Bravo Team
An engineering design firm whose default answer is how, not whether.
Cornelius, North Carolina. Sixteen thousand square feet, forty-seven people, and every discipline a difficult program requires operating from a single facility.
We design and build custom machines, automation, electronics, and low-volume hardware for companies that have exhausted their off-the-shelf options. Three consecutive years on the Inc. 5000, and the second fastest-growing company in Charlotte in 2024.
Those are the credentials. The reason clients stay is what happens in the first conversation about a problem nobody has solved yet.
How it started.
I left a tenured engineering professorship in 2018 to found this firm, and for the first four years every dollar of margin was reinvested rather than distributed. That decision is why the company owns its equipment, its facility footprint, and its engineering bench outright.
The early work was the work other firms declined: one-off machines, prototypes with no drawing package, components with compressed schedules and incomplete requirements. Delivering on enough of those is how a reputation gets built, and it is why the difficult programs now arrive here first.
Eight years on, that is still the operating model. The difference is scale, process, and forty-six other people executing it.
What we hold each other to.
Values printed on a wall are worth little. These earn their place because they are the stated reasons people here have talked a client out of a project.
Remarkable Integrity
We tell you the thing you do not want to hear while there is still time to do something about it.
Tenacious Pursuit of Excellence
Good enough is a decision, and it is one we make on purpose or not at all.
Embrace Growth
Nobody here is finished. The project you bring us should teach us something too.
Own the Experience
The person who took your call is still the person accountable when the part ships.
We Win Together
No hero engineers, no lone geniuses. The team gets the problem, the team gets the credit.
Special forces engineering teams.
The phrase describes how the firm is organised rather than how it markets. Small senior teams, assigned to a program and given the authority to solve it. It is the one structural idea I carried over from the Army deliberately.
Thirty-eight of our forty-seven employees are engineers, five of them licensed Professional Engineers. The remainder are machinists, technicians, and the program staff who keep a building full of engineers moving in the same direction.
The team works on site, together, and that is not negotiable. The rationale is practical: the decisions that determine whether a program lands on schedule happen when the mechanical engineer can walk twenty feet and ask the machinist whether what she has drawn can be cut.
We refer to the companies we work with as client-partners rather than customers. On programs of this kind, neither party has the complete answer at the outset, and the engagement works better when both acknowledge it.
How a project runs.
Figure out the real problem
A large share of what arrives here is described as a solution somebody has already selected. We go back a step and establish the actual constraint before anything is drawn. This is where most of the budget is protected.
Design it, then build it
Mechanical, electrical, firmware, and manufacturing sit in the same building and work the same problem concurrently. You get one accountable team and one point of contact, rather than four vendors and the integration risk between them.
Prove it and hand it over
Tested, documented, and running in your building with your people trained on it. Then we stay reachable, because the first month of real use always finds something.
Who we build for.
More than a hundred companies since 2018, across aerospace, defense, industrial, and medical work. Most of what we do sits under NDA and stays there, which is generally why it was brought to us in the first place.
Named case: Winbro
5-axis laser ablation machine
A high-precision machine performing five distinct laser functions, holding an accuracy of 0.005 mm.
Aerospace client-partner
Shot recovery floor
A custom shot-peening enclosure with an integrated dust recovery system, filtering and returning debris for reuse.
Four hundred and three years of collective engineering experience currently sit in this building. That is the bench that built both of the programs above.
What it costs.
Realism, mostly. If you want a professional team, you pay for a professional team. There is no version of this where senior engineers, a licensed PE, and a machine shop come cheap, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something else.
What we can tell you is roughly where it lands. Per hour, an engineer here costs you less than your attorney and about what you pay a good plumber. Unlike either, the hours accumulate into something that did not exist before.
At the end you do not have an invoice for time. You have the thing itself, solving the problem that was costing you, built with you rather than at you, and moving at the velocity the physics allow.
For government contracting officers.
Bravo Team is registered and active in SAM.gov as a small business. If you found this page looking for a capability statement, here is the front of it.
SAM.gov UEI
LRGTN9F27LD3
CAGE Code
10NR9
Business status
Small Business
Set-aside
Small Business
Registered NAICS
Discuss a program with us.
Five questions, about a minute. It reaches me and the team together.