Outfit Needed by a Corporation.—To begin business with after you have received your certificate of incorporation you must have:
(1) A minute book in which to record the proceedings of the directors’ and stockholders’ meetings. A minute book with printed forms can be obtained which makes it easy to record the minutes accurately.
(2) A stock certificate book; suppose your certificates, or shares, have a par value of $100 then you will need a book of 100 certificates to equal $10,000. A stock certificate is reproduced in Fig. 84.
(3) A book of account is required by the New York State transfer tax law where companies are doing business in the State, and transfer agents must also have one to show every transfer of stock. Neglect to keep this book imposes a heavy penalty.
(4) The New York transfer law also requires New York companies to keep a stock transfer book which shows when shares, or certificates, are sold, or transferred, by one person to another.
(5) A stock ledger is also needed by every corporation to enter the stock transactions of each day in. A combination book with all of the three last named can be bought ready for use.
(6) A corporate seal, which is an embossed impression of the name of the company, see Fig. 84, is made by a seal press as shown in Fig. 85, and this is also required by law. The whole outfit above described for incorporating and maintaining a company can be bought for the small sum of $10 or less of the Brown-Green Company, 48 John Street, New York City.
How a Stock Company is Operated.—When you receive your certificate of incorporation you can then call a meeting of the directors (named in the certificate of incorporation) or board of directors as they are called. At this first meeting the directors elect the officers, that is a president, a secretary and a treasurer.
The president then takes the chair and the secretary writes down all the minutes of the business transacted at this and subsequent meetings. The first business that will come before the directors after the election of the officers is to make the stock of the company full paid. To do this you must turn your invention and patent over to the company in exchange for the full amount of the stock the company is capitalized for, say $10,000. In other words you sell your right, title and interest in the invention and patent for $10,000 worth of stock, which is all of it.
Next you turn back into the treasury of the company 45 per cent, of the stock and keep 55 per cent. for yourself. The 45 per cent. of the stock in the treasury, which is called treasury stock, can then be sold at its par value, that is full value, which is $100 per share or at any smaller price the board of directors may agree upon. The sale of the treasury stock gives the company the capital it needs to start the business and to keep it moving until it becomes self-supporting.
If $4,500 is not enough money to finance your company then capitalize it for whatever amount you think will be needed and add about 50 per cent. more to it. You can incorporate a company for $100,000 just as easy as you can for $10,000, but this is a matter you and your friends should consider most carefully.
Should you at any time sell more than 5 per cent. of your holdings, that is of the stock you own, the control of the company will pass out of your hands and the other directors and stockholders will whip-saw you as they like, if they can pull together, for the majority of the stock will be in their hands.
The stock, or securities, as it is called, of a company can be sold in a number of ways but the usual method is to sell it (a) by personal solicitation, (b) through stock-salesmen, (c) have a broker take the whole stock issue, and (d) by advertising. If your invention is what it seems to be, your patent as good as the average patent, your company capitalized for a moderate amount and the product looks good for making quick sales and large profits you won’t find any trouble in placing the stock with the moneyed people of your community.
Besides receiving 55 per cent. of the stock for your invention and patent you should as the inventor and practical man be voted a salary of $25, $50 or $100 per week to superintend the manufacturing end of the business. Have a salary contract drawn up with the company in which the amount you are to receive weekly and the length of time you are to receive it is stated, and have it signed by the president and secretary for the company.
About Retaining a Lawyer.—In all of your business dealings with other people from the very beginning the safest way is to have the advice and help of a corporation lawyer and while he is keeping you safe, whole and harmless from all damage be sure he doesn’t mulct you while he is doing it.
A good way is to pay him a flat-rate for whatever advice he gives you and the contracts he draws up for you. But if you can’t do this then give him a 1 per cent interest in the net amount which you may receive from your invention.
When you and your associates have decided on organizing a company the usual and proper way is to retain a lawyer and have him take care of the incorporation certificate, conduct the first meeting and open the books, to the end that it may all be done right and in good legal form.
After you have formed a partnership or a company and have the coveted capital to go ahead with the business, you and your associates must consider two problems and the way you work them out will decide whether your venture will lose money or declare dividends.
The Problem of Manufacture.—These two problems are the manufacturing and the marketing of your product and in this chapter we will talk about manufacturing it first and then take up the marketing end of it in the next chapter, for while they are closely allied in a common cause they have to be treated as entirely separate things.
