Restoring control as owner-managed EMS businesses scale

Why clarity, not effort, determines whether growth compounds

If you haven’t read Part 1, it’s worth starting there. In that piece, I explored why growth often feels harder in owner-managed EMS and contract manufacturing businesses — why effort increases while control erodes, and why positioning failures are amplified by buyer assumptions and internal structures.

This second part focuses on what changes in the businesses that do break through that ceiling.

From more than a decade of working alongside owner-managed EMS and contract manufacturers, one pattern emerges repeatedly: the hardest transition occurs when complexity begins to outpace informal control — often somewhere between £25M and £50M, but fundamentally driven by risk, not revenue.

Not because demand disappears, but because the behaviours that drove early success — responsiveness, flexibility, sheer effort — begin to work against the business at scale.

Breaking through isn’t about doing more. It’s about shifting from selling capacity to owning a clear commercial position.

What follows are four structural shifts I consistently see in firms that regain control and make that leap.

1. Codifying judgement: from “gut feel” to hard-gate qualification

One of the most common risks for owner-managed EMS businesses as they scale is a strong “can-do” culture paired with sales activity that is primarily rewarded for volume.

When positioning is vague, poor-fit work doesn’t arrive looking dangerous. It arrives framed as pragmatism: keeping the lines busy, building relationships, getting a foot in the door.

High-growth firms behave differently.

They don’t just have a sales process; they have a clear rejection process. They know which enquiries look attractive on the top line but quietly erode margin, engineering focus, and management attention.

A useful test is simple:

If you reviewed your last ten lost bids, how many should never have been quoted in the first place?

The shift isn’t about being selective for its own sake. It’s about institutionalising judgement — and aligning marketing, sales, and operations around the same definition of “good work”.

The MD’s intuition — who the business is really built for — needs to be translated into a shared filter. Whether that takes the form of a Fit-for-Growth matrix or another mechanism, the principle is the same: leads are assessed against strategic alignment, not just technical feasibility.

This protects the most valuable resource in the business: the time and attention of your best engineers and commercial people — and reduces the internal and external noise created by pursuing work that was never a good fit.

2. Moving the conversation from unit price to total risk

Many owner-managed EMS firms feel trapped by price pressure because customers are allowed to define the comparison.

When the conversation centres on price per unit, the firm is measured against a spreadsheet, often one built around a very different operating model.

The businesses that break through make a deliberate shift in how value is framed.

In complex B2B manufacturing, the largest costs are rarely in the BOM. They sit in missed deliveries, long lead times, design rework, supply chain fragility, and slow response when something changes.

The practical question becomes:

Are we being evaluated as a component supplier — or as a risk-reduction partner?

Firms that regain pricing power reposition around total cost of ownership and supply chain resilience. They surface the hidden costs of “cheaper” alternatives and make trade-offs explicit, including MOQ flexibility, local engineering access, lifecycle support, and responsiveness in the face of change.

This doesn’t eliminate price discussions. It reframes them and places them in a context where the £35M specialist often becomes the lower-risk choice.

3. Owning integration without owning every asset

At this stage, many MDs assume that meaningful scale requires heavy vertical integration and significant capital investment.

In practice, the firms that move fastest do something more targeted: they own the integration, not necessarily the assets.

OEMs are increasingly burdened by supplier sprawl. Managing multiple vendors across PCBs, enclosures, cabling, and test creates friction that sits outside most sourcing models — but inside daily operational pain.

A useful lens here is:

What problem does the customer still have once the board leaves your dock?

By taking responsibility for system integration — box build, final assembly, test, and coordination — EMS firms move from being a vendor to becoming an operational extension of the customer.

This changes the relationship. It increases switching cost. And it shifts the conversation from price to dependence.

It’s far easier for a customer to replace a PCB supplier than a partner responsible for an entire subsystem.

4. From heroic leadership to institutional strength

The most uncomfortable pattern I see at this stage is the MD becoming the limiting factor.

At earlier stages, personal involvement is an advantage. As the business scales and complexity multiplies, that same involvement can quietly become a bottleneck.

When growth relies on the MD being present in every key customer meeting, qualification decision, or technical escalation, the business isn’t scaling — it’s stretching.

A revealing question is:

If I stepped away for a month, would the pipeline still qualify work the way I would want it to?

The transition here isn’t about disengaging. It’s about shifting where authority lives.

Firms that scale successfully focus their commercial effort on the institution, not the individual. Their positioning, priorities, and “secret sauce” are embedded in processes, systems, and sector-specific proof — not held in the MD’s head.

This is what turns the business into something that isn’t dependent on you. It shifts the business from relying on personal involvement to standing on a clearer structure and shared decision-making, whether the future involves growth, succession, or simply keeping options open.

Final thought: clarity as leverage

At this stage, working harder is no longer the constraint. The constraint is the amount of uncertainty the organisation can absorb.

Positioning isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s a strategic filter. It tells sales what to pursue, engineering what to prioritise, and customers what to expect.

For owner-managed EMS businesses, this clarity is what restores control — and allows growth to compound rather than consume.

Part 3: How owner-managed EMS businesses regain control before taking action

In the follow-up, I look at how to work out whether this is actually your problem and where control is breaking down before any decisions are made.

→ Read Part 3 here