OPSA Just Right in the Middle

While reading about some of our competitors this week I realized how much I like our model compared to theirs. We have many small "one-man or two-man show" competitors. These are mainly people who have made contacts in China and travel there a few times a year to work with factories. They have no consistent presence in China, or they have one partner there that makes contacts for them. These small competitors do not offer inspection services or engineering support in China. They essentially are trading companies and work well on commodity items. For custom components and assemblies they do not offer enough services to significantly reduce risk.

On the other side of the spectrum are our large competitors. These companies have lavish offices in premier locations of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and/or Beijing. They are sophisticated and offer special services like online order tracking. These companies have very high overhead and charge more than OPSA. They also work on very large volume projects. They are appropriate for large companies here in the US only.

OPSA fits nicely in the middle. Our offices in the US and China are utilitarian. Overall our overhead is very low, but our service is intense. We offer all the key risk reduction services in China and are improving them every month. We do not offer special services like online order tracking that our large competitors offer. We also don't work on any commodities. Our customers are SME's (small and mid-size enterprises) rather than very large companies.

I know this post sounds like an ad, but I really like the way we go about our business. Like almost all companies we have processes I'd like to improve, and we are getting there. We're growing fast and expect to be a much larger company in a few years. However, we'll still keep our overhead low and will keep the focus on what benefits our customers most.