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Out on a LIMSThe Blog for People Who Risk Life and LIMS on a Daily Basis

More Comments on the Industry

Volume IIIEntry 36 of 36 in 20183 min read4 comments ↓

Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.

Ever since the US Thanksgiving holiday (i.e., since the of November), I've received quite a lot of contacts about consulting work both from potential end-customers as well as from larger consulting firms looking to subcontract. It's been pretty crazy, actually.

Whether the Industry is Busy

Those of us who sell things all know that the true test of the strength of the industry is whether we end up selling things or not. So, despite an incredible number of contacts in the past weeks, we all know that most of these will likely come to nothing and, in fact, that maybe none will turn into anything. Lots of contact doesn't equal a strong industry economy.

On the other hand, for anyone out there sitting on the fence or anyone trying to pull together resources, I would say that the safest course to take it to make decisions and get resources while you can. We do know that January tends to be a hot time to pull in resources, anyway, so whether or not this year is stronger than others, you could still risk not having the people you need if you don't make decisions and get your resources in order.

Reason for the Sudden Upswing

Now that GeoMetrick Enterprises is closer to the exact middle of this country, it must be that all time zones across the world see this as the center of everything. In fact, I would say that GeoMetrick Enterprises has now made Iowa the global center of the LIMS, ELN and LES industry by moving our headquarters, here.

I hope you know I'm joking and have already guessed where I'm going with this.  ;-)

So, when you come up with a possible reason for events and you look at your statistics, you might see that your statistics support whatever if is that you came up with. That doesn't actually make it true. From watching the statistics of this blog for so many years, I can tell you even without doing much complex analysis on it that there are many variables that seem to come into play, some of which seem predictable, others not. And then, there are times when there's a huge upswing in readership that I never can quite explain. I could write to every person who read the blog and ask, "Why, now?" and they probably wouldn't be able to put their finger on it, themselves. Occasionally, these events remain a mystery.

In any case, my point is that we so often hear claims about one company or piece of software being the "best" because of high numbers of one sort or another and, as long as we keep it in our minds that this is just what sales people like to do, we can keep an open mind to the fact that all of us selling do what we can to put our companies in the best light. Some people are more imaginative about it than others but everyone does it in their own way.

Finally

So, back to getting services commitments - if you haven't tied-up your 2019 services, yet, and have the ability to do so, it's my opinion that you should bump it up in priority and that's just roughly based on all the calls I'm personally getting.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/

The conversation

4 comments from 2 people, December 22, 2018 to January 2, 2019. Gloria replied 2 times.

  1. John H. Jones

    All of this is true even when it comes to bathroom remodeling. I am going through that now and we hunted down a small independent contractor that is doing a great job. Same applies to finding new resources for our projects. We have to hunt for them. We avoid running job ads as best we can as actual recruiting and hunting resources is the best approach for us. We have a dedicated recruiter going at it full time.

    1. Gloria MetrickAuthor

      Here's a slightly different twist - a tiny startup wanted to find a key employee and couldn't find anyone - it wasn't just that they couldn't find someone with the right skills, they just couldn't even find a warm body to interview. However, they had a much larger company that provided some services to them (not recruiting) and that much larger company did the search for them. The larger company knew that by helping the tiny company grow they were helping to create more future business for themselves. And, as the larger company had quite a few employees and knew their way around how to find people, they were able to find the right person for their tiny customer.

      By the way, for those who like to hear the end of the story, the tiny company is growing and producing a lot of product for their services company to deal with.

  2. John Jones

    We are barely wasting any time looking for Node.js developers anymore. They are in short supply and over priced. So we find it better to hire recent grads and train them. We do enough of them we end up with some good staff and what does not make it through the process become part of the node.js open market. There are tax credits for this training to help fund the effort.

    1. Gloria MetrickAuthor

      It's funny that you would mention Node.js because a really large company geographically close to me called me to ask if I knew any Node.js people. They were really desperate to find some and the manager happened to know me so just took a chance and shot me an e-mail about it, even though it really had nothing to do with anything we'd talked about. But even the larger companies can't find Node.js people, it seems. And I'm not certain it was yet an issue of price because I don't think they had anyone apply for the job, at all, so it really must be hard to find people, period.

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