Rightsize your operation so you can retain your best people.
We help growing manufacturers understand what good actually looks like — & where their talent can create more value than the process is asking of them today.
PRODUCTIVITY
THE FOUNDATION
To understand productivity, you have to watch the people.
Most productivity work starts at a desk. Spreadsheets. Ratios. Benchmarks. All the abstraction of a system without the reality of the humans running it.
We work the other way around.
You can't understand productivity from a spreadsheet. You understand it by watching the work happen.
The best insight in any operation lives at the intersection of the data your system already produces & the reality on the floor. Half the story lives in each place. Miss either half & you'll get the answer wrong.
OUR APPROACH
Mapping. Cycle times. Waste. The baseline your system actually needs.
When we come in for a productivity engagement, we're doing three things at once: mapping the process, taking real cycle times, & identifying the waste hiding in the system. That combination becomes the baseline for staffing — a data-backed answer to the question your leadership team has been dancing around:
Where are we? And where should we be?
Process Mapping
We walk your operation with you. Document the current state exactly as it runs. Every step, every handoff, every place work waits.
Cycle time studies
Real time studies on the floor. What each step actually takes. What people are actually doing. The gap between the spec & the reality.
Waste identification
Wait time. Overproduction. Rework loops. Talent underutilization. The waste in your system that's silently shaping your capacity.
The baseline model
A staffing model based on what the system actually needs — not what history has trained you to expect. Where you are today. Where you should be.
This isn’t about cutting heads. It’s about freeing them up.
THE REAL VALUE
The reason productivity matters right now — for almost every mid-market manufacturer we talk to — is talent retention. Certain roles are getting harder to hire for every year. Which means the people you already have are worth more than they've ever been. And if your process is asking less of them than they're capable of, you're going to lose them.
A productivity assessment tells you exactly where your talent is being underutilized — & where you can reallocate that capacity into work that actually creates value.
"When I was at GE, we did a lot of productivity work. We found a value stream that had too many people in it — our headcount was too high. But we didn't cut heads. We reallocated those people to Kaizen projects — to solving problems the business had never had the capacity to touch. That's where the real ROI is."
— Sarah Tilkens, Founder
The value of knowing isn't so you can cut heads. It's so you can reallocate people into work that matters — & keep them because they finally get to do it.
START HERE
The Sidewalk Assessment
Not every productivity conversation needs a $25K engagement to start. Sometimes it needs a couple hours & a walk through your operation.
The Sidewalk
A two-hour on-site assessment. Sarah walks your operation with your leadership team, points out what she sees, & sends back a short write-up with the biggest opportunities she'd tackle first. No spreadsheets. No 40-slide deck. Just a real read from someone who's walked a lot of floors.
If you move forward with a full engagement, the Sidewalk fee rolls into the engagement price. So it's essentially a risk-free first look.
2-hour on-site
+ written recap
Ready for the deeper work? Explore the full Productivity Assessment →
Productivity Assessment + 12-Month Roadmap
THE FULL ENGAGEMENT
When the Sidewalk turns into a real project, here's what a full Productivity engagement looks like:
Productivity Assessment + 12-Month Roadmap
What we deliver:
- Full process map of your operation (or the value stream we're focused on)
- Real cycle time studies on the floor
- Waste identification — including talent underutilization
- True baseline staffing model — where you are vs. where you should be
- A 12-month roadmap of prioritized actions to close the gap
- Recommended reallocation plan for freed-up capacity (Kaizens, projects, problem-solving work)
- Optional Kaizen implementation to follow
Pricing & timeline scoped to the complexity of your process. Every engagement starts with a $500 Sidewalk.
Explore the full Productivity Assessment →A Milwaukee nonprofit came to us with the classic productivity puzzle: they were growing fast, their team was stretched, & the CEO's gut said something wasn't right.
We ran the assessment. Mapped their operation. Ran time studies on the floor. Talked to every function.
What we found was a system that was asking less of its best people than they were capable of giving.
CASE STUDY
Food for Health.
50%
capacity opportunity — hiding in the people.
That doesn't mean cut the team by half. It means half the team's capacity could be freed up & reallocated into work they'd never had the resources to do — the strategic work, the process improvements, the problems they'd been watching pile up for years.
Is this right for you?
IDEAL FIT
You're a growing manufacturer who's never done a rigorous capacity study. SYou have a hunch about where the gaps are, but no data-backed answer.
Certain roles are getting harder to hire for. You know you can't afford to lose your best people — & you're worried the process is grinding them down.
Your default answer to every problem has become "we need to hire more people." And you're starting to suspect that's not what's actually broken.
You want to reallocate your best talent to work that creates real value — instead of grinding them on work a better-designed system could handle.
You're about to make a big investment — new hires, new equipment, a new facility — & you want to know it's actually necessary before you write the check.
What makes our productivity work different?
WHY US
We watch the people, not the spreadsheet
The data tells us where to look. The people tell us what's actually going on.
Not a headcount reduction play
We come in looking for capacity, not cuts. Almost every operation has 20–50% opportunity hiding in underutilized talent.
Sidewalk-first, engagement-second
We start with a $500 walk-through. If it becomes a full engagement, the fee rolls in. Low risk to start.
Reallocation, not elimination
Every roadmap includes a plan for where freed-up capacity goes — into work that actually creates value.
GET STARTED
How do we get started?
Book a Sidewalk
$500. Two hours on-site with Sarah walking your operation & pointing out what she sees. No commitment beyond the walk.
Get the write-up
A short recap of what Sarah found, the biggest opportunities, & what a full engagement would look like if you want one.
Decide
Take the Sidewalk write-up & do the work internally. Or convert to a full Productivity Assessment — the $500 rolls in.
Productivity isn’t about cutting heads. It’s about freeing them up.
Ready to see where your best people could be spending their time?
COMMON QUESTIONS
FAQ
What's a Sidewalk assessment?
A two-hour on-site walk-through with Sarah. She walks your operation with your leadership team, asks questions, & sends back a written recap of the biggest opportunities she'd tackle first. $500. If you move forward with a full engagement, the fee rolls in.
Are you going to tell me to cut headcount?
Almost never. We come in looking for capacity — where your best people are being asked to do less than they're capable of — & the fix is almost always reallocation, not elimination. Our Food for Health engagement found a 50% capacity opportunity & we didn't recommend cutting a single role.
How is this different from a Lean assessment?
A Lean assessment focuses on tools & waste in the process. A productivity assessment focuses on capacity — what your system can actually do vs. what it's doing today, & where your talent is being underutilized. There's overlap, but the lens is different.
How long does a full Productivity Assessment take?
Depends on the complexity of your operation. Typically 4–8 weeks from kickoff to roadmap delivery. Simple single-line operations can be faster. Multi-value-stream sites take longer.
Do you only work with manufacturers?
Our productivity work translates to any operation with flow — manufacturers, nonprofits, healthcare, distribution, professional services. If work moves through your organization on a rhythm, capacity can be modeled.
What if the Sidewalk shows we don't need a bigger engagement?
Then you take the write-up, run the improvements internally, & we did our job. That happens sometimes — & that's fine. We'd rather have you tell your peers we gave you real value than talk you into a project you didn't need.