In this respect a manufacturing concern is very like a human being in that it has a brain and a body. You and those interested with you are the brains of the organization and those who work for you, to the end that profits may pile up for your benefit and behoof, form the body.
On your head, most likely, will fall the responsibility of turning out a high-grade product at the lowest possible cost and to do this the right way and to the best advantage you must begin at the beginning and think and scheme out how you can obtain the best results with the least outlay of time, labor and money.
There are many ways to start in manufacturing your product but the efficient way will depend on what you have to make, the number you are to make and the amount of capital you have to do it with.
Farming out the Work.—In the beginning you will often find it much cheaper, and hence more profitable, to give a contract to some manufacturer—who has a big factory fitted out with thousands of dollars worth of machine tools and a capable force of skilled mechanics—for a given number of the articles, or machines, you want to have made and delivered in and at a certain time.
By this arrangement there is no initial time, effort or money spent on buying machinery and getting a factory into running order, neither is there the work and worry of keeping a shop force going and besides you know exactly what each device will cost you when the lot is done and delivered. Still this scheme is not one that appeals to many inventors especially if they have, or think they have, a genius for mechanics and shop management.
Another way to start operations in an economical manner is to have some one or all of the parts of your invention done by outside manufacturers, or farm them out as it is called, and then assemble the parts in your own shop. Scattered all over the United States are shops and all sorts of factories where you can get a lower price quoted on a certain part or parts made of wood, brass, rubber or any other material than you could possibly make it or them for, in a shop of your own in the beginning.
Of course the larger the quantity of a given piece you can order at a time the lower will be the pro rata cost, that is the cost of each piece; for instance suppose a brass founder quoted you a price of $1 each on a certain casting in lots of ten, he might scale the price down to 50 or 60 cents each in lots of one hundred, and if you ordered a thousand at a time you might get the price down to 35 or 40 cents each. In figuring cost things like this must be taken into consideration.
In many cases it is not the mere material put into, and labor put on making a part that brings up the cost of the first lots but before the part can be turned out a special die, or jig, or fixture must be made for duplicating the part and very often a special machine must be designed and built for making a certain part. Such special tools and machines are very expensive and their cost must also be reckoned with.
Starting Your Own Shop.—In starting your own shop the question of what you are going to make and the quantity you intend to make will fix very largely the kind of machinery, the floor space and everything else you will need, nearly.
In this age of cheap electric power you can have an electric motor installed, to run your lathes, drill presses, shapers and other machines, almost anywhere you happen to be located. And besides it is better, as a rule, to start and operate your plant in your home town. For a shop on a small scale, wherever it may be, it is cleaner, less troublesome and cheaper to use electric power than it is to use gas or steam power.
Should you intend to operate on a very large scale it may then be to your advantage to look up a place where there is water power, or if your industry is one that calls for the large use of electricity you would then be justified in moving to Niagara Falls, or some other place where there are great hydro-electric plants.
The matter of being near to certain raw materials you need for manufacturing, or to a market for your product is not one that you will probably have to decide alone. Nor need the question of labor take up your time for the wages of skilled machinists, electricians and chemists are about the same throughout the United States, and while rents are higher in large cities than in the towns and villages still nearly one-half of the articles and machines made in the United States are turned out in 100 of the largest cities.
One of the advantages of manufacturing in a large city is that you can always get skilled labor and a great variety of materials on short notice. Should your product be in the nature of gas or steam engines, harvesting machines or automobiles you should locate your factory on some navigable river, on the Great Lakes, or on a railroad line (with a spur-track running alongside), in order to insure good and cheap transportation.
When you rent or build a shop the main thing is to have plenty of windows on every side and see to it that the ventilation is good and the heating system is adequate. There is no economy in making men work with poor light, bad air and in a cold place.
Buying Machine Tools.—Having secured by lease or by purchase a shop, or factory suitably located your next effort will be directed toward equipping it with the proper tools and machinery.
Besides the usual machinists’ hand tools you should buy (1) a gas furnace; (2) a grinder; (3) a plain lathe; (4) a screw cutting lathe; (5) a drill press; (6) a planer; (7) a shaper; (8) perhaps a milling machine, and (9) a buffer. Several of each of these kinds of machines may be needed.
