A little over a year ago, one of our portfolio companies was turning away orders. Not because the work wasn’t good, but because there weren’t enough hours in the week to get it all done on one production line. That’s a good problem to have, until it isn’t. Customers don’t wait around forever for capacity to open up.
This is the story of what it actually took to get a second line running, and what almost went wrong along the way.
The easy part was deciding to do it
Once the numbers were in front of us, the decision itself wasn’t complicated. Demand was there, the backlog proved it, and the math on a second line made sense within a reasonable timeframe. The harder part was everything that came after saying yes.
Sourcing the right equipment took longer than expected. Installing it meant reworking part of the floor layout, which meant a few weeks of disruption to the existing line while walls came down and new power lines went in. And none of that mattered if there weren’t enough trained people to actually run it once it was built.
Where it almost went sideways
About two months in, it became clear that hiring was going to be the real bottleneck, not the equipment. Skilled operators aren’t easy to find on short notice, and the plan to hire and train a full second shift crew was moving slower than the construction timeline. For a few weeks, we had a finished line sitting mostly idle.
What worked was scaling back the original plan. Instead of trying to staff both lines at full capacity right away, the team ran a smaller crew on the new line and cross-trained a few experienced operators from the first line to split time between both. It wasn’t the plan on paper, but it kept things moving while hiring caught up.
Where things stand now
A year later, both lines are running at close to full capacity. Output is up significantly from where it was, and just as important, the backlog that used to mean turning down new customers is gone. The company’s now in a position to actually compete for bigger contracts it couldn’t have taken on before.
None of this happened because of one big decision. It happened because of a dozen smaller ones, made by people who were willing to adjust the plan when reality didn’t match it. That’s usually how growth actually works, not a straight line, but a series of corrections along the way.
