Volume 7 – June 1st 2010

New MW Ad Campaign

Last month Manufacturing-Works released a new ad campaign focused on our slogan "Delivering Solutions for Creating Wealth" and helping us to define what wealth means.

You can see our current add below and the full page and ad here.

Stay tuned for next mont’s ad as well. We’ll have a place on our website where you can tell us what wealth means to you and your company.

News and Articles

Precision Analysis of Riverton is Named Wyoming Small Business of the Year

Wyoming’s Precision Analysis in Rock Springs won the award for Wyoming Small Business of the Year.

Wyoming and Kansas Lead MEP in Sales, Growth

On February 25, Wyoming Growth Services coaches, Rick Rothwell and Barry Bruns, learned how to run a Eureka! Jump Start program. By April 1, they had sold 20 of them, in a state with a population of only 500,000. That’s right, twenty in a month. By May 1, they had delivered 18. Roughly half of those clients are manufacturers and half are estimated to return for follow up services. Kansas is on a parallel path, having sold and delivered 16 projects from March to April, all for manufacturing clients.

�It’s more than just another point solution, Eureka! Jump Start gives us a business model and an excellent first step with clients. Rather than us coming in with an assessment telling them what to do, Eureka! is the assessment. The clients define the next steps based on the ideas they pick,� says Sandy Johnson, center director of MAMTC in Kansas.

Read the full article on innovationnews.com...

The Business of Selling

There is the art of selling and the science of selling. How good are you at the “business” of selling?

Learn more about this important side of business...

Changing Your Customer’s World

In its infancy, Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, realized he needed a real business person to run his company, "…a respectable face who could sell corporate America." He chose John Sculley, an executive at Pepsi Cola. Why would Sculley leave a plush corporate gig to work for a four-year-old start-up that began in a garage?

Do you want to sell widgets the rest of your life or do you want to change your customer’s world?...

Wyoming Innovation Marketplace launches, Entrepreneurs gain new access to commercialization options

The Wyoming Business Council and the University of Wyoming’s Manufacturing-Works Program announced the creation of the Wyoming Innovation Marketplace (WIM), a program by the National Institute of Standards and Technology/Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Learn more about this new way to get your good ideas off the ground...

Don’t Get Trapped in Time

Your past is not your potential. Today is only one-part yesterday and even less for tomorrow. Your future has more to do with your potential than your history, if you choose to live that way.

That Dirty Word � “Creative.”

“I needed my appendix removed so while being wheeled into surgery, I told the doctor I only budgeted $200 for the operation but if I liked his work, I had other organs he could remove down the line at a higher fee. I asked if he wouldn’t mind if I had a few people look over his work and make some suggestions on how he performed the operation.”

This seems like a bit of a weird scenario. Most of us wouldn’t think of dealing with a doctor, or even our mechanic in this fashion.

Learn how to work with the creative professionals in your business...

The Pareto Principle and Value-Added Selling

At the end of the 19th Century, an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, was studying the wealth patterns of western Europe and observed a fundamental imbalance�most of the wealth was owned by a small number of people. Pareto, an avid gardener, observed this same imbalance in his garden. Most of the peas he harvested came from a small number of pods. These insights gave birth to a theory that has been called variably the Pareto Law, Pareto Rule, Pareto Principle, 80-20 Law, and 80-20 Principle.

Learn how to use the Pareto Principle for the opportunity to invest your sales time for maximum return...

5th Annual MEP Awards

Every year the MEP centers gather in Orlando to recognize and celebrate the achievements of some of our own that have gone above and beyond to make significant impacts to our MEP national system and more importantly on our manufacturing clients. The MEP National Conference Awards Ceremony is a great way to acknowledge these individuals/groups and celebrate their contributions with their family, friends and colleagues.

Company fined more than $130,000 after worker’s hand is partially amputated by unsafe machine

OSHA inspectors found that a motorized saw at the Yonkers, N.Y., plant of H&H Woodworking Inc. cut off part of a worker’s hand because the machine was not equipped with required safety features.

Pro Tips

Don’t Treat Your CDs and DVDs Like Fine China

If you send an CD or DVD for any reason at all, do you ever stop to consider how much packaging you’re putting it in? Often we wrap it up in multiple layers of cardboard, bubble wrap, then tape it up so much that it takes a hacksaw to get it open. We’re not shipping our grandmother’s fine china here!

CDs aren’t as fragile as we think they are. If you subscribe to Netflix take a look at how they package their CDs. One thin sleeve for the CD, then a paper envelope for the addressing and mailing. Their CDs get mailed more than once and see a lot more abuse than the normal CD/DVD and I’ve yet to have one come to me broken.

Save your self some time and money. Ship the disk in a paper sleeve and put that into a regular clasp envelope.

Contact Stan Grabowski for more information.