A gas furnace, see Fig. 86, is useful for tempering tools and other operations where an intense heat is needed. A grinder, shown in Fig. 87, is used for grinding off rough parts of iron or brass castings and for smoothing up rough surfaces. It is formed of a mandrel which turns freely in a pair of bearings set in a headstock. A pulley is fixed to the middle of the mandrel and the latter is threaded on the ends; an emery, or a carborundum wheel is slipped over each end and these are held in place by washers and nuts. A swivel hand rest makes it easy to hold the work against the wheel.
A plain lathe, see Fig. 88, is good for turning, drilling and facing metal parts and for many other operations. It consists of a bed supported on a frame which carries the driving pulleys; the latter in turn is belted to a cone pulley which is keyed to the mandrel and this runs in bearings in the headstock. The inner end of the mandrel projects beyond the bearing and this is threaded so that a chuck, that is a device with adjustable jaws for holding the work, can be screwed on it.
Besides the headstock which carries the rotating mandrel, and which is fixed on the left hand side of the bed, there is a tailstock with an adjustable mandrel which slides on the right hand end of the bed, and between the headstock and the tailstock there is an adjustable hand rest.
An engine lathe, as shown in Fig. 89, besides doing all an ordinary lathe can do can be used for accurately turning up cylinders, disks, etc., turning out cylinders and cutting screws of any size or pitch, within certain limits, and it does all these things with rapidity and precision.
A lathe of this kind has a guide-screw, a set of change wheels, that is a number of interchangeable gears, and a back-gear, and by means of these gears the guide-screw is revolved in any ratio to the speed of the gears which may be desired. For turning or cutting a slide-rest is used, that is an attachment sliding between the headstock and the tailstock, for holding the tools.
The slide-rest is made with two adjustable slides so that the tool can be held in any position. The slide-rest can be moved freely by hand or by means of the guide-screw which carries it along the bed at any desired speed.
A drill press makes drilling an easier and a more accurate operation than when a lathe is used for this purpose. A pillar type of power drill is shown in Fig. 90. It is so constructed that the drill can be rotated at any one of a number of speeds and by means of a guide-rod it is caused to advance into the metal automatically at the proper speed.
A planer, see Fig. 91, is a machine for turning up flat surfaces, cutting slots and the like in metal parts. A planer is made up of a bed, a table in which the work is clamped and which slides back and forth on the bed by means of a feed motion; a slide-rest, which carries the cutting tool, is held above the bed by an upright frame and this moves to and fro across the table.
There are several kinds of shapers made and Fig. 92 shows one of them. A shaper cannot only be used for planing, but for turning, boring and slotting. In a shaper the work is held in a fixed position on the table, which can be raised and lowered by a hoisting screw, and the tool is made to move across the table by a quick-acting return motion.
There is also an arbor on which the work is mounted where a circular cut is to be made. The cutter head has a vertical adjusting screw with a worm feed and an index plate so that it can be set to any ratio. In a shop where only small work is to be done a planer may be dispensed with and a shaper used instead.
A universal milling machine, see Fig. 93, is also a handy combination tool in that it can be used for drilling, cotter drilling, boring, profiling, key-seating, rack- and gear-cutting and other operations.
A buffing machine is made nearly like a grinder but leather, felt and rag wheels are used on the spindle and when either pumice-stone, crocus and rotten-stone is applied to them tool marks and scratches can be buffed out and the work polished when it is ready to be lacquered or nickle plated.
If you are buying new machines get them fitted with individual electric motors, as shown in Fig. 90, as this will save shafting, the time and cost of putting it up, the cost of belting, besides the time the machine is idle while the belt is broken and it is being laced again, the loss of power in transmission, when the machine is idle, etc., etc.; boiled down, these machines equipped with individual motors are the last word in modern shop practice and it is a good one for you to follow.
Whatever machines you order be sure to also order at the same time a full supply of tools to use with them for otherwise you may find when you have your machinery all set up and you think you are ready to start that you are minus the cutting tools and should this happen you will be in for another long delay.
Unless your product requires a lot of wood-work it will hardly pay you to add a woodworking shop to your plant, though sometimes a jig-saw, see Fig. 94, or a band-saw, as shown in Fig. 95, will often prove of service.
It is the same way with a foundry, for unless you need a large number of castings right along it is as a rule cheaper to farm the work out to some founder in your own town.
