There are also disadvantages. An obvious one is that no one vets the stories for us, which means the deluge of information includes not just the good (which seems rare some days), but the bad and the ugly as well. We also get to experience the range of company interactions that demonstrate a well thought out strategy and professionalism at one end, or rank amateurism at the other. Again, there is more of the latter than the former, unfortunately. Which does dish back one advantage that is kind of scary... our interaction doesn't have hundreds of thousands of project dollars on the line, with success dependent upon whether the company knows what it is doing, or not.

Our view isn't so much "from the inside" but rather "from a different perspective that includes some less often visible elements". So we thought it appropriate to share our take on some of the elements that our 25 years in the technology and consumer-related sales and marketing fields suggest are required for a company to succeed. While some of these items may be gates, for which failure to pass will yield failure in the market, others can fairly be seen on a continuum, where more is better, but less isn't fatal.

Topping the list of gating items is technical competence. A company either has it, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, market forces will soon wash the company away into history. This is the part where we find out if the product does what it says it does, if what it says it does is useful, and if it will keep on doing it for more than 1000 hours. Is there a bit of technical incompetence running around in the market? Oh, yes. Mostly with regard to being able to build a luminaire or "replacement lamp" the same way every time, and being able to accurately sample and test something that represents precisely how the next ones off the production line will perform. It doesn't matter if it's luminous output or color shift from batch to batch, or over time, but being able to design something that is manufacturable, reliable and long lived takes competence with both design and manufacturing practices. When a company has technical competence, especially if garnered from the electronics industry, they might assume that's the key, rather than a gate. When that happens, we get into the second success ingredient that a company may miss, and that, is...

A fully encompassing plan, along with the knowledge and experience to get it done. Don't mistake this for "some kind of plan" or even "an ambitious plan". While, "Our plan is to provide more than 70 lumens per watt to in a downlight product for commercial site applications." may sound good, there needs to be more to the story. How will it be marketed? Through reps, or distribution, both, or direct? If you're going direct, how do you plan to bring prospects to the website? If you're going through reps and distribution, how are you going to manage the margins and markup required for the lighting industry? This isn't the electronic industry's 20-30% for distribution and 6-10% for reps, you know. Who do you have that has lighting channel experience, and if you don't have anyone, where are you going to get the expertise? I was able to invest a little time on the phone recently with Luminus Devices' new President & CEO, Keith Ward. He was at the 100-day mark of his tenure, and acknowledged that, "There is still a lot to know." As he pointed out, "Luminus was born with great technology and a technology-centric view. While that was fun, a customer-centric view was needed for the long term." While they are bringing great "big-chip" technology to the table, and to some eyes, bending the DOE's roadmap a bit more sharply up than expected, the rise of the flat screen TVs ushered in the demise of the projection TV which was Luminus' bread and butter (as well as the showcase of their technical competence, which, when teamed as it is with Nichia's materials talent, is considerable). A quick re-focus to more diversified applications, including the customer-centric lighting market was needed. As Keith put it, "We didn't have enough lighting people leading the lighting division, which is why we sought out Peter Weller. Between he and I, we counted up 55 years in the lighting space," which suggests they can, and likely have, formulated a plan.

The plan also needs to include the money to get it done. From the money side, we're seeing a number of companies that birthed themselves assuming venture funding would be available when they needed to move from prototypes to some type of production. Unfortunately, they didn't plan on a credit and financing squeeze, and had no contingency plan for how they would bootstrap the company if venture funding didn't pan out. Oops. Now they've got a product that shows competence, some pilot units that have proved themselves, but no resources to supply samples to their eager reps or prospects, and not much capability to produce a product if they got anything besides a paid in advance order with a 90-day lead time. Didn't they think to pre-arrange something with a components distributor, including terms that let the money flow out just slightly later than when it will flow in? Or if 25-day receivable terms, and 30-day payable terms aren't doable, would arranging a line of credit when they launched kind of made sense? Maybe the issues aren't this basic all the time, but we see them often enough to suspect it's not uncommon for the newer lighting market entries riding the solid state lighting wave.

What about communications capabilities? We're obviously communications folks, and particularly sensitive (or critical) in this area. There is an old axiom that basically says you need to act to change the way you think, not vice versa. If you want to think like the LED lighting success you want to be, whether you're now a small company or a part of a large one, you need to communicate fully and professionally, both to your customers and the world at large. Does that mean paying big bucks for a "full service" PR firm? I tend to think not, as so far, most of the full service PR firms seem to plant themselves firmly in the middle of the information we need, creating delays and only relaying part of the story when we need the full one, right now. They aren't all that way, but what you really need is someone who can suggest a communications plan, add an understandable message, and that knows how to get that message exposed. The "one man band" is often very skilled at this, if they bring industry experience to the table. Find someone to help you communicate a message to the media and, more broadly, to the web. "We'll select someone to help us once we figure out our PR plan," is right up there with, "We'll consult with our doctor after we diagnose ourselves and set up our own surgery schedule," in its backwardness.

Successful companies are going to avoid arrogance, either at the factory or in their sales channels. This is an important one for a number of "established lighting companies" that are beginning to churn out some pretty decent LED products, but by no means limited to just that group. Sometimes it manifests because of technical arrogance... "We're semiconductor system gurus and no what it takes to design the best solid state lighting, and if you can't see that, you're stupid." Yep, we've gotten that attitude more than once. For those coming more from the lighting side, the trouble attitude is often more, "We're XYZ and everything we produce is good. If you can't handle our 60% markup don't even bother to ask for the data sheet... and if you do ask for a data sheet, don't plan to bug us with questions as that will just prove your ignorance." Seems obvious that won't win friends and influence people, but we're getting the stories coming our way that tell us it's happening.