Light manufacturing and fabrication
Quoting is the whole game and most small shops quote from memory. Job costing that runs afterwards rather than before is where the money quietly goes.
Why here
The neighbourhood
A consultancy in Woodside rather than in Midtown is a decision about who the clients are, and it is visible in the fees.
The client base is out here
The businesses this firm works with are in Maspeth, Long Island City, Ridgewood, Greenpoint, College Point and the industrial edges of the Bronx. They are workshops, warehouses, kitchens, yards and depots. Almost none of them is in Manhattan, and a consultancy with a Midtown address is charging its clients for a rent that exists to impress a different sort of client altogether.
Most of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx is inside an hour by van from here, and a great deal of it is inside forty minutes. That is why site work is priced the same wherever it happens, and it is why we can be on a floor at half past seven, which is the hour at which a business shows you what it is actually like.
What is on this block
Two- and three-storey brick, fire escapes, a hardware supplier, an auto shop, two food businesses and a lot of apartments above all of it. The elevated line runs a few streets over and you can hear it. It is a working neighbourhood rather than a scenic one, and the office is two rooms on the first floor above a street that looks like most of the streets our clients work on.
Where we work
Woodside
Sunnyside
Long Island City
Astoria
Maspeth
Jackson Heights
Elmhurst
Ridgewood
Corona
Flushing
Greenpoint
Williamsburg
The Bronx
Manhattan
Nassau County
That list is the honest reach of a six-person firm that does most of its work on client premises. Further than that and the travel starts costing you more than the advice is worth, and we will say so rather than take the work and charge for the driving.
The station
61st Street-Woodside is four minutes' walk and it is unusually good: the 7 and the Long Island Rail Road share it, so Grand Central is eighteen minutes away and Times Square about twenty-five. For a first meeting at our office that matters — a business owner from Nassau County can be here and back inside a lunch hour.
Most of the work happens at your premises. Most of the work happens at your premises. You cannot follow a job around a spreadsheet, and the things worth finding are usually visible only in the room where the work is done.
Who we work with out here
Seven industries
Wholesale and distribution
Customer concentration and stock are the two risks, and they pull against each other. The biggest customer is usually the one with the worst terms.
Construction and the trades
Cash arrives long after the work and the schedule is the business. Most of the operations work here is scheduling and change orders.
Food, hospitality and retail
Labour is the constraint and it moves hourly. Capacity work here is about the shape of a week, not the size of a year.
Professional and personal services
The product is somebody's time, so pricing and utilisation are the same conversation, and the founder is usually still the best salesperson.
Home care and healthcare services
Rostering, turnover and reimbursement timing. We work on the operations of these businesses and never on anything clinical.
Transport and logistics
Utilisation, maintenance and drivers. The margin is in the empty miles and almost nobody measures them.
$2,200 a partner day · ninety minutes free · about one in four we talk out of it
Start with the assessment, or just telephone
The assessment takes about four minutes and gives you a written summary of what your answers suggest and which engagement addresses each thing. It is indicative and not professional advice, and it is a better opening than a blank contact form. If you would rather skip it, the telephone works and the first meeting is ninety minutes and free.