Consulting Services That Helped Keystone Carvings, Inc.

Frederick Pihl’s Experience Working With American Management Services:

After a year of working with American Management Services, Inc, and as we conclude our project together, it’s a great time to stop and assess the year gone by and give you my thoughts. This is an easy assessment since American Management Services, Inc’s turnaround of JHL was so clearly and completely successful.

Last February, after five years of poor performance, the American Management Services, Inc team started a turnaround project that not only transformed our profitability and not only tremendously improved our lead times with customer orders but, even more significantly, gave us the operational and managerial tools to stay on a growth track for years to come. And we haven’t even started phase two yet.

When we first met your team, they set our target at over $10 million over three years as a return on our investment. Frankly, that target did not seem achievable, but after only one year, we are more than halfway there and expect the remainder to come within the next 24 months. Many of those American Management Services improvements kicked in pretty fast, and the return on our investment is significantly many times over the cost we paid into the project.

Here are some of the things I can thank American Management Services, Inc for:

• Our manufacturing area has been streamlined to the point where we eliminated a backlog growing for three years.
• Our reporting structure has been condensed into more rational and well-defined functional areas, and everyone now has a job description with measurable objectives.
• Employee performance reviews will now happen in a way that ties back to those objectives and gives everyone a set of goals that are achievable and make sense. This task, in particular, used to be unstructured and unhelpful, but going forward, performance reviews will be a force multiplier.
• Our senior management team had unclear boundaries with other managers and with each other. This was a constant source of organizational gridlock and by far our biggest obstacle to growth. I was amazed to see the American Management Services, Inc team leader, Mr. Dave Almstead, solve this completely.

I look forward to working with your team for the remainder of the project, and I especially look forward to running the business with these new tools and success.

Best Regards,