Buying the Stock.—I do not mean the stock of your company—let your friends and the public do that—but the raw materials, as the stock is sometimes called, which you are to convert into the finished product.
Before you order either machinery or stock, try to standardize your product, that is to say whatever it is you intend to manufacture have it in such shape that you are satisfied to market it without making any further changes in it, at least for some time to come. It is the after-changes, the constant changes that have kept many a manufacturer poor, aye, forced him to the wall.
Having a standardized article, object or machine, you and your associates should determine on the number to be built first and then you can go over the model in detail and figure out just how much of each kind of stock, such as brass rod, sheet hard rubber, screws, washers, nuts, etc., you will need, allowing of course for waste and breakage.
Now when you are ordering the tools and machines for your shop get prices on and order your stock at the same time and see to it you do not overlook any little thing and so have to wait for something you forgot.
Screws, nuts, washers, bolts and some other small supplies can be bought in wholesale lots cheaper than you could possibly make them in your own shop and it is false economy to make anything with ordinary machine tools that can be bought from some other manufacturer who does the work with automatic machinery.
Organizing a Shop Force.—I am taking it for granted that if you have enough ability to invent, design and make a working model of an invention and get an organization together to manufacture and market it you will certainly have enough ability left to build up and superintend the body of your enterprise and that is your shop force.
Your first effort in this direction should be to hire a good foreman; this, though, is not an easy thing to do for a foreman must be something more than a thorough machinist who can use any tool or run any machine. He must be able to get the best there is in them out of the other men under him and see that each one is put on the job which he is best adapted to do.
Some of the men will shine as bench hands, others will show an aptitude in running machine tools and yet again others will be naturally clever in assembling your device; he must be able to pick out these good qualities and put the men where they will do the best work in the shortest time.
By all means get a foreman, if you can, who has worked on something like, or nearly like, your own product. He should be a man of shop ideas with enough initiative to put them into use. To get all these things rolled into one human being for $25, $30 or $35 dollars a week is asking a good deal but there are boss machinists in almost every city who can fill the bill.
Your foreman can usually get all the mechanics you need but don’t make the mistake of starting in and letting him hire the men. After he has found a man and wants to take him on, then you talk to the prospective employee, and you do the hiring. Hiring and firing the men should be your prerogative. This will make all of them respect you without respecting their foreman the less and they will do more and better work by knowing that you are the real boss of the works.
The Stock Room.—The tools that belong to the shop and the stock, or raw materials, should be kept under lock and key in the stock-room and a stock-clerk should be put in charge of and made responsible for them.
Have slips printed and whenever the foreman, or anybody else, including yourself, wants a drill, or a piece of brass, or a machine screw, insist that the stock-clerk get a slip signed for it. By this method you will know exactly where your tools and stock went to; and when a man returns a tool credit him with it.
You should also have a record kept of the time spent on each job by the man who did the work and the easiest way to do this is to use a time-stamp as shown in Fig. 96. If your shop is a small one your stock-clerk can take care of the time-slips. By doing things in this systematized way you will be able to keep pretty close tab on tools, stock and labor and these are three factors where a great deal of waste usually occurs in small shops and factories.
The Finished Product.—Whatever you are manufacturing, the finished product must be made as attractive as can be with the littlest extra cost and this applies alike to a toaster for a gas-stove or a threshing-machine. It’s the finish the buyer sees and he will gladly pay for the paint and the gloss that covers up the defects, if the thing looks nice.
Where a number of different materials enter into the make-up of a device it is always well to give some thought not only to the design,[5] but also to the color effect.
Figure 97 shows a high frequency (violet ray) electric machine designed by the author in which this idea is carried out. The stand is of iron, nickle-plated; the base of the apparatus proper is of wood, japanned black; the rim is of brass, nickle-plated; the plate-base, on which the visible part of the apparatus is mounted, is made of slate and japanned black; the metal parts of the interruptor are nickle-plated, and the coil and insulating standards are of hard rubber as is also the handle. The cover shade and the violet ray vacuum tube are of glass, while red or green flexible silk cords are used to make the connections, and finally the lamp socket is of a composition called electrose.
Thus the color scheme is polished ebony, the wood base, the slate plate base, hard rubber fittings and electrose socket all appearing precisely alike; the blue-white nickle-plated parts alternate with the black, the glass lends an added touch of beauty while the red, or green, cords give it a dash of color that relieves and sets off the other parts.
