Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Anybody that is involved with the sport of archery has seen a tremendous advance concerning the bows and arrows. The bows themselves have become lighter and quicker. Arrows are now fitted with mechanical broadheads which allow them to fly straighter.

On the other hand, on the practice side of archery, things had remained the same for a long time. With targets the new equipment and innovation had caused them to not be able to hold up at all. They were being torn apart even more and the arrows penetrated so far into the target that they were very difficult to pull out.

One day Larry R. Pulkrabek got fed up with the current targets on the market. So out of this frustration emerged the idea to make a target completely different. He created a target consisting of compressed layers of high-friction foam kept together by compression bonds. The unique result: the target survived much longer and the arrows were now stopped with friction rather than force.

In typical entrepreneurial action, he began to manufacture the targets in his personal garage. Originally called "the Block," it was the first open-layered, self-healing archery target on the market, advertised as capable of withstanding “thousands of broadhead shots and tens of thousands of field-tip shots.”
 
In just a few short years his company, called Field Logic, revolutionized the entire archery target industry. BusinessNorth estimates Field Logic has about 100 employees and could see revenues rise to $20 million in 2006. All that is a very short time.

What I really like about this story is that backdoor way of entering this field. He didn't go after the fancy bow market or innovative arrow market. Rather he found something that he saw needed to be drastically improved and went after an area of the niche that had lagged far behind the other products in its field.

He not only created a superior product, as far as functionality goes, but he created greater value by making it easy to extract the arrows plus making the target much more durable and lasting.

This is simply a great story. Look for things in your niche or industry that are lagging behind other advances. It could offer you some great new products or services that could really revolutionize your industry like it did here!