporate clients or give us a call.
Frequently
Ask Questions
I do not have
money to develop my product but I have revolutionary product which will
change the industry would Mechanical Engineering Professionals, LLC be
willing work free for a percentage of the profits?
No. We are an engineering consulting firm and not venture capitalists
or angel investors. If you own a company or have a startup
that is partially funded we may be able to work out a deal for a lower
rate initially for larger profits later, but we would still need some
ongoing consulting fee to maintain our business. Also most of
our extra capital goes into developing our own product.
I do not have
money to develop my
product, is there any other way that you could help me?
Our business is to be paid for the work that we do. So if you do
not have money to pay us, there is not much we can do. There are
many books available at bookstores or your local library that
explain how to sell or profit from your inventions. We
reccomend books by Mike Rounds of Rounds, Miller and
Associates as we know him and respect his integrity.
He also offers consulting
and product solicitation services for inventors, you can find
out more at his website at www.roundsmiller.com.
Why does it cost so much
to develop a product, my product is just a simple plastic part and I
see similar items in the store for just a few dollars?
We make plastic parts for some clients. In large quantities they
do only cost a few dollars eact or even cents. The key to this is
large quantities. A part we designed for one of our clients cost
about $7000 to design, the mold costed $15000, and then the first runs
and inspecting of the parts cost another $3000. So here, there is
a $25000 cost prior to being able to make that one plastic part.
However, if they make 1 million parts, that cost is averaged over one
million of parts. So the design and mold cost per part is only
2.5 cents, but they still need to pay the $25000 up front. If the part
itself is 2.5 cents then they also need to pay another $25000 just to
do the manufacturing run. Because of this, the upfront
development costs are really closer to $50000 for just one plastic
part.
Most items are more than one part, but it's easy to see now that if a
project entails 10 plastic parts, the design upfront costs could easily
be over $500,000. We have ways to make it less expensive to do
the initial development in most cases, but there limits on how much we
can reduce the price. Product development is big business and
carries with it large capital requirements.
More
information on the
specifics of working with Mechanical Engineering Professionals, LLC
such as terms and rates can be found on the following page:
Working with
Mechanical Engineering Professionals
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