“Look it’s very simple, we focus on what we do best and then we do it best. That’s what I wanted to do when I started this company over twenty years ago,” said Dave Ryder, president and founder of Prototron Circuits in Redmond, Wash., and Tucson Ariz.

Starting in the PCB business as a plater, but quickly moving through the ranks as a supervisor and then production manager, Dave was very observant. He studied how the shops he worked for were run, he picked up on what he felt was good—and not so good—and he developed a plan for a company of his own.

“It was the late seventies and one of the things I saw was that there was a growing need for quick turn prototypes. I also saw that when we took up the challenge and built boards quickly we made a lot of money, sometimes as much as four times the basic price for normal lead times. That made sense to me,” says Ryder.

So with that premise in mind, Dave and a friend started Prototron Circuits.

“We came up with the name because we knew we wanted to build prototypes fast. Back then, the word prototype was synonymous with quick turn, so we felt that the name Prototron would indicate what we did,” Ryder says.

Ryder also realized that to be good at something you had to be focused on that one thing and not anything else, so he decided that, unlike most companies that only dabbled in quick turn services, his company would be exclusively quick turn.

Kirk Williams

“Most of the companies I worked for would do some quick turns, just once in a while when their regular production customers would ask them to. And then they would have to turn the shop upside down to get them down. It was my idea that if we had a shop that built everything in three days or less we could really do pretty well,” says Ryder. “I knew that the cost of the board would be the same, the materials and chemistry and labor and everything would be the same, but that we would be paid extra for the time. People would pay us for time. That made sense to me, so I decided that we would sell nothing but time. I did not want to do any production lead times or quantities.”

Ryder and his partner started with literally a “dollar and a dream.” Actually more than a dollar, but not much more. And they worked very hard doing just about everything themselves. They bought some used equipment and put together a little shop in the rear of a local strip mall in the Redmond area of Washington.

“We did everything ourselves, everything. My then partner was experience in front end and CAM and I was able to do everything else, including the marketing. We, of course, had no sales force, so I would get a hold of every name and every list of potential circuit board users in the area and I would spend literally hours each day working on mailings, painstakingly typing and copying letters, stuffing envelopes and mailing them out,” says Ryder. “Then I would follow up with a phone call. It was a real seat-of-the-pants operation, but, you know, it worked. Our hard work paid off and pretty soon we had a list of customers we were building boards for.”

Eventually, the company grew steadily, but a bit slowly. There was not a lot of money to invest as the first years were pretty much hand to mouth. But after a while they started to get ahead, they started to hire people, and buy newer, if not new, equipment. The choices made at that time became, ultimately, the building blocks that have lead to Prototron’s success over the years. The one main ingredient in the company’s solid, steady, profitable growth was that they would have virtually no debt. They would sometimes arrange for leasing some equipment, but most of the time they just bought what they needed, when they could afford it.

“Over the years, I have done everything I can not to have debt. For a while a few years ago, we carried a line of credit, but never used it. It was there, I knew I could fall back on it, but I really did not want to. After a few years, I just chose to shut it down. In fact, after we bought Tucson [in 1998, Prototron acquired Southwest Circuits in Tucson, Ariz.] we had some rocky years down there where we had to put quite of bit of money in. Those times were pretty tough for us, but fortunately, the Redmond shop was doing very well so that they could provide the financing to get Prototron Tucson up and running. It was great to be able to do that but I have to admit that it put a strain on the Redmond shop.

“But having little or no debt has served us well. One of the things I learned early on was that if you paid your vendors on time, even sometimes a bit early, which can drive my accountant crazy sometimes, you can get a lot more out of them. What I learned in this business is that if you are nice to your vendors, if you respect them and pay them when you are supposed, it can really work to your advantage,” says Ryder. You get a lot of good deals, not to mention technical support. The way I figure it is, if a guy selling laminate then he probably knows a lot more about laminate than we do, so I am very happy to let him share his expertise with our guys. In terms of equipment, if you have a reputation for paying on time and paying cash then the people selling equipment are going to throw some very good deals your way. I feel very strongly that paying on time has saved us a lot of money in the long run.”

Oneil

As Prototron grew they started to establish a reputation, particularly in their own neighborhood, the Pacific Northwest. They became known as the go-to company for quick turn boards in that region. By 1996, Dave had built a strong team of industry veterans, most of them coming from some of the many local printed circuit board companies. Although sales were still well under five million dollars a year they were very profitable when they decided to acquire a local facility and roll their sales into their own company.

“Buying Cir-Quick was a risk for us at that time. But I felt that besides the fact that we could assimilate their customers and their sales, there were also a number of very key individuals at that company that I had had my eye on for quite a while, so I feel that we got a pretty good deal in the long run. That acquisition gave us a pretty good boost at the time,” says Ryder. “I knew that although we were still pretty small we were going in the right direction, both sales wise and people wise. It was also at this time that I hired Kirk Williams to be our production manager and later our general manager. That has turned out to be a key move in our company’s growth, as well as stability, over that past twelve years. Kirk brings real leadership to our company. The people here really believe in Kirk and trust his ability to lead them to success.”

Kirk Williams is a different kind of general manager. He doesn’t deal with fancy charts or deep analysis of where the company has been or where it is going. If you ask him how many panels go through his shop everyday he will have to guess, because that really is not the way he runs the company. Rather he runs the company by jobs, quick turn jobs, not panels. As far as he is concerned, every job has a personality, every order is his customers’ most important order; that is why they are paying a premium to get the boards so quickly. If you walk through the shop at any one time you won’t see a lot of boards sitting on shelves. That’s because the boards are always moving. Since he arrived at Prototron 13 years ago, Kirk has lived with a three-day cycle time, whether or not the customer wants his boards in three days or less. In most cases, Prototron builds all orders in three days or less. This means that there is almost no backlog. In fact, there is so little lag between the time an order is booked and the time it goes out the door that people at Prototron do not talk about bookings and shipments, because at Prototron, they are virtually the same thing.

