How portfolio companies can access engineering and manufacturing expertise without hiring a team
Building an in-house engineering and manufacturing function is slow and expensive. Here’s how portfolio companies can get the capability they need without it.
When a hardware business needs to move from prototype to production, the instinctive response is often to hire. An engineering lead, a supply-chain manager, a quality specialist. Those are sensible roles in a mature company, but for an early-stage business they present real problems.
Hiring takes time. Finding good people, particularly with manufacturing experience, can take months. Onboarding takes longer.
It’s a fixed cost for a variable need. Development and pre-production are intense periods of activity. A permanent team sized for that peak may be under-used afterwards.
One person doesn’t cover everything. Product engineering, DFM, supplier selection, factory auditing, quality control and logistics are separate disciplines. It’s rare to find all of them in one hire.
Relationships don’t come with the CV. A new hire may be very capable, but they still need to build the manufacturer network and the trust that goes with it.
An alternative is to work with an external product development, engineering and manufacturing partner. This gives a portfolio company:
- Immediate access to a multi-disciplinary team, rather than waiting to recruit.
- Flexibility. Capability can be scaled up or down as the project demands.
- Established supplier relationships in the UK and Asia.
- Experience of what goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- A single point of coordination across design, engineering, sourcing and quality.
This isn’t necessarily either/or. Many companies will eventually build some in-house capability, and a good partner will help them define what that should look like and when it makes sense.
For investors, the appeal is practical: a relevant, experienced resource that can be introduced to portfolio companies as and when they need it, without adding to headcount or burn.
If you’d like to talk about how we could support your portfolio, we’d welcome the conversation.