About a year ago (August 4th, 2006) I sold PRWeb to Vocus. I owned and operated PRWeb for the better part of a decade. It was a successful venture and we had a ton of fun building that business. In July 2006, knowing that the sale was eminent, I moved Alex Linde, an analyst for me at PRWeb, to head up a group in Springville, Utah we called Chispa Labs (pronounced cheese pah, a Spanish word for “little spark”.)

Chispa’s main reason for existing was to look out over the horizon to uncover new opportunities. And it worked too well. It became clear that opportunities would soon threaten to outpace my budget. We explored everything ranging from going into the publishing business, starting other Internet-based businesses, casual dining franchise opportunities, brick and mortar retail and more. Chispa Fun, a retail Vespa and Segway dealership in Bellingham, WA was one of the businesses to emerge from this incubator – mostly because it is a retail business that would require very little of my attention leaving me plenty of time to pursue my pilot training.

Learning to fly would ultimately lead me down the path of buying a small Cessna 182 and research into fractional biz jet ownership. Fly anywhere of consequence in a Cessna 182 and you quickly develop a requirement to get places faster. The 182 is great but a trip from Bellingham to Salt Lake City could take five plus hours. I needed something faster. So I began looking at various fractional jet ownership programs that are available and other alternatives to moving myself back and forth between Utah and Washington.

Perhaps the most important company to come out of Chispa Labs is Tangible Express, a rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing company that we located in the Chispa offices in Springville, UT. Tangible Express is important not necessarily for what it does but for what it has inspired.

As we studied the rapid prototyping / rapid manufacturing business it became clear that the service provider portion of the business had become highly commoditized. Buying decisions, it seemed, were made almost exclusively on price. Questions began to arise. How do we differentiate ourselves in this increasingly crowded space? Is price the only area that we can compete? What about competing on capacity? What if we could provide speed and quality while being price neutral?

This is where we come back to aviation. I was in Austin, TX in January visiting my friends at the Wizard Academy (highly recommend) and JP Engelbrecht and I were talking about fractional business jet ownership. He was considering fractional ownership in the Eclipse VLJ and pointed me to a company that was offering fractional ownership in the Eclipse jets. I went to this company’s web site and as I reviewed their materials a light went off. What if we overlayed this business model on the rapid prototyping industry? Would it work to answer those questions that we had been struggling with for the prior two months? I called Alex and asked his to try overylaying the fractional business jet model on our business model to see if we could discover some efficiencies.

I was very encouraged when I saw that it could be applied to our business. We could move our new machines into inventory and fractionalize ownership. By shifting the ownership of the asset to our customer we could remove that expense from our costs and provide a cost savings to our customer ensuring a loyal customer base and facilitating economies of scale. There was an even more intriguing prospect to this idea. If, as a fractional owner, I made a purchase in a single rapid prototyping technology I could trade my allotted build time on other rapid prototyping technologies as the need arose. This is something that I could not do as a traditional owner of a single rapid prototyping technology.

So, I began to dream. What if I could do the same thing with other manufacturing processes such as CNC milling, injection-molding, laser cutting, nano-manufacturing, EDM, etc? Would it be possible for someone that owned a fraction of a rapid prototyping machine to exchange time not only for other rapid prototyping processes but to move up and down the supply chain based on their ability to trade on their asset ownership? What if I could sell someone a fraction of an injection-molding machine and they could access rapid prototyping machine by trading injection-molding capacity for the amount of rapid prototyping capacity that they need?

Witness the birth of our patent-pending* Fractional Manufacturing and the renewal of US Asset-Based Manufacturing.

*(More on why we patented this process later, I promise.)

David McInnis, CEO
US Reliant

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under David A. McInnis, Repatriating Manufacturing, Startup Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.