Alfonso.Chacon
PARKED
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2023
- Messages
- 3
Rep Bank
$65
$65
Hi
I'm an Electronics Engineer with a PhD in microelectronics (VLSI), that for the past 20 years has been mostly in academia in Costa Rica. In 2021, due to some alignment of the stars (cannot find a better explanation), my partners and I landed a business selling staff augmentation services to a big VLSI start up in the US.
My partners are a colleague with 8+ years of experience as ASIC Designer in the VLSI industry (Intel), and a friend with 20 years of experience with his own small Embedded systems company. Business has been really good, and have now 25+ people giving key support to our customer (ASIC RTL design and verification, mainly). But we're approaching the end of the contract. And though our customer has promised us to keep most of our staff for another product for next year, we now that promises are just that, and we find ourselves still depending on one client (and as I know from the books, this makes us extremely fragile, as these guys can pull the plug at anytime leaving us in the middle of the desert).
We have timidly tried some marketing and followed some promising leads, but the truth is: we haven't been able to close a sale in two years, and our marketing is lousy. We don't even have anyone with the required experience seriously working on this, since we had the hubris at the beginning of our business of thinking that marketing and sales were very easy compared to VLSI design and that we could handle that ourselves, an attitude which of course, has now come back to slap us on the face, and we need to quickly learn on how to improve our lead generation and conversion rates.
I read the Millionaire Fastlane and Escape From the Rat Race, and found so many parallels with my life that, when this business opportunity happened, didn't think twice on jumping into it. I think we've been able to fulfill the first four major premises of CENTS in our business, but having no marketing and sales strategy has made scaling hard for us. I hope the insights in this forum can give us some hints on how to make our business escape the current situation.
I'm an Electronics Engineer with a PhD in microelectronics (VLSI), that for the past 20 years has been mostly in academia in Costa Rica. In 2021, due to some alignment of the stars (cannot find a better explanation), my partners and I landed a business selling staff augmentation services to a big VLSI start up in the US.
My partners are a colleague with 8+ years of experience as ASIC Designer in the VLSI industry (Intel), and a friend with 20 years of experience with his own small Embedded systems company. Business has been really good, and have now 25+ people giving key support to our customer (ASIC RTL design and verification, mainly). But we're approaching the end of the contract. And though our customer has promised us to keep most of our staff for another product for next year, we now that promises are just that, and we find ourselves still depending on one client (and as I know from the books, this makes us extremely fragile, as these guys can pull the plug at anytime leaving us in the middle of the desert).
We have timidly tried some marketing and followed some promising leads, but the truth is: we haven't been able to close a sale in two years, and our marketing is lousy. We don't even have anyone with the required experience seriously working on this, since we had the hubris at the beginning of our business of thinking that marketing and sales were very easy compared to VLSI design and that we could handle that ourselves, an attitude which of course, has now come back to slap us on the face, and we need to quickly learn on how to improve our lead generation and conversion rates.
I read the Millionaire Fastlane and Escape From the Rat Race, and found so many parallels with my life that, when this business opportunity happened, didn't think twice on jumping into it. I think we've been able to fulfill the first four major premises of CENTS in our business, but having no marketing and sales strategy has made scaling hard for us. I hope the insights in this forum can give us some hints on how to make our business escape the current situation.
Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member:
Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)
Access Restricted: Unlock 1,000,000+ Posts
Stop Peeking Through the Keyhole.
Open the Door.
You hit a wall because the best advice isn't free—it's earned. Since 2007, MJ DeMarco has been active here daily (99.9% active rate), building a war room for entrepreneurs who refuse to settle for mediocrity.
- Active Daily: Life-changing content posted dozens of times every day. No dead threads.
- MJ's Inner Circle: Direct access to the author of The Millionaire Fastlane.
- Vetted Network: Connect with founders scaling to 7 and 8 figures.
- Proven Roadmaps: Strategy over motivation. Execution over "hustle porn."
"SCALED TO 6-FIGURE MONTHS"
"Tips and advice here saved me from huge mistakes, others allowed me to scale my business to 6-figure months."— User MitchC
"INSANE QUALITY OF PEOPLE"
"The number of high quality people I've met from this forum has been insane. All of it predicated on building real value."— User Richard Peck
"You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with."
Are you surrounding yourself with success?
O vjopl zua xomm hiv nusi siqmoit tjuamf zua iyqmeop vjot vu at op qmeop Iphmotj.
