A passionate product designer and business executive, Kevin Bailey helps guide CEO’s, start-ups and established companies through the maze of hardware product development. Spending over 35 years in the detailed designing of hardware products, Kevin is now an expert at assessing risk and opportunity when making the hundreds of decisions required to move from a vision to a physical product that customers find useful and businesses can manufacture.
Since the early 1980’s Kevin has been on the ground floor of global hardware product innovation, cutting his teeth with National Research Council, General Motors, Shell, Bell Northern Research Labs and Nortel Networks where he worked on the first global smartphone development in 1994. After founding Design 1st in 1996, Kevin has emerged as one of the leaders at stickhandling hardware product development from concept to design including mechanical engineering and go-to-market manufacturing set-up.
As CEO and president of Design 1st, clients and staff rely on Kevin’s strategic thinking to guide the full suite of development and manufacturing oriented product decisions. The company’s results with new product development speaks for itself. More than 1,000 start-ups and global enterprise corporations—such as Motorola, Acer, Stanley Tools, Ericsson and Christie Digital—have brought hardware product ideas to life under Kevin’s guidance. Kevin and his team of thirty creative experts bring up to 70 projects to market for a diversity of clients each year.
Kevin is a Mechanical Engineer graduating top of class in 1984 from the University of Waterloo and has been a registered member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario since 1985. Kevin is also a VC and Angel Investor and one of Canada’s leading experts at bringing innovative new hardware product designs to market.
Company: Design 1st
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company
Kevin Bailey: I am a father with 3 children, 2 grandchildren and a loving partner. I graduated in Mechanical Engineering in the early 80’s and over time became a business owner in the late 90’s. I have 42 years of experience designing ‘real world’ physical products for innovators in North America and abroad. Call it an obsession, I love to create and build useful devices. I am CEO of a design-engineering service business and CEO of a global Consumer Product business. My life has extended into financing new business start ups as a member of a Venture Capital group and as an Angel Investor, helping guide early-stage business teams to configure their physical product ideas and get them to market, searching for great product-market fit.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Kevin Bailey: Physical devices take great skill and effort to design, prototype and manufacture so that a high quality and useful product turns into repeatable business revenue and profit. Warren would understand this and likely has heard both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs describe developing real world devices, from phones to rockets, as near the top of the list of most challenging endeavours to undertake and master. I have built a service business so the innovators wanting to get a physical product idea to market have a place to go with predictably and a process of build-refine-test. Usually, the innovators have a good understanding of what the product must do and who will value it and what they would pay for it. Our design-engineering team are the conduit for what is feasible, practical, reliable to produce, at the target business cost. Together with 1000’s of clients we have applied this process and become deep knowledge specialists in all the dark corners of getting product designed, transferred to a manufacturing partner and ready for market – with speed and laser focus on user value and the business objectives. Many specialty companies do some of the elements of product development, however there are very few public access choices for innovators to find professional trusted partners that take them from their idea to sales.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, is an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle to keep talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued, and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are you adapting to the current shift we see?
Kevin Bailey: I am very fortunate to offer the people that work with me a very rewarding job with lots of diversity and challenges and problems to solve every day. Our environment is not for everyone. It requires an aptitude and experience in materials and a respect for physics, mother nature and human behaviour. When one small component of a physical product fails, the device can be rendered useless. Thousands of decisions must be made in the complex jigsaw puzzle of a new product. As a business owner I cannot rely on a creative environment alone to keep talented, educated people continually satisfied with their jobs. Each employee is on their own personal development path. We work in teams on many projects at once.
I believe in a flat organization where staff are empowered to make decisions as they must organize their time with others. I have a range of staff expertise so there is always someone in the organization that has an answer to any topic/issue. The one rule I have is do not make a decision when you feel risk, go find a person to talk it through before proceeding. The same goes for interactions with clients. If you are in a new situation or feel pressured, pause, let the client know you will get back to them and go find the right person in the organization to guide your next step. Where people do their work is another area that self empowerment works. At home, at night, at the office depends on the activity at hand. Sometimes, working alone in a quiet space is the right choice and working with a team on a prototype assembly means being in the lab. The rule is – make a monday plan with others, get your weekly work done, work your committed hours, communicate changes and make sure you are in the best location to do each type of activity. Teams have leaders and if you are causing inefficiencies in work, the team will let you know. The goal is personal accountability and self governing with a team lead to drive efficiency and coordinate activities and people.
Yearly one on one meetings with the CEO, and team events, and active weekly listening by everyone in the organization for personnel issues means dealing with any new frustrations quickly. We have found that providing flexible working environments that are challenging and rewarding with clear objective expectation metrics for people to follow has keep our turn over rate very low.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Kevin Bailey: We have been an online business since 2001. Without our online inbound sales model we would not exist. We have no outbound sales team; we do not go to events or shows. Our clients are almost always in other cities/countries from us. They find us using a search engine and we work closely with them remotely over months or years. Many long-term clients may have met us in person once or twice. Product development of physical devices is a costly risky undertaking. Eliminating unnecessary travel time is tens of thousands of dollars over a year or two. We meet clients at least weekly on Zoom or Teams and as often as needed to ensure project activity flow is efficient.
