Last night I had a very interesting talk with a friend of mine in Oregon named Jason. It was about some work we are doing together to get a business started. Jason is a vendor with whom I have worked for seven or eight years. He helped me get the job I had previous to this one. I bought a lot of equipment from him. He is giving me some advice on some open source software I am writing and I am helping some of his customers with their machine vision programming needs. He is a great salesman in the field within which I work and I am hoping to do some kind of business with him some day before too long. The reason we want to do business together is that we have compatibles strengths, but more importantly, we know who we are not, if that makes any sense. Neither of us are CEO types. We do not have any illusions of grandeur about being the head of a big company. Jason wants to sell and take care of his customers. I want to develop technology and take care of my customers. We think we have some ideas about a business model that will allow us to do what we do well, while minimizing the impact our lack of desire to run a big company.
The idea is not that complicated. There is a lot of machine vision consulting opportunities out there. Some time after the next two or three years when I have finished my commitment with my current employer, we are going to try to have everything in place to start a consulting company. I have several friends around the country who work in this same field who would love to do part or full time consulting work. With machine vision, it is often the case that machine vision is required for a machine to function, but does not do the real work of the machine. That means that the machine vision guy is needed either as a consultant, or if we are fortunate, as a minor equity partner in the development of new technology. That is all. Jason finds those kinds of opportunities all the time (as do I). I love to work in the application of machine vision to solve new classes of problems. It seems like there should be a business model in there somewhere for a two many consulting and technology development company.
Check out my buddy Eric’s interesting and very cerebral blog here.
Update on our old customer from this post: We got our first big order from them yesterday.
My brother just sent me this quote:
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means “put down.” — Bob Newhart