A lesson for all business

The business world is changing, and many small manufacturing and service companies are finding it hard to grow and even maintain. The demands of larger businesses on them as a supplier is increasing at the same time the larger companies are pushing costs down and demanding price decreases. In the over thirty years of its existence, DMI remade itself several times, leading to the diversity of its skill set. For many years DMI's diverse skill set was a considerable strength in solving customer's problems. The downturn at the end of 2008, found the company and it's customers struggling to make ends meet. It became apparent that like it had so many times in thirty years, the company needed to reinvent itself. The problem it discovered was DMI's diversity had become a weakness in deciding on which of its skills to focus on with which to move forward. A company must maintain a core competency, a niche if you will that drives it. This applies to large and small companies. Many companies have failed by broadly diversifying outside the product or service that made the successful.