Nichols said it’ s how he believes all humans should interact – but there’ s a strong bottom-line incentive too.
“ It’ s what makes good companies great companies, I believe,” he said.“ It affects how we treat our customers all the way from the smallest to the largest – we treat them with respect, and we expect vice versa. We have great partnering relationships.”
Silicon Forest also benefitted from a business strategy that has helped it survive decades of change in the electronics industry.
When Nichols founded his company in 1996,“ Silicon Forest” was a buzzword that Oregon economic development marketers were using to describe the cluster of electronics manufacturers that had sprung up in and around Portland – just across the Columbia River from Nichols’ new plant.
But during the‘ 90s, much of the basic chip and circuit board manufacturing that had once been done by laid-off forest products workers in Oregon migrated offshore to low-wage countries in Asia. Twenty-some years later, Oregon still proudly boasts a Silicon Forest hub of high-tech companies – most notably Intel, which employs more than 17,000 people near Portland – but it’ s a software, cloud-computing and Web-delivered services industry. Many of the manufacturers are gone.
Except for Silicon Forest.
Its success, Nichols said, came from an early decision on what kinds of work to pursue.
“ We started as a high-bid, low-volume manufacturer,” he said. So as the high-volume mass-production contracts went offshore, Silicon Forest kept winning a steady stream of bids for low-volume specialized parts.
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