Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine

Focus on Business

2025 could bring demand spikes and component availability tightening. Are you prepared?

Hurricanes Helene and Milton delivered unprecedented damage throughout the Southeast US. Rebuilding efforts will take years in some locations. In western North Carolina, some people lost their homes, their families and their employers. In those cases, it isn’t a matter of just rebuilding a home; they are rebuilding their entire lives. Sadly, while everyone contributes when the disaster is in the news, those contributions stop when the news cycle moves on.

So, before I start my column on the business upside of natural disasters, I encourage everyone to remember the impacted communities. Personally, I’m budgeting to keep giving to charities helping those areas for the next several months. I’m also buying from companies in North Carolina to help local businesses stay in business.

Read more: Natural Disasters and Impact on EMS Forecasting

Communicate your improvements to keep OEMs satisfied.

My undergraduate degree is from the University of Florida and our football season has just begun. As I write this, the Miami Hurricanes have just wiped the field with the Gators in the opening game. It is our coach’s third season. The game included errors in judgment that triggered momentum-shifting penalties on the field. Overall, the plays were unimaginative and not substantially different from the previous two years.

Coaching has been a revolving door at Florida and there are two camps of fans. One camp believes in giving the new coach time and the other feels that with no measurable improvement in play, maintaining the status quo will prolong the losing. That latter camp just got a lot bigger because this season opener showed no visible improvement over last year. Social media is ablaze with discussions about firing the athletic director and head coach.

Read more: How are You Measuring Success?

Self-confidence comes from meeting new challenges.

I shake my head when I see the large amount of self-idolizing today on LinkedIn. Who describes themselves as visionary, disruptive, a rainmaker, the prophet, the catalyst, the wizard, a guru, a Jedi master, or a creative genius?

Do you feel that this hubris is believable to peers? When did our egos start to dilute the need for getting up every day, working hard, looking at problems from multiple angles, being bold to take mindful chances, understanding we make our own luck and being thankful for small victories when running a business? Your title is stated on your business card; use it.

Disruptive people, technologies or real advancements in our society are so few, it seems we now must minimize these people or events when they actually occur due to the overuse of this term. For most of us, success is a byproduct of very hard work, learning from failures, collaboration with the people we are surrounded by, an ability to see the real issues affecting our businesses with a focus on solving the critical few, a strong competitive drive for “winning,” and yes, a little good luck.

Read more: Let’s Stop Idolizing Ourselves

Employee recruitment and retention require an active company effort.

It’s no secret that a tight labor market is an issue in all segments of the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) industry. A large part of this is the result of manufacturing offshoring trends. When I entered the workforce, I had friends and relatives who worked or had worked in manufacturing-related careers, influencing my choice to work for an EMS company. That isn’t the case today.

A few years ago, I participated in a local manufacturing awareness day targeted at high school students participating in their schools’ robotics programs. I put together a short video that illustrated manufacturing processes and careers in the EMS industry. Even students interested in engineering careers weren’t thinking about manufacturing engineering or hardware engineering. Most were focused on software engineering with an eye on getting jobs at Google or some other highly visible tech employer.

Read more: Meeting the Challenge of EMS Workforce Shortages