Iron work can be japanned black, enameled any color, or nickle-plated; brass can be lacquered or nickle-plated, and wood can be enameled. After the device or machine is assembled it should be rubbed up to remove all finger marks and to brighten it, then wrapped in tissue paper and packed carefully in a box if it is small enough so that this can be done, or it must be crated in such a way that it can be transported without marring or breakage.
Overhead Charges.—In figuring on the cost of a completed device, machine or product so that a selling price may be put on it which will insure a handsome profit the cost of the stock, of the breakage of tools, of the labor, or production, and of the power—gas, electricity, water or coal—are all easy to keep track of.
But there are other costs that must be taken into account which, while they do not stick out so plainly must also be reckoned with, or your venture will be a money losing one. These are the overhead charges, such as the depreciation of your machinery, that is the wear and tear of it; the rental of your factory, or the taxes if you own the building; the insurance on the building and the machinery; transportation costs such as teams and teamsters or automobile trucks and drivers; telephone calls and the other little and big items of expense—all of these must be carefully thought up and worked out for the year and charged against the number of machines you are going to make in that year.
To these fixed and variable charges must be added the salaries of yourself and your associates and the office staff together with the printing bills, advertising accounts and all the incidental expenses of maintaining an executive office. Divide the total running expenses for the year by the number of machines you have turned out in a year and you will have the net cost of each article or machine you have produced.
Where Your Profits Come In.—Add 33⅓ per cent., 100 per cent., or 500 per cent. to the cost of production and let that be your selling price to consumers, agents, jobbers or wholesalers, less the usual small discount for cash. And the difference between the cost of production and your selling price will be your profits less certain losses on accounts which even an agency can’t collect.
Long before you get your shop into running condition and you are able to fill orders, you and your associates will have talked over the best way that should be adopted to put your article or machine on the market so that it will bring in the largest returns in the shortest time.
Here again the method you will choose and use will depend on what you have to sell and the backing you have to sell it with. Just as there are only seven original jokes and all the others that you see and hear are worked over and out of them so, too, there are only a few basic principles in the art of selling goods but these are modified into a thousand and one schemes.
How Best to Do It.—How? Aye, that’s the question! But even as you have had the genius to invent a new and useful time, labor and money saving device—there will, among the men you have surrounded yourself with, rise up one whose brains teems with schemes of ways and means to dispose of the factory’s output at the greatest profit and you may have a few stray ideas too as to how the thing can best be done.
In every business however small or large there should be frequent conferences of the partners, or of the heads of departments, and to save time and to conserve energy it is better that these meetings should be held at certain times each week, or oftener, when all of the matters of the office and shop can be discussed freely and threshed out. Indeed it is the common practice of every business concern where there are a number of departments for the heads of them to get together every day in conference to learn the viewpoints of the others.
By this method every one knows exactly where the business stands for that day not only in his own department but in the other fellow’s as well and he conducts his part of it accordingly. This welds the whole business into an efficient unit instead of having it made up of a bunch of straggling ends. If the business can’t be put on a paying basis under such favorable conditions then you had better get a new partner, hire a new manager or call in the old sheriff.
Agents Wanted.—Hundreds of small patented inventions as, for instance broom hangers, pinless clothes lines and burglar alarm traps are sold by the manufacturers of them directly to small agents all over the country and who, in turn, sell them by making a house to house canvass. See Fig. 98.
The amount of your sales under this plan will depend on the number of agents you are able to secure and generally on the persuasive ability of the rhinoceros skinned peripatetic to sell the good housewife something which she truly doesn’t want. But should your invention be one of exceeding merit—and of course it is—then the path of the itinerant salesman is made glad and he sees a rose for every prick of the thorn he gets.
Agents can be had by running small ads in the daily and Sunday papers in the large cities under the classified head of Agents Wanted. There are advertising agents who will run an ad for you in 15 or 20 papers throughout the United States, whose combined circulation runs up into the millions of copies and all for a $10 bill. An ad of this kind can also be run in such magazines as Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and a dozen other like publications.
The Mail Order Business.—The two chief plans for working a mail order business are (1) by selling direct from your shop to the consumer and (2) by selling your product to agents whom you start in the mail order business.
To work the first plan there are two ways by which you can get the names of prospective buyers and these are (a) by running small ads in the papers and magazines and (b) by buying a list of the names of firms who make a business of classifying and selling them.
