A production director rang me last Tuesday needing a plant manager. Not eventually, now.
His board had just signed off a seven-figure expansion, and he had nobody senior enough to run the extra shift.
Calls like that are going to become a lot more common. New figures from BDO's bi-monthly mid-market business survey, published this week, found four in five mid-sized UK firms have increased their appetite to invest over the past three months. Manufacturing ranked third among the sectors executives see as having the strongest growth potential. Behind hospitality and leisure, behind financial services, but still ahead of professional services.
Decent news on the face of it.
Except 31% of those same businesses named higher employment costs and skills shortages as one of the biggest barriers to actually delivering that growth, with supply chain pressure the only concern ranked higher. So you end up with two figures sitting side by side that don't quite square up.
Confidence is climbing. Whether there's anyone senior enough to run the extra output is a separate question, and it's one a lot of boards haven't properly asked yet.
Why does manufacturing investment keep stalling at the hiring stage?
Because money moves faster than management capacity does. A board can approve capital spend in an afternoon. But finding someone who can actually run a production line at the scale that spend implies takes a good deal longer.
Most businesses don't start that search until the new equipment is already on order. By then you're recruiting under pressure, which tends to be exactly when standards slip.
I've watched this play out at three different manufacturers this year. All three had the capital sitting ready and a fairly tight deadline attached to it. None had set aside the time to find the right production manager before they actually needed one.
Two ended up delaying the go-live by a few months while the search dragged on. The third promoted someone internally who wasn't quite ready for the step up, and it showed for a while.
BDO's survey covered 500 mid-market businesses turning over between £10m and £500m. And roughly half are planning to expand into London and the South East over the next two years, with the Midlands the second most popular target region.
None of that is a wishlist sitting in a strategy deck somewhere. It's capital with a timeline attached, which is exactly why the hiring conversation can't wait until the machinery turns up.
What does a strong production manager hire actually look like right now?
Someone who has run a line through a real expansion before, not just steady-state operations. Keeping an established process ticking along is one skill.
Scaling that same process up while it's still running, hitting new output targets without letting quality slip, managing a bigger team than you had six months earlier, is a harder and quite different one. And plenty of solid operational managers have simply never had to do it, through no fault of their own, because most factories don't expand often enough to give anyone that kind of practice.
A generalist recruiter, or an in-house HR team stretched thin across every department, will screen against the job description. Years of experience, sector background, the obvious boxes ticked.
But that approach rarely catches whether a candidate has actually run growth before rather than simply managed it once it had already settled down. You can only test for that properly if you understand, from the inside, the difference between running a line and scaling one.
We talk to engineering and manufacturing managers most days of the week. Usually we can tell within about ten minutes of a call which candidates have done the harder version of the job and which have only ever managed the steady version, and that ten minutes tends to save everyone a very expensive mistake six months later.
Is now really the right time to hire, given everything being said about employment costs?
Fair question, and the honest answer is yes, carefully. Wages and National Insurance are both up on where they were a couple of years ago.
Nobody's disputing that.
But the businesses getting this right treat a production manager or engineering manager hire as part of the investment case itself, budgeted in alongside the machinery, rather than as an afterthought once everything else is already signed off. And get the leadership in place early enough and the expansion tends to run on schedule.
Leave it too late and you're stuck choosing between an emergency hire at a premium or a go-live that slips by months. Either one usually costs more than starting the search three months earlier would have done, and neither is a comfortable conversation to have with a board that already approved the spend.
None of this really comes down to one survey's numbers. It comes down to what happens in the gap between a confident boardroom and a factory floor that still needs someone senior running it properly.
Most of the actual risk in these growth plans sits in that gap. It's rarely where anyone on the board is looking hardest, mainly because the equipment order feels like the decision and the staffing feels like a detail that will sort itself out on its own.
It usually doesn't sort itself out.
If your business is one of the four in five weighing up manufacturing investment over the coming months, the sensible order is finding who'll run the extra output before the equipment arrives, not after. We work with manufacturing and engineering businesses across the country on exactly this, matching production manager recruitment to real expansion timelines rather than to a job description written in a hurry once the pressure's already on.
Send us the brief for your next engineering or production manager hire and we'll give you an honest read on whether your timeline and the market's line up.
For engineers weighing up their own next move, we've also written about why experienced engineers are leaving UK manufacturing, which sits alongside this one fairly naturally. And if you want a second opinion on a role you're already trying to fill, our engineering recruitment team is a useful place to start that conversation.
