Choose what you do & for whom you do wisely

In 2003, Marlin Steel made $800,000 selling wire bagel baskets, and it was sinking fast because of newfound competition from Chinese factories, which were selling bagel baskets for $6--half of what Marlin’s baskets cost. Marlin’s customers were switching to save $200 a store and Marlin would never be able to match its Chinese competitors on price.There were no barriers keeping new global competitors at bay or preventing price-conscious customers from straying. So Marlin Steel built them within a radically rethought business plan.The transition began in 2003, when Marlin received an inbound sales call from an engineer at Boeing who wanted 20 wire baskets. The Boeing engineer, who had seen a Marlin steel ad in the Thomas Register, a pre-Internet manufacturing directory, wanted baskets to hold airplane parts and move them around the factory. He wanted them fast and he wanted them made in a way Marlin wasn’t used to--with astonishing precision. The Boeing engineer needed the basket’s size to be within a sixty-fourth of an inch of his specifications.Marlin steel owner Drew Greenblatt told the engineer that such precision would cost him $24 a basket. The engineer didn’t seem to mind. Greenblatt thought “I’m trying to sell a basket for $12, the bagel shops they are saying, ‘I’m not paying more than $6.’ and here’s a guy who just approves the outrageous sum of $24 in a moment, WOW!." He’s price insensitive. That aha moment led to the company’s rebirth.After the Boeing job, Greenblatt did a little poking around, and he made two discoveries, Factories have a huge appetite for wire baskets, which they use to stage parts for assembly; a single big factory has thousands of them. And in the United States today, factories outnumber bagel stores by a hundredfold.With these 2 insights and action plan in line with it Marlin steel is now a $50,00,000 maker of steel products, transitioned from making wire bagel baskets for customers like Bruegger’s and Einstein Bros. to making custom baskets, hooks, and precision sheet-metal products for customers like Boeing, Caterpillar, GE, Merck, and Toyota. The baskets used to hold food; now they hold everything from microchips to turbine blades.Learning from the story 1. Choose your target audience wisely. 2. Know the size of the target market and check if your long term goals can be achieved with them. 2. Once you choose them, know what you’re really selling your unique serving proposition. The wire basket was only part of their product. To Boeing, they were selling engineering, precision, and speed, too.Questions to ask: 1. Who are my target audience; are they a right target market? 2. What is that we are doing for our target audience? 3. Do my target audience value what we do for them in terms of satisfaction and payout? see hubwealthy.com/wealthy