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When a prominent analyst suddenly jumps to one of the companies he follows, it’s bound to turn some heads. Eric Miscoll recently did just that, departing as COO of Technology Forecasters (techforecasters.com) for a job as vice president of strategy and operations for TXP – Texas Prototypes (texasprototypes.com) in June. He explained his reasons for shifting gears, and his confidence in TXP’s business model, to Circuits Assembly editor-in-chief Mike Buetow in August.

CA: You were well into building a career as a prominent analyst. Why jump the wall now?

EM: I have received quite a bit of [feedback] from people on that. It was a combination of professional and personal reasons. The bottom line is, I’m an operations guy. My career with Tech Forecasters was frankly at the point where there was nowhere for me to go, and it was very data-centric. I like working with people, that’s what I do well, that’s what I can bring to a company. [TXP] allows me to roll up my sleeves and work in a very exciting company with strong upside potential and get more involved in human interaction. I met [TXP CEO] Michael Shores in 2003. I increasingly became a fan of the model he was advocating. What the industry needs is some new models. This is a breath of fresh air.

CA: What exactly is your role?

EM: It feels like a general manager’s role. It has a strong external and internal focus. The external focus is in supporting sales, business development and marketing, which in and of itself could be a full-time job. On the internal side I’m overseeing some of the strategy, which is a collaborative process, and the organization structure and design. This company was put together in a fashion that was never coordinated. As we start to grow, that informal structure has to give way to a more considered approach.

CA: As TXP grows, how do you retain the small company services and entrepreneurial element?

EM: A lot of companies, as they grow, decide they need more layers of supervision. We don’t want to do that. What we need are the right technical people to make this work.

CA: How do you explain TXP’s model to outsiders, and what is it about that model that you find so worthwhile?

EM: I see ours as an engineering support model. We take that engineer, wherever he or she is in the world, and surround that engineer with all the services they may need to bring product to market quickly. We’ll work through partners – we call them complementary services partners – to do that. We have some core processes: assembly, material purchasing, DfM and board layout, photonics. We have what we call our Solutions Group, which provides a mechanical and industrial design side that adds some nice synergies with the rest of the operations. But at our core, we support the engineers. We prepare product for production. Our goal is to get that product validated, prepare prototypes, compile the build recipe and get that product ready faster than [the customer] would working through traditional channels.

Not to split hairs but it’s not really NPI, it’s pre-NPI. NPI implies we are ready to launch to production. Engineers tinker with stuff – serving them and their unique needs can be challenging. We come in and offer them a way to get their product validated and built. I should mention that we are equally supportive of OEM and EMS companies.

CA: What sets TXP apart? How do you ensure your products will scale?

EM: We want to be much more collaborative with the design engineers. There’s a sequential nature to this, obviously, but the tighter you can manage this, the better. Engineers and design guys are great about making widgets work. But they have no concept of parts availability or building a million of something later. That’s a different animal. You collaborate early so you can work through the problems and develop the efficiencies so you can get product to market.

We can all have the same equipment. It’s not the tools; it comes down to the jockeys. Our team has been together for years. It’s seen a lot. They are incredibly competent in doing this. That’s one of the barriers to entry: It’s not a production environment. You can’t take production people and have them do this. They are likely to say, “What? The board didn’t work? Let’s build another 100.” Our mindset is, this will end up in a factory someday, so we try to mimic the factory, do everything with machines, limit the human involvement. We think the correct way is to automate from the beginning. We put together the build recipe.

As we grow, the challenge will be finding like-minded people. Our production schedule changes almost daily, based on: What’s here? Do we have all the data? Do we have all the parts? It can be very frustrating to someone who is used to a production environment. It’s very fast paced and everchanging.

CA: TXP is small for a public company. Why go public?

EM: We like the pressure, I guess [laughs]. There were real reasons. Access to capital is one; as our model is being embraced and accepted we want to be able to grow. It was a vehicle for employees to share in the growth of the company. It allows us a currency to attract and retain talent. There’s an added benefit that it gets us attention. Versus going with a venture capitalist, [being public] allows us to run our own company.

CA: Does TXP have acquisition plans?

EM: The capacity that we have at this facility can support organic growth quite comfortably. In 2005, we sized the U.S. prototype manufacturing services market at $1.5 billion. Going back, most NPI centers try to be physically close to their customers. We’re trying to buck that trend a bit. Our biggest customers are not in Texas; they are in California and Florida and New York. Longer term as we grow we’ll need to look at the footprint. But we have absolutely no desire to grow as a production house. That model is so messed up. We’re not going to be the cheapest one on the block.

CA: How do you prospect for customers?

EM: We work with design houses; there’s a nice synergistic relationship there. For larger EMS companies, they may come across something that’s too small for them. It helps them if they can provide a good reference. Also, many EMS companies are simply not that good at what we do, so by partnering with us they can more quickly get to the work that they do do well. We are talking to OEMs constantly. We go after particular industry sectors that we think would be good for us.