I work on what your parts actually cost, what they should be quoted at, and when the money really arrives.
What you probably cannot answer today
Most machine shops from about $1 million upward have a bookkeeper and a tax accountant. Neither one is responsible for the questions that decide whether a busy year turns into money:
What does an hour on each machine actually cost you — or does every quote go out on one blended shop rate?
What does a part have to be quoted at just to break even — and is that the number your quotes are built on?
What did your finished jobs make against what you quoted them at?
How many days after month-end do you have complete, reconciled financials in your hands?
Can you produce a production-to-cash forecast that accounts for material bought ahead, work in process, and parts finished but not yet invoiced?
If those questions do not have answers, it is not a competence problem. It is a finance-function problem — and it is the whole of what I do.
What that costs, in one example
At Wildcat Machine, Inc., a Tulsa machine shop where I serve as fractional CFO, the shop had no way to compare what a job was quoted at against what it actually consumed. We set that comparison up. Wildcat’s own VP ran it.
The first pass turned up a 930-piece stainless run that cost $2,325 in material and time and had been priced at $697.50 — a loss of more than sixteen hundred dollars on a single purchase order. The work was good and the customer was satisfied.
Nothing was wrong with the work. The arithmetic behind the quote had never been done.
The free review
The Shop Financial and Performance Review — no cost, no obligation.
You send: three recent quotes and what those jobs actually cost, two years of P&Ls, and your receivables and payables aging. Nothing else. No tax returns, no bank access, no employee files.
You get back: a written scorecard of your numbers against what a shop your size should be hitting, with the two or three parts or programs costing you the most identified in dollars.
It costs you: one hour up front, and one hour to walk the findings.
Turnaround: ten business days. Mutual NDA before anything changes hands.
What it is not: an audit, a valuation, or a sales meeting with a worksheet stapled to it. It is a diagnostic. If it turns up nothing worth fixing, I will tell you that.
Call (918) 269-6457 · Text (918) 269-6457 · steve@cfologistics.com
How engagements work
A defined project, at a fixed fee, agreed before I start. Build your machine-rate and overhead-recovery model. Set up the quoted-versus-actual comparison you will actually use. Produce a production-to-cash forecast — and, for a shop that needs it, cost of quality and margin by program. No monthly retainer and no open meter.
On larger or longer engagements I will tie a meaningful share of my compensation to the goals we set together. It only works when both of us can measure the result — which is the point of doing the measurement first.
Shops served
Precision machining and CNC job shops · Aerospace and defense (AS9100) · Oil, gas and energy · Production and contract manufacturing · Reverse engineering and prototype.
Tulsa metro and northeastern Oklahoma. I serve as fractional CFO to Wildcat Machine, Inc., a Tulsa precision machine shop — building the machine-rate model, the quoted-versus-actual comparison, and the weekly production-to-cash forecast it now runs on. Its owner, Mike Reiter, will take a call from a shop owner who wants to ask him about it.
“We were quoting off a number nobody had ever built from our financials. Steve built the overhead rate out of our P&L and the hours we actually worked, and a weekly cash forecast we now run on. I can defend my hour now.”
— Mike Reiter, Wildcat, Tulsa
Recovering what you may not know is lost. That is the whole proposition. The review is how we find out whether anything is.
Call (918) 269-6457 · Text (918) 269-6457 · steve@cfologistics.com