How Much Does a Machine Shop Consultant Cost? AS9100, Lean and COO Help, Priced

A first year of each, before travel and the registrar’s invoice

Monthly and annual prices only compare once they cover the same stretch of time. At the list prices above, with no travel and no mid-year price change, twelve months come to:

• Retained quality-system support from The QMS Collective at $1,500 a month: $18,000 or more, or $20,995 in a year that opens with its $2,995 AS9100D package and calls.
• Gemba Academy’s lean training: $3,995 for the single-site video library, or $7,995 for the learning system with 50 seats.
• A fractional COO at Go Fractional’s 12 hours a week: $86,400 to $129,600 at $7,200 to $10,800 a month.
• A shop manager found through a recruiter at a 25% fee: $25,000 for every $100,000 of first-year salary, on top of the salary.
• An automation build with OS For Your Business: $25,000 to $150,000, priced as a project.
• The Revenue Review: $4,500, once.

These totals are not a ranking, because each buys something different: a quality system ready for its audit, people trained in lean methods, someone running the weekly production meeting, a working integration, a new hire, or a count of the paper trail from quote to cash. What none of these invoices shows is the shop’s own time. The quality manager writes procedures, the estimator steps away from the RFQ pile for interviews, the owner leaves the floor for meetings. For scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2025 median pay for machinists and tool and die makers at $28.66 an hour, so one hour at Go Fractional’s $191 average costs as much as six to seven hours of that pay, before burden.

Travelers, revisions and the ERP export: why one shop costs more to read

The state of the records moves a quote before anything else does. When the ERP or job-management system can hand over quotes, jobs, shipments and invoices as a same-day export, the reading begins at once. When quotes live in the estimator’s inbox, travelers on paper and job costs in a binder, somebody has to rebuild the record first, and that work is billed by the hour or folded into a larger fixed price.

The mix of work matters next. Repeat part numbers for a handful of customers, one-off prints for dozens of buyers, and fabrication with installed work and progress billing each leave a different trail. Outside processing such as heat treat, plating or anodize adds vendor POs and lead times to line up against the traveler. Work under ITAR or a customer NDA can mean de-identified exports, and those take planning before anyone opens a file.

Scope moves it last: one question, such as how often a revised drawing ran at the old price, is read from one export, while quoting, revisions, shipping paperwork and collections at once are several engagements and should be quoted as several.

Prints, ITAR, the registrar and the ERP reseller: questions only a shop has to ask

Which records get read, how the scope is fixed, how the fee shapes the findings and what the buyer owns when the work stops are questions for any buyer of outside help; our ten-question guide to picking an operations consultant covers them and sits under Keep reading. A fixed price protects the shop the way a PO does: only when it names what is being bought, here the records to be read and what comes back. A job shop or fabricator has five more questions of its own.

• What leaves the building? A business review runs on the RFQ log, quotes, POs and their revisions, travelers and invoices. Customer prints, CAD models, CAM programs and anything ITAR-controlled have no place in it, and a request for them, for work described as a business review, is a red flag.
• Who decides certification? The registrar does, after its own audit. A consultant who promises the certificate, or prices the work as payable only on a pass, is promising something outside its control.
• Does the adviser earn on what it recommends? Ask in writing whether it takes referral fees or resale margin from any ERP, quoting software, machine-tool dealer or automation vendor it might suggest, and whether its findings can end in “buy nothing.”
• Is a payback named before a record is opened? A scrap rate, a spindle-utilization gain or a margin figure quoted sight unseen is a sales number, not a finding.
• Whose customer list walks out the door? An NDA before any record opens, and a clause keeping the shop’s customers, part numbers and pricing out of work done for the next shop down the road.

Have the shop’s attorney read those clauses before anyone signs, and take anything touching export control to export-compliance counsel. Not legal advice.

When a shop should spend nothing, and who to call instead

When the whole fix is one person’s name on one task, write the name down and skip the study: the certs that sit on a desk after the parts ship because closing out the paperwork is nobody’s job, or the quote log nobody updates with won and lost. A shop that cannot cover next Friday’s payroll needs a decision about cash this week, not a report.

Some questions belong to other specialists. Setup times, spindle utilization, layout and flow on the floor are MEP-center and lean work. Certification belongs to a quality consultant and the registrar. Flow-down clauses and disputes with a prime go to a contracts attorney, and taxes and the year-end package to a CPA.

Size matters too. In a shop under about $1 million a year, where the owner quotes, programs and ships every job, any outside fee looms large against the dollars a year of paperwork can reveal, and a SCORE mentor costs nothing. The 20-minute call says so plainly when a shop sits below the size the Review is built for.

The Revenue Review in a job shop

The Review follows the money from RFQ to cleared payment through the shop’s own quote log, ERP, POs and revisions, travelers, packing slips, certs and invoices, read-only, and prices each leak by the month where those documents allow; it touches no program, setup or schedule and certifies nothing. Scope, payment terms and what the shop keeps afterwards are set out on the Review page, linked under Keep reading.