The Firm
How we work.
Six partners. Ten working days onsite. One bound plan. One pricing model. No decks, no associates, no surprises.
Most manufacturing consulting firms send a senior partner to the pitch, an associate to the engagement, and a deck to the handover. Brass & Bench sends the people whose names are on the door. Every time, every engagement, on your floor. That is the entire model.
This page is the explanation of how that model actually runs. Day by day, partner by partner, deliverable by deliverable. Read it before the first call and you will already know what we are going to do for you, what we are going to charge, and what we are going to refuse to do.
The methodology.
The engagement is built around three working phases and one closing phase. The phases are named for the work, not for the consultant-speak. Discover. Design. Build. Handover.
Discover runs for the first five days. The full team is onsite for some portion of it. Every partner walks the parts of your operation that map to their expertise. Mike Fox owns the business-development and operations conversation with ownership. Lorrie Lynn walks every documented procedure against the floor reality. Ben Kurtz runs the time studies and the OEE measurement. Pam Kurtz reviews every commercial insurance policy and risk register the business carries. Talon Fox maps the physical facility, the equipment posture, and the work flow. Jason Santiago connects the operational findings to the financial picture and scopes the custom software builds.
Records review and operator interviews happen in parallel. By Friday of week one, ownership has heard every uncomfortable finding live and in person. If there is going to be a surprise in the final binder, it is not a surprise to ownership by the end of week one. That rule is non-negotiable.
Design runs Saturday through Tuesday of week two. The team builds the recommended operational state. The strategic redesign, the industrial-engineering case, the facility-flow changes, the insurance recovery path, and the financial model are all drafted in this window. The binder draft is reviewed against every finding from week one.
Build runs Wednesday and Thursday of week two. Software and automation development. Tools built on your actual data, in your actual environment, deployed and tested. The binder is finalized. Every recommendation is tied to a dollar figure.
Handover is day ten. Mike returns onsite and walks ownership through the binder section by section. The dollar math is defended in the room. The custom tools are transferred and the team is trained. The engagement closes with a defined thirty, sixty, ninety, and one-hundred-eighty day roadmap.
What makes it different.
The partners are the deliverable. When you sign a Brass & Bench engagement, you are not buying a methodology. You are buying ten working days of six operators inside your facility. The methodology is what we use to organize the time. It is not the product.
No decks. We do not produce slide decks. We produce a bound implementation plan. The plan goes home with ownership and stays useful for years. Decks get filed in shared drives and forgotten in a quarter.
No associates. There are no junior associates on a Brass & Bench engagement. If a partner is named on your engagement, that partner is the one doing the work. If a question comes up about industrial-engineering math, you call Ben. If a question comes up about insurance audit findings, you call Pam. Real names, real numbers, real responsibility.
No recycled best practices. Every recommendation is anchored in what we observed at your facility, in your records, on your floor. We do not paste in templates from prior engagements. The binder you receive is yours, built for your operation, and unlikely to look much like the binder another client received.
One pricing model. The Two-Week Onsite is one hundred forty thousand dollars, all-inclusive. Travel, lodging, ground transport, food, software builds, binder production, and thirty days of post-engagement support. One quote. No expense receipts. If we propose a different engagement tier (a snapshot, a wedge, a program, or a fractional layer), the pricing is similarly fixed and similarly inclusive. No T&M billing. No surprise change orders.
What we will refuse to do.
We will not take an engagement we do not believe will return at least ten times its cost in the first eighteen months. We will not take an engagement where ownership is unwilling to give us full floor access. We will not take a Two-Week Onsite if the company is in active crisis (mid-recall, just lost the largest customer, about to miss payroll). For those, we will route you to the right engagement or the right firm.
We will not run a Brass & Bench engagement through your IT department's procurement gauntlet. The custom software we build is yours, deployed during the engagement, on stack you already run. There is no SaaS contract, no managed-service tail, no annual license fee.
We will not co-sign a recommendation we do not believe. If during the engagement we determine the operation does not need the changes ownership expected to hear about, we will say so. The binder will say so. The dollar math will say so.
How to start.
The first call is a thirty-minute conversation with Mike Fox. No deck, no pitch. Mike asks four questions. The conversation closes one of three ways. Either we scope an engagement and send a quote, or we recommend a different Brass & Bench engagement tier, or we tell you why this is not the right firm for what you are trying to do.
If you would rather start in writing, send a brief summary of the operation, the current pain points, and the timeline pressure to the email on the contact page. We will read it, route it to the right partner, and respond within two business days.