What continues to utterly baffle me is this nonsense that Cyclone was engaged in R and D. Their patents contained what were flat-out assembly drawings. This isn't unprecedented when companies have built and thoroughly tested an idea; they know exactly what works and therefore what to illustrate in the patent.
When you haven't managed to even build a workable prototype, why are you patenting a finished product? You are sending a clear, unmistakable signal that the product is fully completed, vetted and ready for manufacture. What they did was to essentially lock themselves into their initial concept. Research and Development is a process meant to lead to the best outcome possible with your current knowledge and resources; a legitimate R and D program has no fixed concept of the exact route needed to achieve the desired goals. If you already knew what you wanted to do, why would you need to perform any research or engage in development?
The whole thing spun further out of control when they put together websites and mockups and then started soliciting investors based on the initial concepts. That still might not have been fatal except that a number of high-blown claims were made outlining exactly why this particular design was so "ingenious" and far advanced over current state of the art. And now they were completely locked in. When you've not only advertised the product, but also loudly sung its praises, people are going to get upset if you want to toss things out and start over. Your reasons for wanting to change course might even be honest and reasonable but the term "bait and switch" is still going to be thrown around by those led to believe that they were already buying into a mature and supremely competitive operation.
And that comes back to VeryUpset's observations that Cyclone was:
"...made it out to be such a big corporation before its time and that's why it failed, because it was set up to do just that and so it did..."
Undoubtedly this is where such a huge administrative overhead originated. A few guys tinkering around in a shop can go through quite a bit of cash when buying components and materials at retail prices. When they don't have a well equipped tool room and they must subcontract a majority of the work, the prices go through the roof. The first mistake was not setting up an adequate facility. That could have been rectified by not working out of the boat shop but by renting an appropriate sized facility in a small industrial park and stocking it with some appropriate machine tools. The tools can be had at reasonable prices if you go onto the used market and look for deals. Of course, it presupposes you employ skilled tradesmen capable of using the hardware.
Setting up a "Big Time" company introduced a ton of added expense... website production, office personnel, legal fees, travel expenses, wining and dining potential investors, costs associated with all the elaborate financing arrangements and so on. Why is a company with a handful of employees and no products involved in derivatives? What they needed were a couple of decent engineers with solid backgrounds in power plant design, a couple of skilled tradesmen capable of translating the engineers designs into metal, and a part time book-keeper to keep track of the beans and to do miscellaneous admin such as cutting checks, searching around for competitive prices and so on.
I keep envisioning Orville and Wilbur Wright pacing a Dayton cornfield to lay out a manufacturing plant and making up rosters of management personnel two years before going to Kittyhawk.....
If they had gone that route, they would have smothered under administrative garbage and never got a foot into the air.....
