A profitable, well-regarded manufacturer approaching its third decade. The founder worked sixty-hour weeks and had not taken a full week off in four years. Two acquirers had approached, and both had gone quiet after diligence.
The business was healthy and almost impossible to read from the outside. Pricing logic, vendor terms, and scheduling priorities lived in the founder’s judgment rather than in any system. Diligence had stalled twice for the same reason: an acquirer could not model a business whose margin depended on one person’s intuition. The bottleneck was not a capacity problem. It was a transferability problem, and it was suppressing the valuation.
We documented the pricing model as an actual model, with the founder’s reasoning made explicit and testable. Scheduling authority moved to the operations lead against written criteria. Vendor terms were consolidated and renegotiated once they could be seen in one place. The founder’s calendar was rebuilt around the four decisions that genuinely required him.
Decisions still requiring the founder
Reduction in quote turnaround time
To a transferable operating model
Eighteen months in, the founder takes scheduled time away and the plant runs. The more consequential outcome is that the business can now be explained to a buyer without him in the room.
Every Audit starts from the same place and ends somewhere different. That is rather the point of doing one.
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