Industries / Industrial & Manufacturing
Do you know your true cost per job?
Know your true cost per job. For owner-run manufacturers, job shops, and fabricators. See the true cost of every job, and price it right.
By Fenwick How, Founder
BBA in Project Management, certified PMP, currently pursuing an MBA at Texas A&M. He leads the work himself, start to finish.
Who this is for
Built for businesses like yours.
Owner-operated manufacturers, job shops, and fabricators, roughly $2M–$20M, running on an ERP and QuickBooks, with detailed job and cost data that almost never gets analyzed.
The problems we solve
Sound familiar?
- True cost and margin by job, product, and customer are unclear
- Quoting and pricing lag rising labor and material costs
- Capacity and throughput constraints
- Customer concentration risk
- Inconsistent operational data
How we help
The offer.
Start with the Business X-Ray to expose pricing and margin leaks fast; then a Profit Map by job and customer, and a plan to fix quoting and mix.
The Aperture Method phases: Understand · Quantify · Navigate · Perform
- Business X-Ray
- Profit Map
- Focus Plan
- Scoreboard
What the work looks like.
Representative case study · Illustrative
An $8M metal-fabrication job shop that quoted on gut.
The shop quoted work the way it always had, on experience and a feel for the shop rate. Margins were slipping and the owner couldn't say which jobs were the problem. Aperture Insights named the constraint: quoting that hadn't kept pace with labor and material costs. Aperture Analytics built a Profit Map by job type and customer and found a large share of jobs run below true cost once setup and rework were counted, with a handful of accounts carrying the rest. Aperture Compass introduced quoting discipline, repriced the worst work, and set target margins by job type. Aperture Atlas tracked margin per job on the Scoreboard. Illustratively, a shop like this could recover several points of margin through pricing and quoting discipline alone, without turning away good work.
What you'd learn first
Do you know your true cost per job, and which work and customers actually make money?
The Business X-Ray is a fixed-fee, low-risk first step. It answers exactly this before you commit to anything more.
Before you book
Questions industrial & manufacturing owners ask.
We already have an ERP. Why is that not enough?
An ERP records what happened on each job accurately, which is a different thing from telling you which job types and which customers earn money once setup, rework and the time nobody logs are counted. The data is usually all in there. What is missing is somebody pulling it into a costed view and ranking it.
Our job costing is not clean. Does that stop us?
No. Almost nobody's is. Where labour hours are estimated rather than captured, we say so and show the range it creates rather than presenting a false precision. Finding out which parts of your costing cannot be trusted is often the most valuable finding of the engagement.
Will this tell us what to quote?
It tells you what each type of work actually costs you and what margin you are currently getting, by job type and by customer. Pricing is then your decision, made with the number in front of you. We can model what a change does to volume and margin before you take it to a customer.
One customer is most of our revenue. Is that a problem?
It is a risk that every lender and every buyer prices, and it is worth knowing exactly how large it is before somebody else calculates it for you. Concentration shows up in the X-Ray, and the Focus Plan usually treats reducing it as a sequencing question rather than an emergency.
The position an established private business is in is not specific to your sector, even though the questions are.
Last reviewed . Fees and timings on this page are current as of that date.
See your business clearly. Then watch the strategy run.
Start with the Business X-Ray, a fixed-fee, low-risk first step.