In the year to come we are launching an free online tool “New to Product Development” budget estimator, based on the complexity of a product concept. We have a lot of data from the 1000’s of products where the design effort is intimately tied to how many parts, how many unique features, how complex are the electronics, user interface etc . It is an interactive online Q&A tool so people can take their idea and explore how much time and money they will need to develop their idea (before they determine who will do the product design and development). They may create their own development team, find an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) or hire a professional product development group like Design 1st to guide them. The tool is also a GO-NO-GO self-help decision maker to align your available budget with your product idea , and its degree of difficulty to develop.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Kevin Bailey: Growth is not on our key business metric, at this time. Internal efficiency, quality output and predictability of service are. With a team of 30 staff and a dozen third party contractors we have a perfect blend of talent, experience and team processes and multi-disciplinary breadth of service from designers to engineers to manufacturing specialists. We develop products for many markets and each year we grow in knowledge, expertise and networks. Be the best “idea to market” option available for technically challenging product is one of our primary metrics. To do this we turn ideas quickly into opportunities and requirements, and with our considerable knowledge we point out the critical areas of risk. Time spent on strategic design risk and feasibility before diving into the product details means we point the arrow more squarely at the envisioned user, buyer, price point and margin, in our client’s business model.
We rarely face competing bids; clients find us after exploring other options and signing up. Our product success track record and client testimonials build trust and confidence. Choosing third parties to guide you through the complexities of product development is a leap of faith. We want to minimize that anxiety by giving new clients control over what we do and how their money gets spent, involving clients intimately in the decision-making along the way. The path through the details is a series of 1000+ decisions, where 10 decisions are “make-or-break”. We recommend spending more time and collect more data on these critical risk choices before choosing your path. If you are a hiker, you often cannot see the top of the mountain or look at the wrong peak. A development expert as a guide gets you started up the mountain until you can see your options then gets you to the right peak on the first climb.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Kevin Bailey: Thankfully when starting a business, we go in with passion and naivety; like the euphoria of having a baby, eventually you realize its hard relentless work every day to make things work smoothly as possible and stabilize revenue with costs. If good fortune smiles on you and your determination pays off, your new network and colleagues and friends become a source of enrichment, and you enjoy some laughs along the way.
I underestimated the time it takes to build skills in getting people to work seamlessly together in a dynamic daily changing environment with a light touch and clear expectations. There are two buckets of knowledge I had to ingest, the first is tapping into the common business processes. Accounting, legal, tax, invoicing and getting paid are business knowledge that is easy to access in every city either through government or private business owners, once you know where to look and what to ask. There is lots of info so it takes a while to be conversant in all. The 2nd learning bucket is ‘acquiring and leveraging specialized knowledge’ with your service offering where you will find yourself on your own to determine what to do. People in your network will have opinions but experience is much more difficult to tap into as you carefully plan your customer journey and deliver something unique and valuable to your clients.
Design 1st is one of the top 10 “fee-for-service” physical product design-engineering firms in North America. It has taken decades of “test and learn” experience to be excellent. We have built our team, tools and processes so that collectively the people in the company deliver a quality experience and a valued output.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Kevin Bailey: My superpower would be the ability to transplant my experience quickly to others. As a 42-year veteran of product development, business operations, sales and problem solving I can go into most conversations and after a few questions can formulate a next-step, so we fast track going from the product idea to user’s hands where problems are solved in a timely manner not being sidetracked with people issues or poor design decisions. I love the joy that comes from hitting the mark with respect to positive and emotional ‘gotta-have-it” user reactions, when they first try a new product. Transferring my experience to my team members puts confident people in situations that stretch their skills a bit. This has been a goal of mine for many years.
We have two leadership groups at Design 1st being trained under a new process. The first is Product Leaders that guide each product development. The Product Leaders need deep technical knowledge across disciplines and the ability to facilitate design team activities. The second group is Account Managers that are responsible for changes to agreed project activities and budgets. The Account Managers need great sales and interpersonal skills as they track and document changes so the client feels informed and in control. Every week there is a new situation with one of the 25 active projects on the go all the time. The Product Leaders and Account Managers meet at least once a week to share a client or product challenge, discussing the situation, what got tried and what happened. This approach accelerates the cross staff learning so as these similar situations arise, other leaders can avoid them or try approaches to diffuse or directions to take so the project moves along towards the most positive outcome.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision
Kevin Bailey: Success for me is watching as empowered teams of creative, talented and dedicated individuals collectively engaging innovators out there in the world on difficult challenges. In physical product design there are no passes, you get something wrong and it means a customer issue. A manufacture makes 1000 units (batch build 1), and things that don’t work right, they get returned by customers – they go to landfill and you failed.
Dealing with 100’s of parts brought together in mechanical and electronic assemblies is a never-ending whack-a-mole of problem solving just to get the first products to users. Then there is the customer issues feedback and design changes, as the product-market fit is sorted out over 2 years. Design changes are incorporated into production batch build 2, build 3, build xx as you put in your product orders to the manufacturer. You must know a lot about material choices, physics, manufacturing processes, mother nature and intolerant users to design a good product that lasts. Users can demand perfection as they spend money on your innovation – “make it easy to use and reliable, at a reasonable cost”. People want the experience. They want toast not toasters.
