What You Actually Get When You Hire a Small Engineering Firm
The real tradeoffs of hiring a small engineering firm instead of a large one, including the situations where a small team is the wrong call.
Every so often someone asks, politely, whether a company our size can really handle their project. I don’t mind the question. It’s a reasonable thing to wonder and sometimes the answer is no, so here is my attempt at an honest answer, including a few things I wouldn’t put in a sales deck.
The good parts
The engineers you meet at the start are the ones who do the work. At bigger firms there can be a gap between the people who win a contract and the people who end up staffing it. We don’t have enough layers for that gap to open up.
Decisions come quickly. If a scope question comes up on a Tuesday afternoon, you’ll usually have an answer that afternoon, because the people who can make the call are already in the conversation.
Our team also covers software, databases, firmware, and applied AI, which helps most when a bug won’t stay in one layer. A device that behaves on the bench and gets flaky once it talks to a server is the classic case, and we can chase it down without handing it from one department to another. And frankly, your project matters more to us than it would to a firm juggling hundreds of them.
The less good parts
We don’t have a bench of forty engineers waiting for an assignment. If you need a large team next month, we aren’t the right choice for the whole program, though we could be right for a hard piece of it, working alongside a bigger team or under a prime contractor.
We also don’t carry every registration, contract vehicle, and certification a large contractor has spent years collecting. If your project requires something specific, ask us directly. If we don’t have it yet, we’ll tell you, and a teaming arrangement is often a workable way around it.
And we aren’t great at starting on a vague idea and working it out as we go. Some large firms can absorb that kind of uncertainty. We’d rather pin down the scope first. It can feel slow for the first week or two, but it usually saves time overall.
Where a small team fits
In my opinion, small firms do their best work on problems that are hard but reasonably contained, like a system that keeps falling over or a prototype that needs to become something people use every day.
If your project sounds like that, we’d like to hear about it. If it doesn’t, and we know someone who’d be a better fit, we’ll pass the name along.
