Operations that scale. Margin that holds.
We're Cranes Consulting, a small team of operations partners helping Tampa Bay small businesses tighten up the operations side so growth doesn't eat your margin. The toolkit is Lean Six Sigma plus a decade of running federal programs at scale. Engagements are sprint-based with fixed fees, not open-ended retainers.
Labor time variance
−42%
Change-order cycle time
−61%
Net margin lift
+3.1 pts
Phase
Improve
Weeks in
7 / 13
Savings
$186K
10+
Years leading enterprise programs
75+
KPIs governed across federal operations
$2–4pt
Typical margin recovery target
90-day
Sprint-based engagements
Big-firm operating discipline at small-firm economics.
Results show up in the P&L
Every engagement starts with a measured baseline and ends with an improvement you can point to in your numbers. No vanity slides.
Real program rigor
A decade running enterprise programs at federal scale taught us how to use risk registers, stage gates, and audit-ready documentation without making the team hate us. That same discipline scales down to small businesses.
Multiple industries
Construction, healthcare, logistics, professional services. The Lean Six Sigma toolkit works across all of them. The judgement about which lever to pull is what changes.
Defined start and end
Most engagements are 90-day sprints with fixed fees and clear deliverables. Scope changes, we re-scope. Nobody gets stuck on an open-ended retainer.
Four lanes. One operating system for growing businesses.
Start where the pain is sharpest. Margin, overload, a shelfware system, a grant deadline. Then layer from there.
01
Margin Recovery
Lean Six Sigma DMAIC Sprints
A 90-day engagement going after the 2 to 4 points of net margin that hide in labor time variance, late change orders, material waste, and stale estimating assumptions.
- Value-stream mapping
- Standard work + SOPs
- KPI dashboards
- Optional gainshare pricing
02
Fractional PMO
Program Governance on Retainer
For owners running too many initiatives at once. Portfolio visibility, a steering cadence, risk and dependency tracking, and stage-gate reviews. Enterprise rigor at small-business scale.
- Portfolio dashboard
- Biweekly steering
- Risk + dependency mapping
- Vendor / sub oversight
03
Software Adoption
Make What You Bought Actually Work
Procore, Buildertrend, HubSpot, ERP, BI. Most teams use about 30% of what they pay for. We design the workflow, migrate the data, train the roles, and build the reporting layer that makes people want to use it.
- Workflow design
- Data migration
- Role-based training
- Reporting & dashboards
04
Grant & Rebuild Programs
CDBG-DR · FEMA · Federal Compliance
Help navigating Helene and Milton recovery funds and other federal grant flows. Davis-Bacon, environmental review, draw schedules, and the audit-ready documentation that gets you paid.
- Eligibility + readiness
- Contractor compliance PMO
- Draw + documentation
- Closeout support
Wherever process and margin collide.
Construction & Trades
Healthcare
Logistics & 3PL
Professional Services
Government & Nonprofit
A four-step process. No mystery, no theatrics.
Most consultants make their methodology sound complicated. Ours is the opposite. Listen first, measure honestly, improve in a 90-day sprint, and hand off cleanly.
Listen
A 30-minute call. No deck. We listen for the actual problem, not the symptom you came in with. If we're not the right fit, we say so on the call.
Measure
A short discovery to get baseline numbers on the workflows that matter. Without a measured starting point, every claim of improvement is just an opinion.
Improve
A 90-day sprint with weekly checkpoints. Standard work, dashboards, and a daily cadence. We work alongside your people, not over them.
Hand off
You finish with a team that can run the new operating rhythm without us. Documented SOPs, trained leads, and a clean exit. The goal is no permanent retainer.
Outcomes you can put in a P&L.
We measure success in points of margin recovered, hours saved, and software actually being used. The work shows up in your numbers.
"Cranes pulled three points of margin out of our operation in a single quarter. We thought we were running tight. We were not."
Owner, residential GC
Tampa, FL · 18-person crew
"We had been paying for Procore for two years and our team used about a third of it. Tyler's team rebuilt our workflow and got real adoption inside 60 days."
Operations director
Light-commercial contractor
"Federal-grade discipline applied to a small-business problem. Our weekly cadence is unrecognizable from where we were six months ago."
Practice administrator
Multi-site healthcare practice
Quotes condensed and identifying detail trimmed at clients' request. Real engagements, real numbers.
The questions we get most often.
Don't see yours? Email us at tyler@cranesconsultingfl.com.
How quickly can we start?
Most engagements kick off within two weeks of a signed proposal. If you're inside a hurricane recovery deadline or a CDBG-DR draw cycle, we move faster.
Do you work with companies outside Tampa Bay?
Most of our clients are in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Lakeland, and the I-4 corridor. We do remote-first engagements for clients elsewhere in Florida and the Southeast when it fits the work.
How much do engagements typically cost?
A 90-day Margin Recovery Sprint runs $25K to $50K with optional gainshare. Fractional PMO retainers run $6K to $15K per month. Software implementations run $15K to $35K. See the Services page for specifics.
What happens on the free 30-minute audit?
You bring a real operational problem. We bring a Lean Six Sigma playbook and ten years of program-management discipline. We talk for 30 minutes, then either propose a scope or send you off with two or three things you can fix yourself.
Are you Lean Six Sigma certified?
Yes. Black Belt certified, Prosci change-management certified, PMP in progress. We use those frameworks because they work, not as marketing.
Will you work with our existing tools, or do we have to switch?
We work with your existing stack. Power BI, Procore, Buildertrend, HubSpot, QuickBooks, whatever you already run. We are not in the business of selling you new software.
30 minutes. No deck. Just the real problem.
Bring something real you're stuck on. We'll bring ten years of running federal programs and a Lean Six Sigma playbook. If there's a fit, we'll talk scope. If not, you walk away with two or three ideas you can run with yourself.