Regarding the first plan suppose you have invented a new blood testing apparatus in which case you couldn’t possibly hope to sell it to any other class than doctors. Now you can buy a list of all of the doctors in Boston, or of any other city, in Illinois or any other State, or of all of them in the whole United States from Boyd’s City Dispatch, 19 Beekman Street; Rapid Addressing Machine Company, 374 Broadway, and R. L. Polk and Co., Inc., 87 Third Avenue, all of New York City.
When you get this list you can then send out to each doctor a nicely gotten up folder or booklet and a clearly worded letter, which you can have mimeographed, that is duplicates made from the original typewritten letter, and according to business rules and regulations these ought to make a noise like a lot of orders.
Lists of men and women in every line of business, profession and trade; including R. S. Dun and Company’s list which is guaranteed 99 per cent. accurate, can be bought of the above concerns that are classified to fit whatever article or device you intend to market. This is one way of conducting a mail-order selling campaign.
The second plan as outlined above is to run small two to ten line classified ads for agents offering to start them in the mail order business. See Fig. 100.
Your proposition to each prospective agent who replies is something like this: you will give him, provided he buys, for cash in advance, of course, one dozen, one gross, or a dozen gross of the product you manufacture, the exclusive territory of a city, a county, or several of them, or of an entire State as you choose and according to the quantity he buys.
Included in the price he pays, you furnish him with so many letter heads and envelopes with his name printed thereon as manufacturer’s agent; printed circulars or folders, a series of follow-up letters and whatever else is needed to start him in the mail order business except the list of names and the postage stamps he will use. It is up to him to get these accessories.
A Series of Follow-up Letters.—By a series of follow-up letters is meant that a number of different letters, say six, are written up in such a way that each one makes a stronger appeal to the consumer than the one he gets before.
Let’s say that your agent sends a circular describing the merits of your patent mailing box for eggs to an egg grower in the rural district and with it a letter stating how glad he would be to receive an order from him for a dozen mailing boxes, the price, etc.; if, now, in ten days’ time no reply is forth-coming the agent mails him a second letter, stating that he can’t understand why he hasn’t heard from him, et cetera and so on. If this brings no response the agent mails a third letter in another ten days saying that since he (the agent) has used several stamps in writing to him suppose that he (the egg grower) sits down and uses a stamp on him and so forth and e pluribus unum, as Artemus Ward used to say.
And so the letters are mailed until the series of six have been sent out at ten day intervals. The idea is that as the letters, each of which is a little stronger than the one before it, reach the egg grower with clocklike regularity the value of your patent mailing box for eggs will sink deeper and with more telling effect into his cranium and that somewhere between the first and the last letter he will conclude he had better order a dozen or more boxes.
If the sixth and last letter does not bring an order the agent may then conclude that the chickens are dead, or that the roosters are sleeping, or else that the egg-grower doesn’t want the mailing box and he knows that he doesn’t want it. At any rate it is time for the agent to quit wasting stamps on him.
Selling Through Sales Agents.—Turning now to big business one of the most successful ways now in vogue to sell goods is the one adopted by automobile manufacturers.
By this method the manufacturer sells his product to his own sales agents and these in turn sell them to the consumer. Both the manufacturer and his agents advertise, the former nationally, that is he tries to reach all the people, and the latter locally, that is in his own territory.
The result of their joint advertising is inquiries and these the sales agent follows up by personal solicitation. Fig. 100 shows diagrammatically how the scheme works out.
Selling Direct from Factory to Consumer.—A large number of manufacturing concerns have built up profitable businesses by advertising in various publications and dealing directly with the consumer. See Fig. 101.
Many products, especially those in the nature of machines, can be sold by this method where they could not be marketed in any other way. Take as an example the larger sizes of hand power printing presses. One firm has sold thousands of these machines through the persistent use of small advertisements where only a few could have been disposed of through dealers of any kind, for the reason that there is not a sufficient demand for them in any one locality.
Any article, device or machine can be sold directly to the people through the medium of cleverly displayed advertisements placed in the right publications. When you get ready for an advertising campaign write to any advertising agent—and he also advertises—telling him what it is you have to sell and he will send you a list of the periodicals which will reach the class of folks who will be interested in your commodity and also quote you advertising rates. But of advertising I shall have something more to say later on.
