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Paul Burri: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
Back in the days when I was managing a machine shop, I had several vendors who did contract machine work for us when we were overloaded or when they could do a particular operation for less money or more efficiently than we could.
I would drop in on them from time to time to see how my job was progressing or to drop off new work, or sometimes just to socialize for a few minutes.
One day I walked into one of the shops and there on the workbench were five very complex machined parts that he was just finishing for one of his other customers. They were about the size of a loaf of bread, and they were among the most complicated parts I had ever seen. Each of them was worth several thousands of dollars — probably about $30,000 in today’s dollars.
I was intrigued by the complexity of the parts, which, to a machinist such as myself, made them fall into the category of works of art. (I guess that happens in a lot of professions when a piece of work is so complex and well done that it becomes beautiful in its own right.)
Anyway, I told my vendor that it was a beautiful piece of workmanship that he could be proud of. He thanked me and said, “One of these is going to Mars on one of the NASA landers.”
Hearing that, I asked his permission to pick them up. (You don’t pick up and handle parts worth thousands of dollars without permission for fear that you might drop them.) He told me it was OK, and I carefully picked up each one of the five parts and held them almost reverently in my hands for a few minutes.
Now I can say that I once held in my own two hands an object sitting on the surface of Mars. A once-in-a-lifetime experience.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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