Most owners call an advisor when something is already broken.
SV Advisors works with precision metalworking and contract manufacturing owners and managers on improving the profitability of their shops and increasing their strategic value.
The six questions below show you where you stand while there is still room to act. If you can answer all of them from a report you already have, you probably don't need us.
Six questions worth answering before you need to
- How many shop hours did you run last month, and for which customers?
- For your ten largest customers, what did each one earn you last year, and how much of your resource hours did they consume?
- Which of your work centers made money last quarter, and which carried the others?
- When a job runs long, does the estimator find out — and how?
- When did you last reprice a part you have been running for years, adjusted for actual run time?
- If you won a job tomorrow at your current rates, would you know whether it was worth taking?
Nearly every shop we have seen can answer one or two. Very few can answer all six, and the ones that can are usually the most profitable in their market.
Who we are
Two principals. One has run precision machining companies, significantly improved their operating performance and sold them to strategic acquirers; the other has advised on the sale of more than twenty of them. We take on a small number of engagements at a time, and both of us work on each one.
Patrick Thornton
Operations and financial performance
Patrick has acquired, run and sold four precision machining businesses as an operator, and has been a principal in more than sixteen M&A transactions. He led the Wilsey Tool, Isimac Machine and Choice Precision group through its sale to ARCH Global Precision in 2021. He began his career at KPMG.
Patrick has a BS in accounting from Penn State University, where he continues to mentor students in the Smeal College of Business.
He owns the operating side of the work: quoting, costing, shop floor performance, and the management routines that keep gains in place.
John Slater
Transaction support and capital
Forty years and more than 200 transactions, including over twenty in precision machining. John practiced law, ran his own investment banking firm for twenty years, and merged it with FOCUS Investment Banking, where he founded the advanced manufacturing and precision metalworking practice.
He is a CFA charterholder with a JD from the University of Virginia and an AB in economics from Princeton. He publishes The Advanced Manufacturing Report.
He owns capital access, automation strategy, and the view of how buyers and lenders will read the business.
Who we serve
We work with independent owners, with private equity firms holding multi-shop platforms, and with global manufacturers assessing individual manufacturing sites. We also work with industrial distributors and service businesses where the same question — which customers and which lines actually earn — applies.
We work nationally and expect to spend time in your shop. We are often introduced by owners we have worked with, or by an attorney, an accountant or a banker who has looked at the numbers and thinks there is more in their client's business than it is currently achieving.
We are paid by the client, on a defined scope, to work on the business itself.
The Advanced Manufacturing Report
John publishes The Advanced Manufacturing Report, an independent newsletter on the advanced manufacturing sector — markets, policy, technology and capital.
It is editorially independent of SV Advisors. It does not review, recommend or promote this firm, and it is written for readers of the sector rather than clients of the practice.
Request more information
Tell us a little about your shop and we will come back to you directly. A first conversation costs nothing and takes half an hour.
John Slater
Patrick Thornton