Draganfly is the $$ justifiable?
- Thread starter kolibri
- Start date
Have any of you stopped to do a business plan on the draganflys target customers, the R&D, the manufacture and ongoing support. Add in how far and wide the support may need to be and how many staff and equipment needed on both the manufacturing and support side of things and if you start to cover all the numbers you might just find that you cant do all this for much less than they do.
Give it some serious thought, put egos aside and imagine yourselves having a company doing this full time, both design and manufacture as well as sales, support for a product sold worldwide and as a turnkey operation. Do the numbers properly.
Give it some serious thought, put egos aside and imagine yourselves having a company doing this full time, both design and manufacture as well as sales, support for a product sold worldwide and as a turnkey operation. Do the numbers properly.
Stacky nothing wrong with what they charge. They have found markets that will pay for the types of things that you outline. Aerovironment, Boeing, General Atomics are all playing in a totally different ballpark and league. And that league probably isn't where the original question needs or wants to play.
Lets start a company and we are going to design and build our own systems. Thats the entire system, from frame to FC to downlinks to groundstations.
Staff? and associated costs?. Premises. We get the design done and we get the systems built. Support documentation and instructions at a professional level. How much time will that have taken and how much has it already cost us before we start? Now we have to sell it and so we need staff for that with associated support material for sales and we need to find and target a market. How much time and cost is that going to take even before we have made our first sale. Their target market and customers happen to be global and specialized. They arent selling tens of thousands of units where the profit margin can be very low and money is made on volume sales. So after they have invested a ton of money in R&D, company infrastructure, staffing, sales etc they need to recoup those costs via sales. Then there is the support. Support has to be global, it has to be of a level that reflects their target clients expectations of speed and quality. Do you build that in to the price remembering that they may be based in 1 country and the support is required in person on the other side of the world. Because its not high volume sales the parts manufacture will be low and in turn expensive for replacements.
Sure we can all build something our selves for a few thousand dollars that will do what these guys do but can we then provide full pro support to companies all over the world within expected time frames and make a decent living?. The operation isnt a 1 man band, what they provide isnt that of a 1 man band, thats just not possible.
Is the price justifiable to us?, nope but is it justifiable to the sorts of companies they are selling to? Maybe yes. Would we be able to do what they do for even half their prices? I seriously doubt it.
Staff? and associated costs?. Premises. We get the design done and we get the systems built. Support documentation and instructions at a professional level. How much time will that have taken and how much has it already cost us before we start? Now we have to sell it and so we need staff for that with associated support material for sales and we need to find and target a market. How much time and cost is that going to take even before we have made our first sale. Their target market and customers happen to be global and specialized. They arent selling tens of thousands of units where the profit margin can be very low and money is made on volume sales. So after they have invested a ton of money in R&D, company infrastructure, staffing, sales etc they need to recoup those costs via sales. Then there is the support. Support has to be global, it has to be of a level that reflects their target clients expectations of speed and quality. Do you build that in to the price remembering that they may be based in 1 country and the support is required in person on the other side of the world. Because its not high volume sales the parts manufacture will be low and in turn expensive for replacements.
Sure we can all build something our selves for a few thousand dollars that will do what these guys do but can we then provide full pro support to companies all over the world within expected time frames and make a decent living?. The operation isnt a 1 man band, what they provide isnt that of a 1 man band, thats just not possible.
Is the price justifiable to us?, nope but is it justifiable to the sorts of companies they are selling to? Maybe yes. Would we be able to do what they do for even half their prices? I seriously doubt it.