Where you sell direct to the consumer you should also use, of course, a series of attractive pictorial cards, circulars, folders and booklets which describe your offering in terms of glowing color and cold, hard facts. Don’t try to deceive your customers for no business can be conducted on misrepresentation and last, and besides it is just as easy to enthuse with the truth as it is to equivocate, not to use a harsher and uglier word.[6]
A series of follow-up letters should also be used and lists of the people you want to reach are sometimes as useful, and occasionally more so, in bringing results as advertising. In fact every art and device known to the system of business should be freely used where there are no middlemen.
Selling Through the Trade.—The older plan for a large manufacturer to dispose of his goods is through the retail stores, but this is a more costly and a harder way than by the direct method of reaching the consumer.
The reason for this is that the manufacturer does not deal directly with the retailer, but must do so through a lot of middlemen of whom there are in some cases not less than three and often more.
Figure 102 shows how many different concerns stand between the manufacturer and those who buy his goods; the manufacturer turns his product over to the commission man who unloads it on the jobber or wholesaler, who sends drummers on the road, who make the retailer buy it, who hands it out over the counter to his customers, who are merely acquaintances of his.
All of the middlemen make big profits while the manufacturer and the retailer have to be satisfied with a very small margin and the consumer knows that he is paying several prices too many for the article he buys.
The advantage, though, of handling your product through middlemen lies in the fact that you can very often get a commission man, or a jobber, to contract for the entire output of your factory, and sometimes a certainty of this kind with small fixed profits is better than taking a chance of putting a large sum into advertising with the uncertainty of large profits or of no profits at all.
Getting Publicity.—Going back once more to the time when you have completed your model and your patent has just been granted, it is often a good idea to give some publicity to your invention.
By publicity I mean to get some write-ups in the papers and some articles in the magazines and if you go about it the right way it will not cost you anything for space and sometimes the editors will even pay you for your contributions.
When you have reached the stage where you want some publicity write up a clear description of say 500, 1000 or 2000 words, depending on the importance and intricacy of your invention, and have a typewritten copy made of it; next have some good 5 by 7, or better, 8 by 10 photographs made of your model from different viewpoints. Small kodak pictures are of no value in obtaining free publicity for clean-cut, large pictures, count for as much or more with the average editor than either subject matter or written copy.
Now the kind of publications in which you will want your article to appear will hinge on the class of readers who will be interested in it. But let’s suppose that it is a new machine, or a new electrical apparatus of some sort or other. If it is a machine send your typewritten article to the editor of the Scientific American, Woolworth Building, New York; if your photos and article appeal to the editor as being new and novel he will most certainly print them in his paper.
In an article of this kind it is not good policy to crack up yourself or put in your street number, as this savors too much of trying to get a page or so of advertising in the body of the paper free of charge; your name and the city where you live are enough to include in the article, but in a letter accompanying the latter you can send your detailed address. And you can send in another article and photos to the Engineering Magazine, 140 Nassau Street, New York; Machinery, 140 Lafayette Street, New York, and other publications of a like character.
Should your invention be electrical, or have a single electric element connected with it, send your article to the Electrical World, 239 West 39th Street and to the Electrical Review, 13 Park Row, both of New York, and the editors of either of these publications will most surely and gladly accommodate you with space for your contribution.
The purpose of having articles appear in these technical papers is not so much to sell your product as it is to give you an authentic article in a standard publication which you can refer to and reprint from for distribution to those whom you may want to interest either as partners or shareholders. Reprints are also useful for circularizing agents or consumers after you have your factory in shape to take care of the orders.
Should your invention have to do with mining send in your article and photographs to the mining papers, if it is in the notion line mail it to the dry-goods papers and so on for no matter what you have invented you will find one or more trade papers in that particular field who will give you the desired publicity.
After some good technical, or trade paper has published an account of your invention the daily and weekly papers in your home-town are apt to be impressed with the importance of what you have done and one or all of them will give you quite a write-up.
Advertising.—While publicity and advertising are one and the same thing in that both of them make known to the great body of buyers the merits of your invention I have arbitrarily divided them into two classes calling (1) everything that is printed as straight reading matter in a paper and free of charge publicity and (2) all that is displayed to attract the attention of the reader and paid for at space rates as advertising.
