How are you monetizing your laser?

[Doug Griffith]

Turning $2600 an hour in sales isn't that hard Kevin, what that leaves out is the ancillary costs. I've done marking and cutting work on sealing rings for unspecified nuclear facilities and sure they can pay $2,000 a time to have something processed but to get those kind of contracts requires far far more than a material database or a ULS laser set up in a garage.

Don't forget the ISO and AS certification requirements that come with accounts like that. Certs don't come cheap and I'm not just talking money. Also, the costs and risks when working with high end materials.

[Robert Tepper]

My laser runs while I am doing other activities. Usually sales on the phone, pad printing, filling web orders, running my old Dahlgren or running the vulcanizers. My laser is like a robot. It just needs to be cleaned and new material added between cycles. Not every job runs at the same rate. Some faster than others. I am very happy with the return on my investment. Everyone needs a specific amount to cover their overhead and I am comfortable with what I am seeing in sales.

The laser is just one of five things that I do. I have always believed in multiple streams of revenue. I plan on purchasing my second laser at the show in Las Vegas later this month.

Robert

[Gary Hair]

I'm betting that for him that 33/hr was profit after costs of running it.

I'm just going by what he said, and he said "revenue" - that's not profit. At anything less than about $75/hour you can't really be profitable, at $16.xx/hour you are losing money...

[Kevin Gregerson]

Don't forget the ISO and AS certification requirements that come with accounts like that. Certs don't come cheap and I'm not just talking money. Also, the costs and risks when working with high end materials.

Yea, the materials database really gets you in the ballpark when it comes to settings on CO2 lasers. Frequently you'll need to adjust up or down based on your environment. The other part of that is also getting good training when it comes to actually running the laser and how to understand material behaviors. Something that Universal does at Corporate for their customers in this market with a materials engineer in the test lab. It's a really good way to understand a little bit of how things work etc.

I'm just going by what he said, and he said "revenue" - that's not profit. At anything less than about $75/hour you can't really be profitable, at $16.xx/hour you are losing money...

75 an hour if it's the only machine you are running yea, if it's just a second or third machine that the operator is running then it's cost of operation drops down a bit. I use the same math for some clients. I ask them how much are you paying your operator. The answer usually comes back at 20-35 an hour. I tell them is he only running the laser? If they say yes, I say you want two machines not one. They ask why I and I say double productivity means nearly half as many dollars per part spent on labor so two machines reduce the cost of manufacturing from 8 to 4.2 dollars a piece. Granted, they need the kind of work it takes to get to that level.

But in this case, I can't really fault him for collecting a consistent check. Lasers have an overall lower maintenance than just about any other tool I've seen out there. So any time they can pay for themselves, it's a good day.

[Dave Sheldrake]

Yea, the materials database really gets you in the ballpark when it comes to settings on CO2 lasers

So does the huge welth of information available from just about every laser manufacturer on the planet without needing to pay for it.

Don't forget the ISO and AS certification requirements that come with accounts like that. Certs don't come cheap and I'm not just talking money. Also, the costs and risks when working with high end materials

Spot on Doug, all this talk of $2600 an hour is cheap snakeoil as far as I'm concerned. Yes I often do jobs that turn OVER more than $2,600 an hour but the associated paperwork, indemnities, insurance, licensing, transportation costs run to around $500,000 a year to do that kind of work. Divide out the costs of doing that kind of work over the annual value of the work and that $2,600 soon becomes $260.
Setting that aside, this spurious rubbish about Kaptons and Fibre sheet being high end materials......it may well be if you believe that ULS are the pinnacle of laser processing but once you start to look at the outside world of lasers (not just manufacturing lasers) you soon realise they amount to a very small ant hill in a very large farm.

[Kevin Gregerson]

So does the huge welth of information available from just about every laser manufacturer on the planet without needing to pay for it.



