Turning a Hobby into a Bright Business
About this video
Jason Christiansen explains how Rigid Industries began as a hobby in his garage after he retired from baseball, when a neighbor asked for an LED light bar like his. He describes bringing in partners, staying disciplined in a niche market, rating and prototyping new product ideas as a team, and being careful about saying yes to huge companies before the business is ready.
You'll be able to
- describe how Rigid Industries grew from a hobby into a company.
- explain the steps Rigid uses to decide whether to develop a new product.
- explain why a company might turn down a big customer if it isn't ready.
Key words
- Aftermarket product
- A part added to a vehicle after it's been sold, not made by the original manufacturer.
- Prototype
- An early test version of a product used to see how it looks and works.
- Niche market
- A small, specific group of customers with particular needs.
- Margin
- How much profit a company makes on each item after its costs.
- Infrastructure
- The people, equipment and systems a company needs to make and deliver its products.
Transcript
- Jason Christiansen. I'm the President/CEO of Rigid Industries. We manufacture floor projection LED lighting, anything from a combine to a tank to an ATV to a boat, a very diverse product line. It started as a hobby, and I was putting aftermarket product onto some off-road vehicles.
I had a large pickup truck, and one of my friends introduced me to a person that had some prototype LED light bars. My neighbor saw it. Hey, can you do one for me? And I had just retired from baseball, so I had time on my hands. I started in my garage. I didn't have any idea that it was gonna become what it is today.
Not being an expert by any means in lighting, electronics. I don't even know how to solder anything to a board. I just knew, based on my background and what I like. It's crazy to think what I like would actually work, but it really did. I had a vision on where this was going, a new technology that I felt we could grew.
We didn't need a lot of money out of the company to get it up and running. Part of a fast-growing company, you can't do everything yourself, and you have to put smart people in the right places, and bringing my partners on has really helped accelerate that process.
And from that moment on, it absolutely exploded, and we haven't looked back since. There wasn't a lot of downside to what we were doing. Everything was very positive, positive, positive. So we really stayed pretty focused on what we needed to do in that niche market to make sure we continued to move forward.
It was hard at times because sometimes you find opportunities that may take you off your path. You really gotta be disciplined to make sure that you continue to stay with what you're good at. You might start hearing from maybe ag people, farmers, asking for a specific light for a specific project.
We sit down as a team and we go over it. It's almost like a focus group, where we talk about different products. What's the potential for it? We give it a rating. If the rating is high enough, it will go to the design phase, and we'll do an S layer, a prototype, and see what does it look like?
How does it feel? What's the weight gonna be? How much light output are we gonna get out of it? Are we getting 10,000 units out of this in the first year, or we getting 150,000 units out of this? What is our margin on it? Is it what the customer wants? Is it what we wanted?
Is it a Rigid product? Those are all things we take into account as well. When you have big companies knocking at your door, asking you to design something, a company like a Toyota or a John Deere comes knocking on your door, it's hard to say no to companies like that.
But if we don't have the infrastructure set and we're not ready for that, it was gonna make us fail.
Video © Khan Academy, used under CC BY-NC-SA. Watch on Khan Academy. Puzzicle is not affiliated with Khan Academy.