Hopes, Wishes, and Dreams
Here’s a sobering statistic: according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, approximately 90% of small businesses will fail.
Since the SBA defines small businesses as any firm employing less that 500 people, some of these “small” business failures are pretty big by our standards.
However, no matter how we define big and small, the statistics show that:
- 21% fail in the first year
- 30% will fail by year two
- 50% will fail by year five
- 70% will fail by year ten
Once all the compound math kicks in, we see that only one in twelve small businesses will survive the business world.
There are many and varied reasons why businesses close – including global pandemics – but in this post, we want to talk about a reason that’s near and dear to our hearts: failing to let the data drive your decisions regarding materials, processing, and equipment.
In particular, failing to make scalability decisions based on hard data.
Our Stage Gate Process, Revisited
As a reminder, IntoCeramics applies a stage gate process to each of our projects.
The objective is to avoid moving on to more complex – and usually more time-consuming and expensive – phases until and unless the results support doing so.
As we’ve written about before, many materials that seem to have great potential end up rejected or being repurposed after an initial round of analytical work.
No matter at what stage in the project we and our clients find ourselves, data drives our work and the decisions we make.
As we always try to impress on our clients, our goal is to help them succeed and the data we collect must support that goal.
Hopes, dreams, and wishes are all good things. Without them, there would be far fewer start-up companies in the world.
Indeed, Amazon, Apple, and J.P. Morgan Chase were all once crazy ideas that someone believed in enough to launch a startup.
But staking your business plan on hopes and dreams alone may well condemn your startup to the 91% failure bin.
And that can apply during any phase of a project.
The Best One Hundred Grams
IntoCeramics’ President, Bryan Geary, often says: “We aren’t interested in making the best 100 grams of material in our lab. We’re interested in making the best hundreds and thousands of tons.”
We recently found ourselves conducting a Phase 3 pilot trial in which we were sintering multiple samples to prove scalability.
Our lab had made the best 100 grams (well, dozens of kilos, actually) of the candidate material.
Using an electric box furnace for quick sintering in the laboratory, we tested fourteen different combinations of material formulation and forming method (such as extrusion and granulation) to densify the clay-like body and increase the handling size.
Based on encouraging lab tests, we selected the final formulas and firing methods for pilot scale testing.
This would involve upscaling the process using a small rotary kiln, representative of the commercial sintering method likely to be most economical.
Based on knowledge of how a European manufacturer was successfully using an unformed approach, our hopes and wishes were staked on firing an unformed mix in the rotary kiln. Eliminating the forming step in a full-scale production process would greatly reduce capital cost and process complexity.
Sadly, data from the pilot scale rotary kiln testing did not support our hopes and wishes.
The unformed samples failed. The product was denser than desired and weaker than needed for a finished product.
We were able to reproduce our excellent laboratory results, but only for the formulas that were extruded or granulated before sintering.
The Value of Shutting Things Down Quickly
This is just one example among the hundreds of data-driven decisions we’ve made throughout our projects.
Whether we deliver a quick no after Phase 1 analytical work or the selection of equipment in Phase 4, data drives our actions.
If something isn’t meant to be, the sooner we can shut it down and stem the bleeding of time and investment, the better.
Often, we must balance the inventors’ excitement, keen creativity, and enthusiasm – the things that fuel the dream – with a dose of reality.
We must help them make the leap from “what IF we could just…” to the realism of “what CAN we actually do economically, at scale, to deliver positive revenue and keep this dream alive?”
We still have hopes, wishes, and dreams like all entrepreneurs, but we take comfort in knowing that our diligent approach can save others from having their dreams dashed later, and more painfully, than is necessary.
Photo Credit: Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
