Joshua Tarbutton · Founder & Chairman, Bravo Team
Engineering capacity for companies that have run out of it.
Bravo Team designs and builds custom machines, automation, electronics, and low-volume hardware. Thirty-eight engineers and five licensed Professional Engineers, in one building in Cornelius, North Carolina.
I founded the firm in 2018 and I chair it. I do not do the work myself. I am the first conversation, and I put the right team behind the problem.
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How we answer hard problems
“If the physics don't say no, we probably won't either.”
When a problem arrives here, the first question is not whether it can be done. It is how. That is a working method, not a slogan. Constraints get identified early. The real ones get respected. The rest gets engineered around.
Physics gets a vote. So do budget and schedule. Most of what is left is work that has not been figured out yet.
When the answer genuinely is no, you will hear it early, with the analysis attached. We looked before we said it.
Capabilities.
Bravo Team is an engineering design firm first. Every discipline below sits in the same building. A program moves from requirements to a delivered machine without being handed between three companies.
Engineering design
Mechanical, systems, and product development. The core of the firm and where most programs begin.
Automation and controls
Custom machines, automated cells, and equipment retrofits built to your process rather than to a catalog.
Electronics, PCB and firmware
Boards and embedded software developed alongside the mechanical design instead of integrated at the end.
Prototyping and R&D
First-of-its-kind development, including programs where the specification does not exist yet.
Small-batch manufacturing
Precision fabrication and 5-axis machining in our own shop, for volumes that fall between prototype and production.
Applied software tools
Purpose-built internal software for the engineering and production work your team still does by hand.
The firm, in numbers.
Founded
2018, Cornelius NC
Engineering staff
38 of 47 employees
Licensed PEs
5 on staff
Single facility
16,000 sq ft
Inc. 5000
2023, 2024, 2025
Charlotte 2024
#2 fastest growing
Federal status
Small Business
Engineering work for people who cannot afford it to be wrong.
Over a hundred companies have hired Bravo Team since 2018, across aerospace, defense, industrial, and medical work. Most of it sits under NDA, which is usually the point.
100+
Companies served since 2018
403
Years of collective engineering experience on staff
You are hiring an organization, not a platform.
Forty-seven people, thirty-eight of them engineers, five of them licensed Professional Engineers, plus the machinists and technicians who build what the engineers draw. Everyone works from the same building, deliberately.
We organise in small, senior teams and assign one to a program rather than staffing it out as individual hours. That is the model the company was built on and it is where the name comes from.
There is a named, accountable engineer on every program, and a licensed PE behind the work that requires one.
Where we fit, and where we do not.
Stated plainly so neither of us spends a meeting finding out.
A good fit
- ◆Manufacturers, OEMs, and industrial companies with a funded engineering program
- ◆Teams that need engineering capacity faster than they can hire it
- ◆Aerospace, defense, and regulated-industry suppliers
- ◆Government buyers and primes working Small Business set-asides
Not a fit
- —Pre-revenue concepts seeking a technical co-founder or equity-based work
- —Projects without an approved budget or an internal decision-maker
- —Buyers selecting purely on lowest bid
- —Investment, fundraising, and partnership pitches
Who you are dealing with.
Licensed Professional Engineer. PhD from Clemson in 5-axis CNC toolpath planning. Bachelor's from Georgia Tech. Fifty-plus peer-reviewed publications and a patent in precision measurement. Nine years teaching engineering across two universities, with tenure, running labs funded by NSF, DOE, ONR, DARPA, NASA and Boeing.
Before all of it, eight years in the Army Reserve as a Platoon Sergeant, including a deployment to Iraq. I founded Bravo Team in 2018 and have chaired it since.
When you contact this site, that is who reads it.
Start with the problem, not the specification.
Five questions, about a minute. It reaches me and the team together, and you will get a straight answer on whether this is work we should be doing.
Discuss a project