Excellent, Run. Now you have raised a strategic question, Now we are not focusing on whether or not our team comes back from Vegas with a yellow piece of paper crumbled in their hands. If my analysis is correct and the industry is polarized into a couple of large and a couple of handfuls of start-up, struggling or battered companies (not an unusual mix in the defense industry IMO), then who has the sales? Fortunate for the BIB, the USMIL is looking hard at tactical uses of LTA. As usual, other potential markets (and the DoD/USGOV isn't the only market or even, in aggregate, the largest IMHO) tend not to be early/first adopters.
When you get a potential customer focused on "we have an amazing product" they begin looking for weaknesses and flaws. When you get them convinced that "we can provide innovative approaches to expanding your capabilities" then you enter into a partnership that will work together to eliminate weaknesses. Now I will get controversial--I don't believe in closing sales, I believe in opening relationships. Oh gosh, am I going to get reaction! Google that phrase and you will see it is not original with me.
Understand the market and the capabilities people would love to have. Create a stable of innovative solutions and the capacity to practice continuous innovation (specialized knowledge and nimble business optimism and opportunism). Integrate your products into a multi-capable system if possible. Build partnerships with a handful of first adopter clients and serve them extremely well. Constantly look for new friends to serve and make successful.
That is the ladder every company at the bottom has to climb. Every one of them can list reasons they can't--"our leadership sucks, this is a proven engine of theft, we lack capital, the market is too resistant, we have death spiral financing, no one loves me, etc., etc., etc." Greatness is born in facing impossible odds and saying, "H*ll no, not now, not here, not me." No company that can't climb out of the abyss deserves to enjoy profitability and market impact. This is how WSGI's scandals handicapped it. IT crippled its mindset. So what, there is a ladder over there. . .want to try an IMPOSSIBLE climb? You DID know this was high risk didn't you? Think strategically! Good thinking, Run. So I am not accused of pumpimg, I did say IMPOSSIBLE, didn't I?
