- If you’ve come up with a new idea or a new invention >
If you’ve come up with a new idea or a new invention, the obvious is that you’ve got to get it patented and go through the right steps. Get yourself protected because once you launch something into the public domain, someone with a bigger company or someone who’s not as honest as the guy who’s invented the product may well be, could come along and take the product from them.
If it’s a service sector, check out your competition. What’s going to make you different from your competition? Make sure you understand your competitors and what they’re offering. Make sure you understand how you’re going to achieve what you’re going to offer and that you don’t let your customer down. Don’t promise something that you can’t deliver.
Our plan was to gain a good reputation in the North East region with various plant hire companies, quarrying, the Coal Board and National Smokeless Fuels. We would do a lot of repair work for them, and we thought, if we could prove we were capable of doing good repair work, we may be considered when the enquiries came out for providing new buckets for diggers and earth moving equipment at the time. So my plan was that we would start out as a service business, doing repair work, and would gradually move into a manufacturing business once we learnt about the customers’ needs and requirements, and understood why we could prove that we were better than their current suppliers. We learnt that by looking at all the repairs we would do for the earth moving equipment, and realise the weaknesses on each of the other people’s manufactured product. We learned that we could build something better than that.
Keith MillerMiller UK Limited
