Straight Answers. No Consulting Jargon.

It's a 4-6 week, fixed-fee engagement where Stu comes to your shop, reviews your operation and your financials, and identifies every place you're losing margin. You get a detailed report showing where the money is going, in dollars, and a prioritized action plan for getting it back.

Job costing accuracy, quoting practices, scheduling and throughput, overtime patterns, scrap and rework rates, labor utilization, and production bottlenecks. Anything that affects your margin gets examined.

Four to six weeks from start to final report. The timeline depends on the size and complexity of your operation, but it's scoped upfront so you'll know the schedule before we start.

No. Stu works around your production schedule. He's on your floor and in your books, not pulling people into meetings or running workshops. Your team keeps doing their jobs. The audit happens alongside normal operations.

Access to your financial records, job cost data, and production floor. Stu will tell you exactly what he needs upfront. It's not a heavy lift on your side. The work is his to do.

It's a fixed fee quoted before the engagement starts. The fee depends on the size and complexity of your operation. There are no hourly charges, no scope creep, and no surprise invoices. You'll know the total cost upfront.

Most shops see a return of 3-5x the audit fee within 12 months. The audit typically identifies 5-15% of annual revenue in hidden margin leakage. On a $5 million shop, that's $250,000-$750,000 in recoverable margin.

Hourly billing rewards slow work. A consultant who bills by the hour has no incentive to be efficient. A fixed fee means the scope is clear, the timeline is set, and Stu is motivated to deliver results, not rack up hours.

Fabrication-based operations in Colorado: metal fabrication, sheet metal, CNC machining, welding, contract manufacturing. Typically 5 to 100 employees, $1M to $20M in revenue, owner-operated.

If you're running a lean operation with a handful of employees, the audit may not make financial sense yet. Reach out anyway. Stu will be honest about whether it's the right fit.

That's the most common thing Stu hears. And usually, the story is the same: someone came in with a methodology, produced a report, and left. Nothing changed. IronForge is different because Stu starts with your financials, not a framework. The deliverable shows specific dollar amounts, not theory. And if you want help implementing the fixes, he's there to do it. On the floor, not from a conference room.

No. This isn't Lean certification, Six Sigma training, or 5S workshops. There's nothing wrong with those tools in the right context, but they're not what IronForge does. The Profit Recovery audit is financial-first. It starts with where you're losing money and works backward to the operational causes. If a Lean principle happens to be the right fix, great. But we're not selling a methodology.

Then you'll know. And that's worth knowing. But in Stu's experience, even well-run shops have blind spots. The audit has never come back empty. There's always something hiding.

No. The audit report is yours. It's built to be actionable, specific enough that you or your team can execute the fixes yourselves. If you want Stu's help with implementation, that's available as a separate engagement. But there's no obligation and no pressure.

It depends on what the audit finds. It could mean rebuilding your quoting model, redesigning production scheduling, setting up job-cost tracking, or working with your team to fix a specific bottleneck. It's scoped and priced separately, based on the action plan.

Ongoing access to Stu for operational guidance without a full-time hire. Think of it as having a seasoned operations leader who knows your shop available when you need a second set of eyes for growth decisions, workforce planning, or operational challenges you don't want to tackle alone.