CompuServe Messages

Brandon- I am just opening a Forensic lab in Virginia, having been a new business Exec for IBM for 22 years (still am). My first love is my PI job on the side, and my second is animating. After doing a business case ananlysis on this it is clear to me that we have classic technologists and experts in the field of animation trying to market to the most conservative bunch of people in the world – lawyers!! Two things have to come together – affordability – the lawyer has to be able to recover his cost or direct charge it to the client, as in PI work (my other life). Either is acceptable, but onthe latter, you have to sell the client, and getting to him/her/them is tought – the lawyer will front it. You have to take in demos, ones that have sold in court, and you ahve to get onto platforms that are not SGI, RISC based systems so the cost of the operation comes down. Second, the operating point for our end has to be determined based on return on OUR investment. Where you direct the lawyer is to the most attractive return for us, and a good return for him. His return is intangible – win/lose, he get's paid. Win he gets paid more, but try to show a lawyer that the animated reconstruction made his case and not his skill and ability and you lose, we lose. There are a myriad of types of animations that can be offered, each one applies more readily to a specific set of case types. The more animation you need, the more time to be re-created, etc, the more it costs. Car accidents are tough to sell into, on the other hand, large suits for punitive damages, etc, can be ideal for showing that the turck, train, or whatever, was doing this, while the client was doing that…..etc. I have spent a lot of time marketing, now I'm up to my A__ in ideas and demands, and still have not gotten a multi-point lab setup on PC's. I am hoping someone can tell me that 3DS has been able to handle most of the load. Everyone has their preferences for hardware/software, and that compounds the problem of return for us. You must use the gear that getst the job done, well, and timely, but not overdo it or you will never make the magic break-even point in the time alloted by the banks. I could do a course on new startups and ROI, but not here. How about talking first about what the typical lab should have so a price point can be baselined? Once we have that, we can each delta up or down what we have invested, and figure out what we have to recover in our rates. Then you go to the spreadsheet and figure out what has to happen to the sales to make it. Lastly, you look at the market and see what enables and inhibits achievement of that level of market penetration. THis is wide open fellas – a little bit of science and a lot of business horse sense will make us all leaders in an emrging field. Any comments.???