A part-time operations director who still runs factories
Senior operational leadership, one or two days a week. Not a report — a person in your production meeting who is accountable for what leaves the building and what it cost to make.
“Busy but not making money” is almost never a sales problem
It is nearly always one of three things, and usually more than one. Nobody knows what a job costs, so nobody knows which work to chase. Work does not move through the shop in a sensible order, so everything is late and the expediting eats the margin on the jobs that were profitable. Or the business depends on one or two people who hold it in their heads.
None of that is fixed by working harder, and none of it shows in a set of annual accounts. It shows in the gap between what you thought a job would take and what it took.
A handful of recent jobs, read properly: quoted hours against actual, what was promised against what shipped. That is usually enough to show where the money is going.
Five things that move the number
In rough order of how often they turn out to be the binding constraint in an engineering SME.
Job costing that someone believes
Quoted hours against actual, materials against issue, on real jobs. Not a system implementation — a method you can run next week that tells you which work makes money. Almost every subsequent decision depends on it.
Estimating and pricing
Where the estimate systematically misses, and why. A recovery rate that reflects what the business costs to run rather than what somebody worked out in 2016. Knowing which customers are subsidising which.
Getting work out on the promised date
Sequencing, batch sizes, changeovers, and the queue in front of the constraint. Most late delivery in a job shop is a sequencing problem wearing a capacity costume, and adding capacity to a badly sequenced shop makes it later.
Rework, scrap and the cost of getting it wrong twice
What is being redone, how often, and at whose cost. Usually the least-measured number in the building and frequently the largest single leak.
Taking the business out of your head
Documenting the processes, drawings and judgement that exist in one or two people. The least urgent item here, and the most valuable. Drawings and technical documentation
Every one of those compounds into the same thing
Documented processes, costing you can trust, evidenced delivery performance and decisions that do not all route through the owner are what turn a good month into a repeatable one. Margins hold because the numbers are right. Delivery holds because the sequence is right. The business becomes less dependent on any one person, and easier to run next year than it was this year.
How the engagement runs
A call, then a day in the works — no charge, no proposal deck. If there is something worth doing, a fixed-price diagnostic with a written output you can act on with or without us. After that, one or two days a week on a rolling basis with notice on both sides.
The person who attends is the person who does the work. Not an associate, not a junior, not somebody you have not met. We work across the United Kingdom.
Straight answers
An operations director is right when you have enough work to fill the role and can carry the risk of the wrong appointment. Fractional is right when the problem is real but the role is not yet full-time — and it is a reasonable way to work out what the permanent role should be before you advertise it. Several engagements end with us helping recruit our replacement.
A consultant, meanwhile, produces a recommendation. We are in the business and accountable for whether the change happens. The difference shows in the boring parts: chasing a supplier, sitting in the production meeting every week, telling somebody their estimate is wrong.
It is the normal starting position and usually the first thing to fix. No quote register, no job costing, no reliable record of hours — that is most engineering SMEs, including ones turning over eight figures. We do not start with a software project. We start by measuring a small number of real jobs properly, by hand if necessary, because you need the size of the problem before you can justify spending anything on a system.
Start with a day on your shop floor.
Not a discovery call, not a capability deck — a day in the works looking at real jobs, then an honest conversation about what we found. If there is nothing worth doing we will say so.