Spot on Doug, all this talk of $2600 an hour is cheap snakeoil as far as I'm concerned. Yes I often do jobs that turn OVER more than $2,600 an hour but the associated paperwork, indemnities, insurance, licensing, transportation costs run to around $500,000 a year to do that kind of work. Divide out the costs of doing that kind of work over the annual value of the work and that $2,600 soon becomes $260.
Setting that aside, this spurious rubbish about Kaptons and Fibre sheet being high end materials......it may well be if you believe that ULS are the pinnacle of laser processing but once you start to look at the outside world of lasers (not just manufacturing lasers) you soon realise they amount to a very small ant hill in a very large farm.

Depends what you process, sheet metal lasers are an entirely different beast of laser equipment usually in the half a million to walk in the door pricing. Not to mention the growing market for laser welding. There are a lot of lasers out there and there are a lot of applications. Thus the reason I say there is really no bad laser just bad applications.

So yes, this is a small piece of a much larger pie in regards to the revenues of the laser industry as a whole.

[Bill Cunningham]

I'm not getting any younger, so after 25 years I decided to cut back a bit and stop doing stuff that was minimally profitable. About 98% of my customers now come to me via the web, so I'm now pretty well only doing custom laser stuff. I make a comfortable living, and when this laser craps out I will buy another. I'll probably keep working until they carry me out of here in a box. 5% of every job goes into a laser repair/replace fund. I do glassware,sheet glass,award glass, canoe paddles and baseball bats, wood portraits and other photographs, memorials for pets and people, and virtually anything with a lasered photograph. I'm constantly booked at least 5-8 days in advance, evry job is prepaid and I turn down at least 5 jobs a week. Yes you can make a comfortable living using only a laser, but you have to excell at what you choose to do. There are half a dozen trophy shops that have lasers within 50 KLM of me, and I'm also doing all the stuff they can't, or won't attempt. I took. Month's worth of time off this Summer, toured the East coast, went fishing, and spent a week on the ATV trails in the Ontario bush. Time off, is just as valuable as time on!

[Keith Colson]

Hi Bill

Good point about getting customers through the web. I finally got on to page 1 of google for the most common search here in Auckland, New Zealand "just this week". It took me 3 months of fiddling but I am getting 4 to 6 calls a day this week versus 1 call a week. I now have more than enough work. Just shifting from page 2 to page 1 makes all the difference.

Cheers
Keith

[Mike Null]

I am somewhat in the same boat as Bill in that I'm not working as much as I once did but I have done what i call refocusing. I've had a $25 minimum fee for some time now which sends most of the retail types to my competition and it's working as I planned. I've discontinued doing t-shirts, mugs and other sublimated items and I am listing my sand blasting stuff on Craig's List this week. I just sold my vinyl cutter---not enough volume. In my judgment all of these things are nuisance type businesses for me--sublimation because it involves too many retail customers and sand carving because it's too dirty and hard to get a fair price in this market.

I have focused more on my core businesses (as GE says) and I'm looking at adding another piece of equipment which I won't discuss as it's very preliminary and tentative.

[Dave Sheldrake]

Same here Mike to the extent I don't supply retail at all these days. It's just too much trouble and the logistics can be a nightmare. Trade or other dealers is easy, less customers and bigger job run times.

If I sell widget A at $10 to a dealer (in a batch of 5,000 of them) or I could sell widget A to retail at $25 it gives me the following break down

To the trade : $50,000 return ,One customer and postal organisation
To retail: $125,000 return and potentially 5,000 different customers who all have different expectations and requirements, 5,000 lots of post to organise, 5,000 potential phone calls or emails to respond to, 5,000 questions to answer not to mention me being dead from a heart attack at 55 from stress.

No thanks, I'll be happy with the $50k and a stress free life for that item and in reality I make more profit at the lower price to one customer. Some people are set up and have the logistics to deal with 5,000 customers....I don't and don't intend to any time soon.

cheers

Dave

[Doug Griffith]

One large order also allows larger material buys resulting in lower costs which can be deferred by having terms with suppliers.

[Dave Sheldrake]

Sure does Doug, I do keep a stock of the common materials though...about 30 metric tonnes of the darn stuff the differences ordering by the pallet can be as much as 50% less cost!

cheers

Dave