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The Chemical Connection: Experience and Wisdom Gained by Doing Business

A well-managed company learns to adjust its strategies and processes based on what it learns during challenging times. The experience gained from making (or losing) a difficult sale is invaluable in adapting new sales and manufacturing processes necessary to make that sale the next time, no matter how painful those new processes might be.

As the great American philosopher Mark Twain once said (paraphrased): “Experience is a wonderful teacher, but sometimes comes at great pain. A man who carries a cat by the tail gains all sorts of experience that is denied the rest of us. But if a man wants to carry a cat by the tail, I say, ‘Let’im’. Tisn’t always easy to be eccentric, you know.”

The ability to make changes from lessons learned is the sign of a good company, even if it involves taking some risks and enduring some pain. Here are a few examples from the early history of my company.

Engineers Learning to Do Business
In the mid-1950s (even before my time), our founder worked for an engineering company that became involved in a project requiring those newfangled printed circuit boards. He built a vertical spray etcher to make the necessary boards and thought there was some business potential for spray etching circuit boards and building equipment to do this. The engineering company was not interested in pursuing this, but permitted him to use what he had learned while working on their project to set up his own company.

Initially, the company devoted one part of the plant to making vertical spray etchers (Model 101), and another to making circuit boards. However, it soon became clear that it was difficult to sell spray etchers to people with whom they competed for circuit board business. The capital equipment end of the business was doing better at the time, so they sold off the circuit board end of the business, which eventually disappeared, showing they had made the right decision.

You would think this would be an obvious lesson, but remember, the founders were engineers, not businessmen. Company growth meant some managers needed at least a little business acumen. Their thinking was that there was a limited market for etching and wet processing equipment (after all, how many circuit boards could the world possibly need?) and that the company needed to diversify to survive.

Projects like relatively simple numerically controlled drills for circuit boards, screen printers for etch resists, and more efficient nozzles for oil burners (?) came, struggled for a while, and eventually failed. The lesson here—although it took time to realize—was to stick to your core business. You’re better off using your resources to improve the efficiency and output of what you’re good at instead of wandering down uncharted and little-understood paths.

Lessons Learned in the Lab
A lesson we learned early on has been part of the company’s philosophy ever since. Many of the responses to early sales attempts in the late ’50s and early ’60s were, “Huh, I didn’t know you could do that,” or “Etching? What in heaven’s name is that?” So, we made the decision to use the space vacated by the former circuit board manufacturing division to set up a demonstration lab to introduce potential customers to the etching process. This proved to be an excellent idea, and we still maintain a lab with basic full-sized develop, etch, and resist strip equipment, along with smaller machines for process and equipment development.

The lab’s personnel can also help with process problems not directly related to the equipment. This does add to the cost of doing business, and people have questioned its value at times, but repeatedly, the lab has proved its value.

For instance, about 10 years ago, a glass company was looking for a way to remove the tiny scratches and imperfections left by the manufacture of display glass for TV, computer, and phone screens. We set up a development program in the lab and, in partnership with the glass manufacturer, we developed processes to produce defect-free display screens and, for phones, a glass thinning process that allowed the glass to be folded (think Samsung Z-Flip and Z-Fold phones and tablets, along with Motorola Razrs). That generated more than $10 million, which we would never have thought of without this lab.

Sometimes this strategy can backfire, however. In the ’90s, the owner of a print-and-etch shop in Florida decided he needed an alkaline etcher to do plated panels. He spent a week in the lab soaking up everything we could think of on the alkaline etch process and then two weeks with our engineering staff laying out the line he would need to fit in the space he had available. Several months later, he called me and asked if we could supply him with someone to train his operators, as he couldn’t trust himself to remember the details of our training.

That was not an unreasonable request, and I agreed to go down for a week of training. This was not unusual, and we covered it in the price of the equipment. When I informed the management, our sales manager slammed his fist on the desk and said, “That (expletive) bought his line from (a competitor).” My friend had taken the drawings generated during his time with us to a competitor who offered to build the line for 30% less than our quote. This was not necessarily illegal, but it was certainly unethical. He was not happy when I informed him I would still come, but he would have to pay travel expenses and an hourly fee. I never heard from him again, and three years later, he went bankrupt and disappeared from the scene.

The wisdom we learned from this was to charge a fee for any visit or development project that exceeded a simple visit and sample runs, to be subtracted from the price if an equipment purchase resulted from the work. I’m happy to say that the vast majority of our customers would never do anything like this, but it only takes one.

I was going to give some examples of wisdom gained but not acted upon, but there is not enough space left in this column to do the subject justice. Perhaps I will get them in later so I can air some pet peeves and other injustices.

This column originally appeared in the August 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.