RightTack Consulting
Operating structure for equipment and industrial manufacturers
— and for the funds that own them. Thirty years of doing the work, eleven of them independent. There is no bench. You get me, and I do the work.
Most operating structures were built for a company that no longer exists.
Either the business outgrew it — the systems that carried you to fifty million will not carry you to three hundred. Or the business changed shape underneath it, and the range, the footprint and the overhead are still sized to what you stopped being some years ago. Nothing has gone wrong in either case. The structure is carrying a load it was not built for, or carrying one that is no longer there. Either way, that is the moment I am usually called.
Some of that complexity holds the business up, and needs better structure underneath it. Some is unprofitable but attached to a customer you want to keep, and should be separated and re-costed rather than cut. The rest is sediment. Many simplification programmes fail because they only own one of those three moves.
If you run the company
You won the order and now have to build it. Your contract manufacturer is running you. Nobody can say which revision is current. You find out about problems three weeks late. Ten methods, each one ending in something your managers keep and use.
If you own it
Operational diligence before the deal. A hundred-day plan that gets executed rather than admired. Where the money is actually made, and what the footprint should be sized to. Governance installed in month one rather than renegotiated in month fourteen.
The ten methods
Decide what to sell, then define exactly what you ship. Decide where you build it, who builds it, and whether you can ship it when the order lands. Then run it with visibility, install the people and the system behind it, survive the turn — and show what it was worth. Any one can be bought on its own.
What the work is for
Avoid a plan that reads beautifully and never gets done
Value creation & governance
The decisions, in the order they get made
What to sell, and why they will buy it
Product strategy & roadmap
Knowing exactly what you ship
Product definition & change control
Where you build it — and how you can defend the decision
Manufacturing strategy & footprint
Who builds it, and whether the price is right
Sourcing & contract manufacturing
Congratulations, you won the order. Can you build it?
Scale-up
It’s hard to make forecasts, especially about the future
Planning, visibility & risk
The market just turned. What now?
Downside planning & exposure
What all of it rests on
Who decides when you are not in the room?
Organisation & people
Buy the system last
ERP, PDM & PLM
Can they actually build it?
An independent read on whether a company can do the thing it says it can do — rated on the published TRL and MRL scales, with the gap costed in money and months. Written for the person with money at risk, not for the company being assessed.
Not a normal operations consultant
I am not a firm. There is no team of analysts and no partner who shows up for the kickoff and the readout. I have run the plants, carried the number, and been the one who had to make the plan work after the consultants left. What I help you build is a skeleton, not scaffolding — scaffolding is external and temporary and comes down when the consultant leaves. A skeleton carries load, sits inside the business, and is yours.
The engagement is designed to end. What you keep is a strategy, a plan, an organisation structure standing up and running, or a playbook your existing managers use without me. If the individuals have not developed, the task was only half done.
Where this has been done
Materials testing and laboratory instruments. Solar and semiconductor capital equipment. Battery energy storage and grid-scale power electronics. Extrusion and plastics machinery. Paper mills and saw mills. Oilfield services. Industrial aftermarket for food processing and flexible packaging. Two-step distribution. Building products. Air conditioning duct manufacturing.
And across every ownership model that changes how a business behaves — venture backed, private equity owned, family owned, publicly listed, and through an IPO. The pressure you are under is not unfamiliar to me.
A first conversation costs nothing and usually establishes within half an hour whether I am the right person for it. Sometimes the answer is no, and that is a useful half hour too.
Right Tack Operational Consulting 