What Is the Crysler Club? Operations Consulting for small to Mid-Market Manufacturers

If you’ve ever Googled “operational excellence consulting,” you already know the problem. The first page is a wall of Big 4 firms selling Fortune 500 engagements, SaaS companies pitching platforms, and a growing wave of AI agencies promising to streamline your operations through tools you’ve never heard of.

Prefer listening? Watch this week’s Solo Session where I expand on the topic.

None of it was built for a $15 million custom manufacturer with 60 employees and an ERP that nobody trusts.

Prefer listening? Check out this week’s Solo Session where I expand on the topic.

That disconnect is why I built the Crysler Club. Not because the world needed another consulting practice, but because the companies that need the most help have the fewest options. Mid-market manufacturers, the businesses doing $5 million to $500 million in revenue, are the most underserved segment in the operations consulting world. They’ve outgrown their systems but they aren’t big enough for McKinsey. They’re drowning in advice designed for companies ten times their size.

This isn’t a niche complaint. There are roughly 200,000 middle market businesses in the United States. They account for about a third of private sector GDP and employ nearly 48 million people. These aren’t small players. They’re the backbone of the economy, and the consulting industry has largely left them to figure it out on their own.

Everybody Sees Your Problem Through Their Own Lens

Here’s what happens when a mid-market manufacturer goes looking for help.

Talk to a SaaS company, say HubSpot, about your CRM adoption issues. They’ll nod along and tell you their platform does everything you need. But then you talk to Salesforce, and they’ll tell you HubSpot was never the right fit. Talk to Pipedrive, and they’ll say the same thing about both. Every vendor sees your problem through the lens of what they sell.

It’s not just software companies. Talk to a Big 4 firm, and they’ll scope a project that requires a team of consultants and a budget that would make your CFO’s head spin. Talk to one of the new AI agencies, and they’ll tell you the answer is automation, before anyone has looked at whether your processes are even documented.

The same pattern plays out internally. An $8 million a year company needs to hire an operations leader. Their resource pool is limited. They’re not going to attract someone who ran a Fortune 1000 operation. More likely, they’ll find someone who came up through similar-sized organizations, maybe held one to five leadership roles. That person is going to solve problems through their lens of experience, the environments they’ve worked in, the approaches they’ve seen succeed. That’s not a knock on them. It’s reality. But it means the company is often stuck in a cycle of solving problems the same way they’ve always been solved, because nobody in the room has seen it done differently.

I came across an article recently where a consultant advised that if your team doesn’t want to experiment with AI, you should fire them. No ramp-up. No coaching. No explanation of why you’re looking at AI in the first place. Just cut them loose.

That kind of advice comes from someone who has never had to solve a problem without the latest tool. The company I grew up in allocated most of its capital to acquisitions. We weren’t buying the newest equipment or implementing the latest software. We were keeping our machines in tip-top shape and getting creative about how we solved problems with what we had. That constraint forced us to think differently, and it produced results that expensive tools wouldn’t have.

What Operational Excellence Actually Means at This Level

Strip away the textbook definitions and the certification programs. For a mid-market manufacturer, operational excellence is straightforward: it’s having the infrastructure to grow without everything breaking.

It’s being able to onboard a new hire without depending on the one person who knows how things work. It’s having data you trust enough to make a decision with. It’s running a production schedule that doesn’t fall apart the first time a customer changes their order.

I think there’s a lot of talented people in the continuous improvement, lean manufacturing, and systems thinking space. But the gap I see is that many of them are too academic for the organizations that need their help the most. They’re focused on proper terminology and textbook execution when the companies they’re trying to help need practical, plain-language solutions they can start using tomorrow.

Take Six Sigma. It’s been widely accepted and marketed as the standard for operational excellence. The problem is that most mid-market organizations aren’t systems mature enough to utilize the full Six Sigma toolset effectively. If you’re a $12 million manufacturer and your item master data hasn’t been maintained since your initial ERP implementation, the statistical process control tools in Six Sigma aren’t going to help you. You have more fundamental problems to solve first.

I’ve always kept it simple. “Go to Gemba” is the Japanese term for going to where the work is. I just call it management by walking around. I don’t need to throw out terms to make people think I’m smart. I’d rather connect through conversation and transfer context that someone can actually use to drive outcomes in their business.

The frameworks I use were built from nearly 30 years of seeing similar problems shake out. Clarity, Consistency, Accountability is the diagnostic sequence: when performance breaks down, work backward. Is accountability in place? Was there consistency? Was there ever clarity? The answer is almost always at the clarity level. Most execution failures trace back to unclear expectations, not incapable people.

Planning, People, Process, Technology is the build sequence for every business system. The order is the point. Most companies start with technology and work backward, which is exactly why implementation failure rates run between 70 and 84 percent. If you haven’t defined the process and prepared the people, the technology amplifies the dysfunction.

A Practitioner, Not an Academic

The consulting industry has a credibility problem, and mid-market operators know it.

They’ve seen the Big 4 team show up, collect data for three months, deliver a binder of recommendations, and leave. They’ve watched software vendors promise transformation and deliver a new interface on the same broken processes. They’ve heard the buzzwords cycle through, from lean to agile to digital transformation to AI, each one promising to be the thing that finally fixes their operations.

