As businesses evolve and market conditions change, we as leaders adapt our strategies, experiment with new initiatives, build and rebuild our structures to maximize opportunities. In recent years, the shifts in the market have been dramatic and have caused us here at DEMA Engineering Company, like so many of you, to adapt and even roll back some initiatives that had seemed so right just a few years earlier. Some of these reversals have caused us to learn powerful lessons about what is right for an Evergreen® company in the long term, regardless of market conditions. Our journey to and from offshoring is a great example of this.

For us, the move toward offshoring started all the way back in the 1980s, when we started exploring some partnerships with companies who made injection molding parts in Taiwan. The reasons were clear; the cost of steel to make the tools and the cost of labor–and therefore the parts themselves–were far less than in the US. It was quickly becoming the case that making the tools necessary for running the injection molding parts, even more than making the parts themselves, was so expensive in the US that very few companies were doing it anymore. We found we had no choice, so we made the smart and obvious move.