For owner-managed contract manufacturers, growth is a personal matter. You didn’t inherit the business. You built it. Through grit, persistence, long hours, and a refusal to be outworked. When things got tough, you leaned in harder. That instinct has served you well for years.
So when growth slows or feels unpredictable, the response is almost automatic: push harder. More sales activity, follow-ups, and pressure.
Sometimes that works. Increasingly, it doesn’t. And that’s where the frustration begins.
Most MDs aren’t worried because there’s no demand. They’re worried because the demand they’re seeing doesn’t feel reliable.
Too many enquiries go nowhere. Too many “promising” prospects drain time and energy. Too many customers squeeze margins or stall late.
On paper, there’s activity. In reality, there’s noise.
This creates a constant background anxiety. You don’t always say it out loud, but it’s there:
Worse still is the quiet follow-on question:
The real barrier isn’t motivation or capability. It’s a lack of clarity about who you best serve and how you’re positioned.
Sales effort can compensate for weak positioning — up to a point.
In the early stages of a business, personal relationships, hustle, and responsiveness are enough. You win work because you show up, because you care, and because you’re prepared to fight harder than the next supplier.
But long-cycle manufacturing sales don’t stay in that phase forever.
Buyers now form opinions early. Long before serious conversations begin, they decide:
When that early clarity is missing, sales teams are forced to re-educate prospects mid-cycle. They explain what the business does, why it’s different, and why it should be taken seriously, despite assumptions that may have already formed.
That takes time.
It weakens pricing power.
And it increases dependence on a small number of familiar customers.
Ultimately, growth feels reactive instead of strategic. You work hard, but lack true control or confidence.
There is a reason this tension appears so frequently at this stage.
As owner-managed EMS and CEM businesses scale, many enter an uncomfortable middle ground, often most visible somewhere between £25M and £50M, but driven less by revenue than by rising complexity.
You’re no longer small enough to rely on personal relationships and reputation alone, but not yet large enough for scale to smooth out inconsistency.
The business has grown faster than its positioning.
What once lived in the MD’s head — who you’re best for, what work to prioritise, what to say no to — hasn’t been formalised. As a result, more opportunities arise, but fewer of them are a good fit. Sales effort increases, but leverage decreases.
This is where buyer assumptions start to matter far more.
At this stage, OEM buyers inevitably make quick judgments about supplier risk, scale, and intent before conversations even begin. Not in a formal “Tier 1 / Tier 2” sense, but in how they categorise suppliers in practice.
Many owner-managed EMS and CEM businesses find themselves treated as too big to be tactical, yet not automatically trusted as strategic.
When positioning is unclear, buyers fill the gaps themselves. Some arrive with expectations shaped by large global EMS providers. Others assume flexibility and price pressure associated with smaller suppliers. Both create friction.
The result is a pipeline shaped by mixed assumptions. Conversations start from different places. Qualification becomes harder. Effort increases — without a corresponding increase in control.
This is often the stage where acquisition starts to feel like the only controllable path forward, not because demand has disappeared, but because organic growth feels increasingly exposed.
Ambition isn’t the problem. The real issue is that, as the business has grown, its positioning and go-to-market approach have not kept pace.
Poor-fit opportunities don’t just waste sales time. They drain the entire organisation, distracting operations, complicating scheduling, and introducing margin pressure.
In many owner-managed EMS businesses, this problem is unintentionally reinforced by how business development is structured.
Historically, BD activity has often been rewarded for volume: enquiries generated, meetings booked, opportunities created. Fit is expected to be sorted later, usually by sales or by the MD. At earlier stages, this works. Personal oversight fills the gaps. At scale, it becomes harder to manage.
When BD effort is optimised for volume rather than alignment, more opportunities enter the system, but not necessarily better opportunities. Sales effort increases, operational noise grows, and leadership becomes the final point of control. Sales effort increases, operational noise grows, and leadership becomes the final point of control.
Worst of all, they distort decision-making. When too much low-quality work enters the system, it becomes harder to tell what’s genuinely valuable and what’s just noise.
Over time, this creates a dangerous pattern. You start making decisions based on urgency rather than strategy. You accept work that “keeps things moving” but doesn’t strengthen the business. You tolerate margin erosion because uncertainty feels riskier than compromise.
That’s not a lack of discipline. It’s the cost of operating without enough control upstream.
Clear market positioning changes the dynamic in three important ways.
First, it attracts customers who genuinely value what you’re good at. Not everyone who needs an EMS or CEM is a good fit. Clear positioning draws in those whose priorities align with your strengths.
Second, it filters out work that shouldn’t enter the business in the first place. This isn’t about being selective for ego’s sake. It’s about protecting time, margin, and focus.
Third, it sets expectations early. Before pricing, before delivery, before negotiations begin.
This doesn’t reduce ambition. It reduces waste.
Sales conversations become shorter, sharper, and more confident. Pricing discussions become less defensive. The pipeline becomes something you trust, not something you constantly second-guess.
For many MDs, control has always come from involvement.
Handing over any part of that control, even conceptually, feels risky. Marketing, in particular, has often failed to earn trust. Too many MDs have seen money spent with little to show for it.
So scepticism is rational.
But clarity upstream doesn’t remove control. It redistributes it.
Instead of control coming from personal intervention, it comes from structure. From knowing that the right work is coming in for the right reasons, even when you’re not personally involved in every conversation. That’s a different kind of confidence.
At some point, the conversation changes. It’s no longer just about next year’s number.
It becomes about what the business is building toward and how many options it creates.
What limits those options isn’t ambition or capability. It’s unpredictability.
Growth that relies heavily on individual effort, a small number of customers, or constant intervention is harder to step back from. It reduces leverage and narrows choice — even if revenue is healthy.
Predictable, well-positioned growth does the opposite. It creates freedom. Freedom to invest with confidence. To delegate without fear. To wait — or to act — when the timing is right.
Legacy isn’t just about size. It’s about control over what happens next.
Working harder is no longer the constraint. The constraint is the amount of uncertainty the business can absorb before it starts making decisions in the wrong way.
Effort alone adds pressure, but clarity around positioning creates the leverage needed for sustainable growth.
Sales effort will always matter in contract manufacturing. Relationships will always matter. Reputation will always matter. What changes is how much of the burden those things are asked to carry.
Clarity at the top shapes growth you can trust.
For owner-managed manufacturers, control through clarity is what separates growth that compounds from growth that always feels one disruption away from slipping.
In the follow-up, I outline four structural shifts I consistently see in firms that move beyond this stage and regain control.
→ Read Part 2 here