You can begin an advertising campaign with a very small outlay of capital by running a ½ inch, one column wide ad in ten or a dozen papers or magazines as a starter. To have your ad displayed as you want it, that is the style of type and the illustration that goes with it, get your local printer to set it up and have as many electrotypes made from it as there are papers you intend to buy space in. Then all you have to do is to mail one of these electrotypes to the publisher and it appears in his paper exactly like the type from which it was made and it can be used over and over again.
This stereotyped kind of an ad which meets the reader’s eye in nearly every publication he picks up will finally get through the pores of the calcium salts which form his skull and impress the sensitive area of his brain, or, to use the language Evelyn doesn’t like, it gets on his nerves and he will read it. Every time he sees it after that he will remember its message and then when the psychological moment arrives and he wants your product he will send to you either for a catalogue and price-list or for the thing itself.
Larger ads should have the reading matter and the cut changed frequently, but it is always well to use some design, or a name (see Chapter XII), which stands out boldly in relief so that it will flag the attention of the reader immediately he turns to the page where it is displayed. The rest of the ad must then be catchy enough to induce him, or her, who sees it to read it, and last of all it should contain some gem or germ of knowledge which he, or she, will carry away and think over and always to the end for which your ad was written and designed—and that is to buy your product.
Writing alluring ads requires inventive ability but of an order very different from that which produces a new machine. Hence there are inventors who make a specialty of writing ads but they are content to call themselves originators.
Should you have a product that you intend to give wide publicity to, whether it is your intention to sell to the consumer direct or to sell to him through the retail trade, it is a good plan to engage the services of an advertising firm to conduct the campaign for you.
If you are going to spend $1,000 or $100,000 on making your product known among men and women and popularizing it so that everybody will buy it, or wants to buy it, it is well to have an advertising agent or firm get up the ads, place them in the papers where they will do the most good—in a word engineer the whole thing for you while you are superintending your factory and your partner is taking care of the orders—then all you have got to do is to count the shekels that roll in or out as the case may be.
All through this book I have done my best to nickelplate you in the bath of my own experience and I believe I have made everything clear unless it is just how to get the big idea.
And even if I could give you a hard and fast rule for thinking up new and novel things I have grave fears I would be tempted to keep that bit of information to myself and start up an idea factory in opposition to Edison.
But while it is not yet possible to lay down a law for the creation of an original idea it may prove of some value to tell you something about what is needed both small and large and this in itself may serve to stimulate your thought centers to activity.
As you look about and see all the different materials, apparatus and machines that have been invented to make work easier, to save time or goods and to increase safety and comfort you may on first thought conclude that everything the human race really needs has been invented and this is in a large measure true.
But the secret of present day inventing was let out of the bag by Edison when he said that “hardly any piece of machinery now manufactured is more than 10 per cent. perfect.” Certainly the electric lights we now have are good enough as far as the light goes but light costs us ten times as much as it ought to cost for the reason that 90 per cent. of the energy there is in a ton of coal is wasted and only 10 per cent. of it is transformed into actual light.
Oliver Lodge, England’s greatest electrician, once said that if we knew how the glow worm makes his light then a boy could turn a machine that would develop enough electricity to light a factory. The problem for you to tackle then is not to make a better light but to make a cheaper light.
And what Edison has said about machines and Lodge has said about light, I say is just as true of everything else we have for lessening labor, for saving time and materials, making for safety and adding to comfort. Everything that has been invented up to the present time, with very few exceptions, such as the electric motor which is 98 per cent. efficient, can be made nearly 90 per cent. better.
This gives you your cue for inventing, that is to conceive and improve upon what has been done rather than to sap your life’s blood and waste time, which is just as precious if you only know it, in trying to invent something entirely new and original under the shining sun.
Nor do you need to undertake to improve upon the big things—unless, of course, you get a great idea and you feel that the world can’t get along without it and that you would lose a fortune unless you straightaway developed it. Otherwise just keep your eagle eye on the lookout and your inventive brain cells on the alert and it will not be long before you will see something where there is room for improvement.
Some Little Things Needed.—For the Person.—There isn’t a thing you wear, or carry in your pockets, or use in making your toilet but which can be improved upon.
Your suspenders, your corset, cuff buttons, dress-shields, necktie clasp, hose supports, garters, hat pins, collar buttons, eye glasses and eye-glass guards, hair curlers or straighteners according to the dictates of fashion, jewelry guards, fasteners for clothing, clothes hangers and clothes presses ought all to be done over and re-invented.