Independent consultant · Chicago
Fifteen years in manufacturing operations, the last six on my own. I work with firms between $8m and $90m in revenue, usually when something has stopped scaling and nobody inside can say precisely why.
No deck, no discovery phase, no junior team. You get me, on site, for a fixed number of days, and a written answer you can act on without me.
Prices are below. If you have to ask what an engagement costs, you are already negotiating against yourself.
How I work
Most of what I do is one of these. If yours is genuinely something else we will work out the shape on the call, and I will quote it before any work starts.
Start here
Two days on site, then a week of my time. I talk to the people doing the work, follow three orders end to end, and write down what is actually happening versus what the org chart says.
$14,000Fixed. Credited in full against a build if you go ahead within 90 days.
Most engagements
We pick the two or three changes worth making and I run them with your people until they hold without me. I am not writing a plan for somebody else to execute — that is the part that never happens.
$9,500 / monthMonthly, cancel with 30 days. No minimum term.
After, or instead
For firms who have done the work and want somebody to think out loud with before a decision gets expensive. A standing hour a fortnight, and my phone in between.
$2,200 / monthBilled quarterly. I will tell you when it is not worth renewing.
Case studies
Named where the client agreed, anonymised where they did not, which is most of the time. The numbers are theirs, not estimates of mine.
Contract manufacturer · 140 staff · anonymised
Every quote needed the same two engineers, who were also the only people who could unblock the floor. Sales believed the problem was price. It was not: they were winning the quotes they returned inside a week and losing almost everything past ten days.
Pulled the eighty percent of quotes that were variations of previous work into a costed library the sales team could issue alone, and kept the engineers for genuine one-offs.
Median quote turnaround 11 days → 2. Win rate up 9 points over two quarters, at the same prices.
Food producer · $31m revenue · anonymised
Night shift scrapped roughly four times what days did, and the standing explanation was that nights were harder to staff. The data said otherwise once it was cut by line and changeover rather than by shift.
Moved two changeovers off the night window, rewrote the handover so it transferred state rather than just keys, and put the scrap number in front of the people making it the same night instead of in a monthly report.
Night scrap down 61% in nine weeks and held for the following year. No new equipment and no extra headcount.
Book a call
Bring the thing that is bothering you. If it is not something I can help with I will say so on the call and point you at who can — that costs me an hour and saves you a quarter.
Central time. Pick one and the form fills itself in.
Template demo — these times are invented. On a live site this is the consultant’s real calendar, so what you see is what is genuinely free.
Questions
Because the alternative is charging what I think you can pay, and you would be right not to trust that. It also saves us both a call: if $14,000 for the read is out of the question, you now know that without booking anything.
No. You get me, which is the whole proposition — a firm your size does not need four consultants, it needs one who has seen this before and will be on the floor rather than in a meeting room. If an engagement genuinely needs a second pair of hands I will tell you and you can hire them directly.
Then it says that, and you have paid $14,000 to not spend a great deal more. It has happened four times. Two of those firms came back a year later when the thing had actually become a problem, which is the right order.
Yes, as a matter of course, before anything is discussed in detail. It is also why most of the case studies above are anonymised — I would rather be vague in public than ask a client for permission to be specific.
Anywhere in the Midwest without a surcharge. Further by arrangement, charged at cost with no markup, and I will usually suggest fewer, longer visits rather than more frequent short ones.