Labs, build floors, test cells, field deployments. Your company carries manufacturer-grade risk with none of a manufacturer’s safety infrastructure — and your broker, your customers, and your next round’s diligence are all going to ask the same question. I build the system before one of them forces it.
Book a 30-minute fit callEvery funded hardware company hits the same forcing events. Companies that wait for one of them pay retrofit prices. Companies that move first pay design prices.
Hired into a company with no system, they inherit a blank page and no authority to fill it. They spend a year writing programs alone. The good ones leave. Right hire — wrong sequence.
Delivers a gap assessment and a binder of template programs. A binder that doesn’t match your operation is a liability with a table of contents. Nobody runs it after they leave.
A senior EHS executive owns your safety function part-time: designs the system around your actual operations, installs the operating rhythm, and defines the role your eventual full-time hire steps into. System first. Hire second.
Walk the operation. Interview the engineers carrying safety knowledge informally. Map regulatory applicability to your real processes — your battery lab, your test cell, your field model. Establish the true baseline.
Sequence by severity, not by checklist order. Scenarios that could seriously hurt someone or stop the company get systems first. Insurance and customer-audit requirements slot in on their external deadlines.
Reporting, review, training, leadership cadence, ownership. The routines that survive your growth rate — the part a document mill never delivers.
After that, the engagement runs at the altitude your company needs — a fraction of a full-time cost — until a dedicated hire makes sense. At which point my last job is hiring my own replacement well.
I’m Corey Robinson. I’ve spent twenty-two years leading EHS from the plant floor to global manufacturing programs, including inside a private equity roll-up — the environment where deferred safety infrastructure shows up in the numbers. I’ve sat in the room when the plant manager pushed back, when the CFO questioned the spend, and when the sponsor asked what the exposure does to the model.
That’s the experience your company is buying: someone who has built and run these systems inside real operations, not someone who writes about them from outside.
Bring your operational picture — what you build, where, and what’s coming in the next two quarters. I’ll tell you where you sit on the EHS Maturity Ladder, what your real exposures are, and whether fractional leadership is the right buy. If it isn’t, I’ll say so.
Book the fit callUsually at the prototype-to-production transition, when a second shift is added, or when a customer or investor starts asking. The trigger is rarely headcount; it is introducing processes that can seriously injure someone.
Evidence rather than intent: written programs, injury rates, training records, and a named person accountable for EHS. An empty answer becomes a finding, and sometimes a holdback.
You can, but understand what you are assigning. Recordability determinations, permit obligations and program adequacy are judgment calls with legal consequences. Pairing an internal owner with credentialed oversight is the usual right structure at this stage.
Sequence to exposure. Close what can kill or cite first, stand up the recurring calendar second, and leave maturity work for later. Trying to implement everything at once is what makes safety feel like a brake.
Standardize before you replicate. One program set and one audit cadence defined at the first site turns the second and third into a configuration exercise rather than three separate builds.