Add Value & Make Your Coating Operation More Successful
Turning your business-to-business powder coating shop into a true value-adding partner for fabricators and OEMs will help you make your business more successful. The process starts by thinking beyond the basics of applying coatings and shipping parts back or having them ready for pick-up. This may be the core of your business, but there’s more you can do to gain a competitive edge.
Along the same lines, fab shops that bring coating in-house can enjoy greater success by doing more than just applying a finish to their parts. The same goes for finishing department managers who want to be seen as adding value for the company and not just cranking out coated parts.
Instead of selling a “commodity finish” that’s like everyone else’s, you can gain an advantage by promoting time savings, problem solving, and reliability. That’s what businesspeople care about, even if they don’t say it that plainly, and these are areas where you can stand out in a crowded market.
Click HERE to learn about a fabrication company that enhanced its capabilities by bringing coating in-house. Only months in, they’re already celebrating the decision as a win. This makes for interesting reading, whether you’re a fabricator thinking about adding powder coating capabilities or a powder coating shop wanting to hear straight talk about why fabricators move on. It comes down to capabilities and value.
One powerful way to add value is by expanding the variety and types of coatings and finishes you offer. Specialty powders such as textures, metallics, anti-graffiti, chemical-resistant, and UV-stable outdoor products aren’t available from all powder coating shops. Neither are food safe finishes or high-temperature coatings. These unique finishes can help solve real-world problems for your customers or give them a way to distinguish their brands.
Michael Schuerer, president of Reliant Finishing Systems, notes, “When your customer has a part that will be installed outdoors, or used around chemicals, or involves hot equipment, they often don’t know which coating products to specify. If you can recommend a proven coating, and you have it in stock or can quickly source it, you become their coatings consultant, not just a vendor. There are plenty of powder suppliers out there who offer excellent specialized coatings, but most fabricators and large-scale manufacturers aren’t researching the market and learning what’s available. By doing some homework and becoming more of an expert, you really do make yourself and your coating business more valuable as a resource. The same applies to coating line managers in a production environment. They’re usually so busy keeping things running and dealing with in-house issues that they build a relationship with one or two powder suppliers and just use whatever products they suggest. By investing some time in learning about what powders are out there, they can add value to what they’re doing and help the entire company.”
The most obvious way to differentiate yourself is through your equipment and capabilities. If you’ve got larger equipment than others in your market, you can capture work they can’t. In fact, you’re likely to win every job that involves parts that are too big for your local competitors with smaller equipment to handle.
Aaron Anderson, Reliant’s customer service manager, adds, “Over the last decade, I’ve never talked with a customer who wished he’d bought smaller equipment, especially when it comes to powder curing ovens. Fortunately, our booths and ovens are modular in design, so we frequently get calls about making them larger. We’ve sold countless expansion kits to customers who saw the advantage of having size-related capabilities that their competitors don’t.”
Click HERE for a great interview with a Reliant customer who started out with a big system to capture jobs that other coaters couldn’t handle.
Beyond the coating itself, you can build value with services that are both directly and indirectly linked to the coating process. Maybe the part has an uncoated surface that needs to be polished. Is that something you can offer to do? If you’re working with a fabricator or reseller, perhaps the parts can be packaged for delivery to the end-customer before they leave your shop. Cleaning, masking, plugging, and thread protection are easy examples. Some shops still expect their customers to send over clean parts or do all the masking, but that adds labor and complexity on the customer’s side. If you can take that work over using consistent, repeatable methods, you can remove a headache for them. The same goes for light assembly work, hardware installation, labeling, and kitting parts for specific projects or production cells.
Lead time and flexibility are also major opportunities. Fabricators and OEMs increasingly need short runs, multiple colors, and quick turn-arounds. If your operation is set up to handle small batches efficiently and you can quickly change colors throughout the day, rack parts intelligently, and schedule jobs accurately, this agility allows you to offer just-in-time coating that supports lean manufacturing. That means you’ll be coating and delivering parts in the sequence and quantities your customer needs, rather than focusing on large batches that require long waits. When a customer sees that your responsiveness keeps their business running or gets better outcomes than breaking into their in-house coating schedule, price becomes less of a deciding factor.
Click HERE to read how a Reliant customer used his company’s agility and quick turn-around times to get a competitive advantage.
Communication and documentation play a big role in being a strategic partner. Many OEMs need traceability, process records, and consistent quality documentation. This is where most mom & pop coating shops miss out. Offering basic certificates of conformance, recorded cure schedules with data logging, film build checks, and clear-cut inspection criteria signals that you understand their quality system and can support it. This takes time, effort, and the right tools, but can set your shop up for success with bigger customers. For smaller customers, you might help create a coating specification just for their product line and then own that process for them.
To win this kind of work, you also need to adjust how you promote and present your operation. Whether you’re a salesperson, fab or coating shop owner, or finishing line manager looking to move up, instead of leading with “we powder coat parts,” lead with outcomes: better field performance, minimal rework, shorter lead times, less handling, and fewer processes, employees, or suppliers to manage. Use case studies—even simple before-and-after stories—to show how you took over packaging, solved a corrosion issue, or cut a customer’s lead time in half. If it’s possible, assign some rough numbers to the value of these changes in dollars and cents. When you speak the language of production managers and engineers, you may stop being treated like a line item on a task list and become part of their process strategy.
In short, treat every added offering as a way to remove hassles, friction, and risk for your customers or employer. Do that consistently, and your powder coating service, fabrication shop, or in-house coating department becomes a value-added partner others will become reluctant to replace or upset, even in a competitive environment.