Edison's Child

Design For Hire

After holding the position of head of design at a manufacturing company, Mark Wheeler went his own route. With the help of two other multi-disciplined engineers, these three founded Tri-Cycle Product Design Inc. (Natick, MA). Now Tri-Cycle has four full-time employees and handles projects for industries such as semiconductor, electronics, medical equipment, communications and instrumentation.

Don't be fooled by the small size of the operation. Mark and the two other principals have a wide range of design experience between the three of them and are able to use that to their advantage when dealing with customers. During a recent conversation, Mark explains how he used his vast manufacturing experience to start an independent firm.

-A. Dyer

AD: What was your background before starting your own independent company?

MW: I was trained as an industrial designer. My specific area of expertise is furniture design. I've had a lot of experience in and spent most of my time working at manufacturers. Most of my experience had to do with building custom products, whether they were in a variety of materials -- plastics, injection molding, vacuum forming. And then in woodworking and also a lot in steel and sheetmetal. So I had experience in a multitude of materials. It's kind of where I felt I got most of my training and my ability to go out and sell myself to a variety of different industries.

Mark Wheeler
Principal

AD: So is that how you got into more design-related work?

MW: Yes, I was trained as a designer but I spent most of my time working on the manufacturing floor doing design and problem solving with manufacturing process issues and plant issues associated with that.

AD: What made you actually decide to take the leap and start Tri-Cycle?

MW: There was an opportunity because of a lay-off at a company that I used to be the head of design at. This was right around the beginning of the `90's, and there was, in the Northeast, just a ton of technical jobs and people getting laid off in engineering. I got together with my business partner, whom I had known previously and was a friend. He is a mechanical engineer with an MBA, and also had been laid off. So between the two of us plus one other person (who is more or less my mentor in industrial design), we came up with the concept of this company and just opened the doors based on our own unemployment.

AD: Is this something you had thought about before getting together with these other principals?

MW: Yes, as a matter of fact, I was working with the third gentleman I mentioned, about getting my portfolio up to speed so I could go out and start to take on work on my own on the side, so that I could work my way out of the company that I eventually got laid off from.

AD: What does it take to get an independent firm like yours started?

MW: It takes, most importantly, good relationships with a lot of people. I think our selling is based on our relationships and our past experiences with different folks. We leverage those relationships to get work. People knew us because they knew we were good in certain things and the three of us had come from different industries. We have worked with the people we knew and kind of worked our way into the business that way. By asking if they knew anybody who needed this done or that done. Before you knew it we were getting little jobs and then we built on top of those jobs. We have a commitment to always delighting the customer on some level. Giving them something more than they expected. That's something that has served us very well. So we were working on a long term relationship with everybody, we were just not trying to do a quick hit.

AD: I'm sure that one major key is that it just takes a lot of time.

MW: It does. We probably didn't have work for about the first month and a half. That was scary, but then we started getting little jobs. Then along the way there were points where we didn't know enough about what we were doing so work was halted. We found that there is usually, between the time we talk about a job to the day we get it, a six-month lead time. We needed to compensate for that and learn how to monitor our activities so that we would have a constant stream, which I think we've just perfected in the last two years. We have been steadily busy since then. It took us a while to get there. But there were times where I went out and got a contracting job doing contract engineering and design just to supplement the pay that wasn't coming into the business.

AD: Did you and the other two co-founders all bring something different to the table in terms of design?

MW: Most definitely. One came from a strong background in the electronics/ packaging industry as an industrial designer. He has more experience in that field than any of us did and has a lot of contacts. And (the second) came from the mechanical/design side of mechanical engineering where he was doing machine building. And I came from the process side where I was used to building custom furniture. Furniture covers a lot of different areas and has a lot to do with packaging, ergonomics and people working with equipment. I also have a graphic design background. So aesthetically I brought some of that to the table too. So we come from different industries and we come with a different set of specific skills, but at the same time we have a lot of experience in producing products for manufacturing.

People always complement us on how the three of us come from completely different points of view but we're all solidified around one idea which is the product development process. That's actually where the name of our company came from is that process we use, which is define, design, develop. That's what Tri-Cycle means.

AD: For what your firm does, I would imagine that you have to be pretty diverse in terms of engineering disciplines just for all of your clients.

MW: That's right. And when we don't have a specific skill for a project, we will contract that skill in or we use the relationships we have to find folks who do specific things like material scientists, or the guy who happens to be extremely good at specifying stepper motors. We'll bring these folks in to augment our skills, and that is kind of the concept behind the company. We will build a team that is necessary for each project. And so, we're not incurring a huge overhead all the time and associating that to every project whether it's big or small. That's an advantage for a customer.

We are all project managers. That is something we had all worked to a level to in the industries we were in. So we have a lot of experience in managing large and diverse and sometimes no-capital projects. That has served us well.

AD: With many companies getting larger workloads and more time constraints, do you think they find it a relief to be able to come to you for their design needs?

MW: Most definitely. You find that there is an opportunity because outsourcing is not considered a bad thing. It's considered a good thing if you can find a group of folks who can go in and take a project, take responsibility for that project and act instead of their engineering department. So we take on project level work, where we assume responsibility for the entire project. We definitely work with a lot of other people and teams inside the company. The idea is that there are folks working with very little resources and need to outsource entire components. You have to have a multitude of disciplines to take on those types of projects.

AD: For design engineering in the future, do you see design firms like yours becoming more and more attractive to companies?

MW: Yes, I think outsourcing is a wave that's not going to stop. Because we're small and we're constantly up against much larger firms with much larger overhead we feel our edge is in technology. We stay on the cutting edge of CAD and Internet technology. We use four of the most popular CAD software out there. We also use four of the most popular solid modelers and we stay current with those packages because we are trainers in three of those different modelers. We do training to keep current and it's a way to get in front of some of our customers. A lot of times we are pulled in because of our ability to use CAD effectively. So we leverage those sorts of things. I think technology is the thing that separates the men from the boys.

For more information, contact Tri-Cycle Product Design Inc., 88 Kendall Lane, Natick, MA 01760. 978-772-1799. Circle 602.

Originally published in the November  1998 issue of designfax.
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