20+ years working inside engineering and industrial businesses. I know where the leakage hides — and I can map it.
Engineering businesses build processes that work — then run them unchanged for years. Familiar becomes invisible. The gap between 'how we do it' and 'the most efficient way to do it' widens silently until it shows up in the margin.
What the sales team promises and what operations receives are often meaningfully different. The gap lives in the handoff — and the operations team absorbs the cost without anyone upstream seeing it.
Engineering projects attract change requests. Without formal change control, those changes get absorbed. The margin on a project that started at 18% often ends at 9% — not because of execution failure, but because of commercial process failure.
Institutional knowledge lives in specific people. The business runs on their presence. When they are unavailable — or eventually leave — the system reveals how fragile it actually was.
Handoff friction between sales and delivery teams typically costs engineering SMEs £20k–£40k per year in rework and timeline slippage.
Informal change control accounts for an average of 6–9% margin compression in project-based engineering businesses.
Resource scheduling bottlenecks — often managed manually — create an average of 3–4 project delays per year with compounding cost consequences.
A 20-minute call. Three questions. An honest answer on whether a Flow Diagnostic makes sense right now.