Member-only story
The biggest one shot deal I ever won was a $25M/Year custom deal we did with Lucent.
We had been doing business with Lucent optical module division in the UK and Pennsylvania for years. In fact, we were getting all of their business.
However, we couldn’t crack Lucent’s box business. We had significantly better products than our competitors, but we just kept losing.
Then Lucent issued a Request For Quote (RFQ) for a custom device. They wanted the custom product in three months!
That was unheard of in the world of Analog semiconductors, but I knew we could do it. And I was tired of losing. I decided we were going to give them exactly what they wanted at the exact schedule we wanted.
Hurdle number one: Convincing the engineering team we could actually meet Lucent’s request.
You can imagine the pushback I got. It went like this, “Three months! There’s no way we can do this!”
Actually, there were the requisite expletives thrown in. And since I’m trying to eliminate expletives from my writing, I’ll let your imagination figure out what they were.
