No deal is worth doing if the customer sees a big win in making you have to suck it up for a design, engineering, manufacturing, test, ship, startup, and qualify cycle that from the time of PO to the time you see your first cent in payment often exceeds 12 - 16 months on 6 and 7 figure jobs.
It is not just "often" Brethren. It is so
very standard that Boeing was taught as the case in Accounting textbooks around fifty years ago, if not also ever SINCE.
The "Special case" had to do with the ordinary 13 Accounting periods of each Accounting year "closing" for the year.
Boeing's case was "work in progress" typically taking 18 months from initiation to shippable.
Each year required handling of special accruals that few other companies had at all, or very little of. Most firms would have but one MONTH in their pipeline, so the value of it was small vs an entire year.
Boeing (and others like them), the WIP value could easily be
greater than that year's entire gross.
Boeing themselves (I owned stock for Donkey's Years. No longer..) have stated that each new generation of aircraft, one after the other as they were begun, was a "bet the entire company" level of risk.
Consider what that means. Wilhelm Boeing didn't see-to-eye with a successful Dad. Left home, took work as a day laborer. His Dad branded him shiftless, figured him a failure. That pissed Bill off no end. He just was NOT going to wear that label. Turned out, he was good at whatever he did. He made good money in timber before using it to make seaplanes. His company has a seriously good record of success and getting paid for it. They even MADE MONEY when the SST was cancelled. Realists at Boeing had expensed it as unrecoverable R&D. They had to re-state the books when the government paid the large penalty for cancelling. Boeing then had a windfall profit!
"Bet the entire company" on the grand scale of Boeing is not an exercise for small-money players. Nor even
entire nations.
Scarebus could not even get INTO that game without being a
de-facto multi-nation,
multi government agency at the outset, still partly
IS, and China has not done well at it, either.
Gear-up to deal with that sort of environment.
Or
go elsewhere and do something more comfortable for your resources.
Odds are, of course, the seat under you on that journey will be Boeing built. Even when we leave the Solar system. They already ARE "comfortable" with that business model.
Y'know? If Bill's Dad had been a better communicator instead of a borderline asshole?
We might still be flying Super-G Connies that took-off on four, flew on three to reduce the damned fire-hazard, fired up the truant radial for landing, just in case of need of a go-round.
Side-issue, but he was also a hard-core segregationist as to his extensive property developments on a scale and intensity that might not have been allowed to stand even in the Old South, post reconstruction era. Or might have. Some seriously dumb s**t has been carried-on in our history. Slow learners, we seem to repeat the worst of it all too easily. Look him up.