What they haven’t seen enough of is someone who has actually done the work. I grew up inside manufacturing. My parents owned two different manufacturing businesses. I saw how hard they worked and how hard they tried to solve the problems they faced every day. The company I spent the bulk of my career with acquired first and second generation family-owned businesses. I relocated to lead transformations, traveled to acquired companies, and spent years on the ground floor learning through trial and error.

Nearly 30 years of that practitioner-level experience is what I bring into every engagement. Not theory. Not frameworks borrowed from a business school case study. Real operational knowledge built from decades of solving problems with constrained resources in real manufacturing environments.

Am I a unicorn? No. There are plenty of amazing practitioners out there. But most of them are inside organizations, doing the work, not building consulting practices. The ones who are consulting tend to chase enterprise contracts because that’s where the money is. The mid-market gets left behind.

Operations On-Demand: A Different Model

The Crysler Club’s engagement model is called Operations On-Demand. It’s not traditional fractional consulting where I’m embedded in your org chart with people rolling up to me. It’s not project-based work with scope documents and change orders. And it’s not a retainer in the traditional sense, though understanding it through that lens is probably the easiest shorthand.

I call it a subscription because that’s what it really is. One fixed monthly investment. You get me, my experience, my network, my frameworks. Either I’m delivering value for your organization, or I’m not. There’s no long-term contract locking you in. There’s no project fee split up over twelve months.

Our longest-running client has been with us for going on three years now. That relationship has expanded over time because the focus was always on solving problems rather than filling a role. We started with tactical operational opportunities, got them rolled out quickly, and the work grew because we kept delivering value.

I develop real relationships with these folks. I become an embedded part of the organization from an outside perspective. Because I have a wide lens of experience across multiple industries, facility types, and organizational structures, I can speak to value from places that a single internal leader might not have visibility into. For companies with a limited number of leadership roles across the organization, plugging someone in with that breadth of perspective is often where the most value shows up.

The Content Is the Pitch

Everything I know is published for free. The newsletter, the podcast, the long-form articles, the frameworks, the diagnostic tools. I’m up to 176 blog posts and over 100 podcast episodes. All of it available to anyone who wants it.

That’s not an accident. That’s the business model.

I learned through trial and error over the course of nearly 30 years. I’m doing the same thing in reverse now: putting out the best stuff, sharing the stories of how those lessons actually came to be, and trusting that the right people will reach out because I taught it well.

You don’t need me. That’s literally the best part of what I offer. You could DIY all of this. The frameworks, the diagnostic questions, the implementation sequences. It’s all out there.

The reason people still reach out and hire me is because the free content teaches the principles, but the paid work gets into the specifics. We’re not talking about generalized frameworks anymore. We’re diving into the weeds of specific work product, defining problems at the root cause level, building corrective and preventive measures, and figuring out how to get a company from $8 million to $80 million. That level of specificity requires someone sitting alongside you, seeing your data, understanding your team, and knowing which lever to pull based on your specific situation.

I’m also building tools to extend that impact further. The first is an operations toolkit, a private portal with guided workflows that operations leaders and individual contributors can use to move the needle in their business. The first tool in the kit is a root cause analysis workflow: a guided process that helps you define and refine your problem statement, work through the five whys, develop corrective and preventive actions, and build in audit steps to verify that what you thought would work actually did. Over time, it tracks your efforts and surfaces patterns in your root causes so you can stop solving for symptoms.

That’s where this is heading. More people getting access to better tools, regardless of whether they ever work with me directly.

Who This Is For, and Who It’s Not

This work isn’t defined by revenue band or team size. I’ve seen the same problems show up in an $8 million shop and a $200+ million operation. What determines fit is the characteristics of the leadership team and ownership.

This is for the founder who knows something is broken but can’t articulate exactly what. The operations leader who is tired of firefighting and wants to build systems that actually hold. The company that bought an ERP and it made things worse because nobody fixed the processes first. The leadership team that’s willing to do the hard work and have the hard conversations.

It’s not for companies looking for a scapegoat or an easy button. It’s not for leadership teams that want a binder of recommendations and someone to blame when the results don’t show up.

Here’s the thing that might surprise people: the misalignment doesn’t have to be across the whole organization. You can have an owner who’s fully committed to doing this work, but an operations leader who thinks everybody on the team is the problem. Or the reverse: an operations leader who is trying to drive change while the owner undermines every effort from the top. Either dynamic creates a culture problem that no amount of consulting can fix long term. Those situations lead to churn, frustration, and ultimately a bad fit for everyone involved.

The question isn’t whether your company is too big or too or small. It’s whether the people at the top are aligned on the willingness to look at the business honestly, invest in the work, and follow through on what gets uncovered.

Final Thoughts

The gap in the operations consulting world is real, and it’s getting wider. The Big 4 are chasing enterprise contracts. The SaaS companies are selling platforms. The AI agencies are pitching automation. None of them are built for the mid-market manufacturer who needs someone with real floor experience to help them build the infrastructure that makes growth sustainable.

That’s why the Crysler Club exists. Not to be the biggest consulting practice or the one with the most tools. Just the one that was built from the ground up for the companies that nobody else is paying attention to.

If you’re leading one of those companies, everything I teach is out there for free. Start with the newsletter, listen to the podcast, read the articles. If the approach resonates and you want someone in the weeds with you, that’s what Operations On-Demand is for.

Either way, the work starts with clarity. It always does.

That’s it for today.

See you all again next week!

Dave