The hiring of a new general manager that Dave could trust freed him up to get more involved in the sales effort of the company. In 1998, he decided that it was time to get serious about sales.

“Up to that time, we really handled sales as well as we could with a few good people. We had one outside sales person and a three person inside sales team. We had no real system to measure our sales effort, never mind having a sales program at all,” says Ryder. “We would work with the customers we had, doing a good job with them, and growing with them. Later, we put one sales person on the road and that was about it. I knew that we could do more, so I installed a strategic sales program that we have been using ever since.”

In Ryder’s office is a book shelf. On that shelf are 12 large binders. Those binders represent the last twelve years of business at Prototron. They contain the annual plans for the company’s strategy, marketing, technology road map, capital investment, and most importantly, account plans and forecasts for the coming year. In short, these twelve books, one for every year since 1998, represent the direction the company has taken over the past twelve years.

“In 1997, we decided that we were going to get serious about our sales effort. I held a number of strategic meetings around the kitchen table at my house where we talked about the company, where we felt it was, and where we felt it should be going,” says Ryder. “We talked about our strengths, weaknesses, and our customer base. We looked at our market, and yes, at our competitors and we set the direction of the company right then and there. Over the course of several weeks, we laid out the foundation that became the direction of the company ever since.”

1998 was the first year that Prototron had an actual forecast. Dave worked with his sales manager and developed a series of account plans for his key customers. From those account plans, he developed a customer by customer, month by month forecast for the coming year. He then changed his sales team’s compensation package to make sure that they were focused on making that forecast. He even set up a simple white board in the sales office so that his sales team would always be aware of how they were doing against the current month’s forecast. With that simple move, Prototron became a truly customer-driven, sales-focused company, something it has been ever since.

“1998 was a turning point for us. I feel that this was the year where we became a customer focused company, or I should say, we defined ourselves that way because we had been customer focused for years before that, but had never really expressed it. Putting together a real forecast was an eye opening experience for me and the rest of the team. That forecast really acted as an indicator of where we were going and we have used it ever since. The first year, we hit that forecast dead on. I think we were three or four hundred dollars over, it was amazing. During the past twelve years, we have had some ups and downs in making the forecast. Obviously, in 2002 we missed it, as we will this year, but for the most part we always hit it or at least come within three or four percent of it. But the important things is that we run our company on that forecast, we live with those numbers, we make sure that everyone is aware of them at all times,” says Ryder. “I want every single sales person to know what his forecast is for each month and for the year. I want our management team to be aware of it as well. Everybody who needs to knows what the score is.”

Prototron has a culture where they put themselves in their customers’ shoes. They know that their customers need to get their boards on time and that those boards need to be good. If you look at their delivery and quality records for the entire history of the company, you will see hard-core proof that their deliver performance is hovering at 98 percent, as is their quality rating. They live and die by these numbers, to the point that many of their customers will actually admit to paying them five or even ten percent more because of the peace of mind they have about Prototron boards being there on time, all the time.

Additionally, Prototron prides itself on being a customer driven company. What their customers need determines the direction the company will go. There sales people are forced to talk to their customers to find out what they need. To successfully fill out their account plans, they have to know what their customers want. These findings are shared with the entire management team and decisions are made based on the “hot buttons” that most customers have at that particular time.

“The direction of our company is based on what our customers want. It can go from the very basic. Our first year doing account plans, for example, most of our customers just wanted us to have a quality manual and we did that; another year it was ISO, and another it was a variety of surface coatings. Whatever it is that the majority of our customers want, we will work hard to give it to them. We are not an R&D company. In fact, we are the opposite of that, we do not work on anything that our customers have not asked for. If enough customers want something, then we will provide it. Our technology road map is no more complicated than that, says Ryder. “When our sales people all decide they want something, that they are going to need something to be successful, they have to develop a hard forecast, including customers and predicted sales of what we can expect to get in increased sales if we provide them with what they feel they need. One recent example of this was ITAR. Our sales people kept telling us that if we were going to be successful in the future we were going to have to have ITAR. They did the forecast, it made sense, and we are now an ITAR company. It’s not that complicated.”

Even a company like Prototron has seen some decline in business during these hard times. But they have seen hard times before and have managed to power through them by keeping their eye on the prize and making sure that they never vary from their original vision of being one of the industry’s foremost quick turn-around suppliers.

“I think one of the most important factors to our strategy is the fact that we stay focused on one thing and that thing is that we sell time. We are not in the production business, we are not in the offshore business we are not in the R&D business, we are in the quick-turn business,” says Ryder. “We live, eat, and breathe quick turn. When we buy equipment, we always consider how this will help us build better boards, faster. When sales are down one month and our sales try to go off center by trying to have us take some production business, or they want us to partner with an offshore company, we just will not do it. Our business is quick turn, that’s what our customers know us for and that’s why they trust us. Our customers will listen to our advice when it comes to making their boards more producible because they know that we do not plan on building their production orders. We will give them some honest and unbiased advice rather than lead them down the path that is going to drive them to build the production in our shop. Because we are quick turn exclusively, we do not have to use our quick turn lines to build late production boards, like other companies do.

“Prototron was founded more than 22 years ago to be a quick turn prototype company and all this time later, that is still our vision, if you will. Our goal is to be the best in the business and we are not going to stop until we achieve that goal.”