Today I am going to talk about the sunken cost fall policy. This is the idea that if you have put a lot of time or money into something then it's very hard to walk away from it because you feel like you're throwing out your money or you're throwing out your life. This can be very hard to deal with as an engineer especially when you're early in your career. You put a lot of effort into something and you're very proud of the work you did but down the road you find out that there's a much better way to do it. and letting go of that and moving in another direction can feel like you're abandoning everything you work so hard on. Everyone has their own journey on how they overcome this. However, my journey for that started about 10 years ago. My brothers were in Colorado where they were running a CBD farm and they contacted me and told me they had to get their harvest out of the ground. They had purchased a machine called a bucking machine which strips the plants down to the stems and it wasn't working for them. They were freaking out. They had a frost coming in in seven days. And if they didn't trim the plants by then, they were going to lose their whole crop. So, they knew I was an engineer. They knew I knew how to work on machines. They told me to solve the problem. I didn't have any experience with farm equipment, but I had a general idea of what the problem was. So, I ran around the shop and I looked for whatever parts I could find. I didn't even have time to order anything. I had to do with what I had. So, I pieced something together in about 3 days over a weekend and I got in the mail and shipped to them. And this is actually the only photo I have of it. It's how it was damaged in shipping. But you can see how rudimentary the machine looks. When they received my machine, it didn't work any better than the machine they already had, but they were able to take the front piece off mine and bolt it to the back piece of the machine they already had, and they were able to get through the harvest and more or less make it work. If this type of information is useful to you, I would love if you would subscribe. I have a lot more information coming forward and I can only do that if people are watching it. Over the next year, whenever I could find some time to break away from my other business, I worked on this machine because I knew there was a market there and I knew that I could solve this problem. I tried all different things to refine this not working design. I came up with new complicated mechanisms and I kept changing out parts and I kept testing and nothing was really working. As progress was going slow on this, I received a phone call that tragedy had struck. My brother I was working with on this project had tragically died. I wasn't planning on putting this in the video. However, I think it's important. I tried to rehearse this before and it didn't really work. So, I'm just going to do my best now. Not having any direction or focus at this point, I then set the project aside for about two years and just worked on my other business without a lot of focus or I guess anything dragging me along. As the rest of my family had some time to process what had happened, after two years, we had a discussion and decided we wanted to move forward and make something from what we had started. Now, three years later, I now had several competitors that were also making solutions, none of which worked very well. So, it was obvious that there was demand for this market, and I just had to figure out how to make it work. I came back, looked at this after having to process a lot, both emotionally and technically, and I looked at what was in front of me. I had been going in all different directions, trying to put band-aid on top of Band-Aid and trying wild ideas without a major direction on what the machine had to do from start to finish. What I was looking at on my computer just looked like a hot mess. So, I stepped back. I had to look at the machine from a holistic standpoint. See, what does it need to do? What does each part of the machine to do? And what is the end result that I am going for? I threw out everything and realized first off the bat I was trying to come up with a complex mechanism that would go on the face of the machine to strip flowers off. But I wasn't paying attention to the main problem was that it couldn't even pull the stem through the machine. So that's when I decided I need to start from the beginning. If the machine won't work, I don't need to refine it. So step one was figuring out how to solve the problem of gripping the plant. I figured out that my problem was surface area. So instead of having two rollers, I needed to have two belts that pulled it through. That's when I came up with this concept. This is a very early prototype. It is very rough, but it was a step in the right direction. I had to call around. I had to find some companies that made belts. And this was far from ideal. But I now knew where I had to go. Being better focused and now having a direction, I had to look at how the machine could be improved. I needed more power. I needed more capacity. I needed everything about it to just be a little better. Once you're at that point, you can refine. Before that, you're basically polishing a turd. I was designing with intent. So, my next version look like this, which isn't a major change, but it's more refined. I now have some stainless steel parts. And you can see back here, this isn't stainless because this first version didn't really work, but it worked better than the previous one. So, I am now getting closer to the goal. Knowing where I was going, I was able to get more refined parts and get something together that looked more or less production ready. The first machine I made was a one-off prototype, and everything on it worked. I ended up selling that machine. However, I knew that it was going to be too expensive to massproduce. However, at this point, I knew I had a design that was made with intent, and all I had to do was refine it to get to the finish line. I then took that design, stripped out everything that wasn't absolutely necessary. I was able to combine a few parts into one and streamlined the manufacturing process. I then made about 12 machines and got them out there and they worked extremely well. Everyone was happy with them. However, at that point, there were still a lot of unknowns and I had a lot of adjustments in the machine and it had to be fine tweaked and once it got all dialed in, it was great. Now, going into the full-blown production model, I looked at what I had and while it was decent, it had a bunch of adjustments that it no longer needed. It was big. It was bulky. It was not refined for shipping. So, I sat down, looked at it. I figured out how to make it two inches shorter, 10 pounds lighter, fit in a standard box, and make a UPS shippable. That is how you go from a good product to, may I say, a great product. You have to get to the state where your fundamental design is good before you can start refining things. I was now at the point that I could refine it for size, refine it for weight, and streamline the manufacturing. But you're never going to be able to do that if you're spending all your time trying to put band-aids on things. This is a belt roller assembly out of the current production model. You can see that everything is CNC machined. I was able to get these made ahead of time and it's been very easy to bolt together. I was able to get a proper belt with good grip and everything is refined and looks professional. However, if I had skipped steps earlier, then I would have never got here. I may have had something that looked good but didn't function the way it was supposed to. I have put together a free product development cheat sheet and there's a link for it down in the description. Hopefully that can help you along your journey. And the one thing I want you to really get out of this is that sometimes the delete key is your secret weapon. If we look around the United States, where is manufacturing happening? It's not happening in places like Boston or New York. It's happening in places like Texas. And that's because they have open land. It's what they call green field. It's a large field where they can put a factory. There's nothing waiting them down. They don't have to go through old bureaucracy. They don't have to deal with old infrastructure. They just pick a spot, they put the factory there, and they run forward. And that is an example of how your old decisions and your old mindset can prevent you from moving forward. There's a reason that China and other underdeveloped areas have grown so fast. It's because they were starting without the old baggage. And your goal is to take what you have learned before and move forward as if you were starting a new but much smarter. Don't get weighted down by your old decisions and your old work because your competitor does not have those same inhibitions holding them back and they will leaprog you. You are in the best position as soon as you learn that there's a better way to move forward. You will only be behind if you don't take that advantage the second you see it. This is your secret weapon. Don't do the work for them. If you found this video useful, check out my video on the five tests that you should do to verify whether your product is ready to go to market.
