Essentium announced a series of HR moves and said they’ve doubled their staff since last year.
The Dallas-based company has been growing rapidly and their changing size likely provoked the need for some organizational change.
Essentium Promotions
The HR moves include a series of promotions of existing staff to more prominent positions, such as “Chief Supply Chain Officer”, or “Executive Vice President of R&D, Materials”. In all, eight positions were strengthened in this way. I have a suspicion that in many cases these folks were likely doing much the same work they’ll be doing in the future.
So why make such changes? My thought is that Essentium is positioning their organization for rapid growth, and thus they will need executive roles at the top to coordinate the additional people who will arrive in 2021 and 2022. These folks are likely the ones who will be on the ground growing their departments.
Essentium Growth
Essentium said:
“The strengthening of the Essentium leadership team and global headcount will allow the company to deepen and expand operational excellence across its supply chain, innovation, commercial, product development, and marketing functions. It will also bake-in the frictionless scale needed to satisfy growing demand in the Essentium High Speed Extrusion (HSE) 3D Printing Platform from North America, Western Europe, and Asia.”
Note the word “expand”, and that they mention not only North America, their base of operations, but also Europe and Asia, the two other major sources of additive manufacturing revenue. With the organizational changes they are now set to address those growing markets.
A number of the promoted positions also deal with product development, both machine and material. Therefore we can expect not only sales growth, but also new products.
Essentium’s CEO, Blake Teipel, said:
“With these appointments and promotions, we leverage existing talent while bringing additional key leadership and global operational experience needed to support our customers to fuel their next stage of growth. Essentium will continue to scale to meet the demands to accelerate an open additive ecosystem through product readiness, innovation, and customer success. Growing appetite and adoption across multiple sectors are proof that industrial-scale AM is ready for prime time. We are confident in furthering our vision to reshape the world of manufacturing into a leaner, more agile future enabled by AM.”
Essentium Trajectory
While these changes do seem quite optimistic, there are good reasons for Essentium to forecast this trajectory. They say their staff complement is presently about 100, but that it actually doubled from a year earlier. That’s strong evidence for growth to come in 2021 and 2022.
With this notable growth, one may ask why Essentium seems to be succeeding. My thought is that they have focused very strongly on the needs of their customers. In any discussions I’ve had with them, they seem to put the application first and then make a machine or material to fit it.
That’s quite different from some other industrial 3D printer manufacturers that seem to take the philosophy of “build a cool machine and someone will figure out what to do with it.”
If they maintain this approach, there’s a great possibility they will double their staff again.
Via Essentium
