The Manufacturing Profit Recovery Audit

A 4-6 week, fixed-fee engagement that shows you exactly where your shop is losing money, and what to do about it.

Your margins should match your effort. When they don't, the gap is hiding somewhere in your operation: the quotes, the schedule, the overtime, the rework, the bottlenecks. Somewhere between the jobs coming in the door and the checks going out, money is leaking.

The Manufacturing Profit Recovery audit finds those leaks. Not with theory. Not with a methodology deck. With a hands-on, financial-first review of how your shop actually runs. Conducted by someone who's led operations like yours for 25 years.

What the Audit Examines

Job costing accuracy: Are your actual costs matching your estimates? Where are the biggest gaps?

Quoting practices: Are you pricing to win or pricing to profit? Where are you consistently underbidding?

Scheduling and throughput: Where are jobs stalling? What bottlenecks are rippling through the whole floor?

Overtime patterns: Is overtime strategic or reactive? What's it actually costing you per month?

Scrap and rework rates: How much material and labor is getting lost to do-overs and waste?

Labor utilization: Are your people spending time on value-adding work, or fighting the system?

Inventory management: Are your inventory levels keeping up with demand? Lack of inventory can cause delays or loss of work.

What You Get

A detailed report with three parts:

Where the money is going: Every margin leak identified and measured in dollars, not percentages. You'll see the actual financial impact of each issue.

Why it's happening: The root cause behind each leak, not just the symptom. Overtime isn't the problem. It's a symptom of something upstream.

What to fix and in what order: A prioritized action plan ranked by financial impact. The biggest dollars-recovered-per-effort items go first.

How It Works

Stu comes to your shop. He works on your floor and in your books, not from a conference room. He works around your production schedule. No all-hands meetings. No workshops. No pulling your people off the line.

The audit takes 4-6 weeks. You pay a fixed fee agreed on upfront. No hourly billing. No scope creep. No surprise invoices.

At the end, you'll know exactly where your margin is going and what it's worth to fix it. What you do with that information is up to you, but most shops recover 3-5x the audit fee within 12 months. On a $5 million operation, that often means six figures back in your pocket. Common questions about the audit →

Find out where your margin is going.

Book a 30-Minute Discovery Call

Help Fixing What the Audit Finds

The audit tells you what to fix. If you want help fixing it, Stu can stay.

Implementation support is a flexible engagement built around the audit's action plan. Stu works alongside your team to execute the highest-impact changes: adjusting quoting models, redesigning scheduling workflows, setting up job-cost tracking that actually gets used, reducing overtime through better planning.

This isn't project management from a laptop. It's hands-on work with your people, on your floor, solving the specific problems the audit identified.

Engagement length depends on the scope of changes. Some shops need four weeks. Some need four months. The work is scoped and priced before it starts. No open-ended retainers.

A Seasoned Operations Leader, Without the Six-Figure Salary

Some shops don't need a full-time COO. They need someone who's been one, available when it counts.

Think of it as having an experienced operations leader on call. Someone who knows your shop, knows your numbers, and can help you make the right call when the stakes are high.

Common Use Cases

Navigating a growth phase without losing operational control

Preparing for a major equipment purchase or facility expansion

Dealing with workforce challenges: hiring, training, retention

Improving systems before bringing on a new operations manager

Gut-checking big decisions with someone who's made them before

What We Don't Do

We don't do Lean certification workshops. We don't audit your 5S compliance. We don't sell you software and call it consulting.

Not methodology theater.

We don't come in with a pre-built framework and force your operation into it. We start with your numbers and your shop. The approach fits the operation, not the other way around.

Not an ERP pitch.

We're not a software company with a consulting arm. If your ERP needs work, we'll tell you, but we're not selling you a system.

Not hourly billing.

Hourly billing rewards slow work. Every IronForge engagement has a fixed fee and a fixed timeline. You know what you're paying before we start.

Not a binder on a shelf.

The audit deliverable is built to be used, not filed. Specific dollar amounts. Specific fixes. Specific priorities. If you can't act on it, we didn't do our job.

Not theory from someone who's never run a shop.

Stu started as a machine operator. He led fabrication operations for 25 years. He's not going to tell you how to run your operation from a textbook. Learn about Stu's background →

Let's Talk About Your Operation

If your shop is busy but margins aren't where they should be, or you just want to know whether a Profit Recovery audit makes sense for your situation, reach out.

No sales pitch. No obligation. Just a straight conversation.