Midnight Machinist
Aluminum
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2006
- Location
- Seattle
Hi Everyone,
I have a customer that has asked me to design and build a specialty flashlight for him. He brought his commercially available and terribly expensive light in and I have reverse engineered it to accommodate cheaper and readily available innards.
The idea is that I would make them until he wants such quantities of this product that I cannot economically make them.
This constituted quite a bit of work, and I have come up with a design and prototype for him. When I presented him with the bill ($1700. so far) he now requested the cad file for the light.
For the promise of more work, I have not billed for everything I could have, and now it looks like the customer will go look for another shop to work with.
My question is how to deal with this situation in the future? It's very interesting to me to make something from an idea, but how do I manage the situation to my advantage?
Thanks,
Grant
I have a customer that has asked me to design and build a specialty flashlight for him. He brought his commercially available and terribly expensive light in and I have reverse engineered it to accommodate cheaper and readily available innards.
The idea is that I would make them until he wants such quantities of this product that I cannot economically make them.
This constituted quite a bit of work, and I have come up with a design and prototype for him. When I presented him with the bill ($1700. so far) he now requested the cad file for the light.
For the promise of more work, I have not billed for everything I could have, and now it looks like the customer will go look for another shop to work with.
My question is how to deal with this situation in the future? It's very interesting to me to make something from an idea, but how do I manage the situation to my advantage?
Thanks,
Grant