Leadership Consultations
The floor grew. The playbook didn't.
Machines and orders scale faster than leaders do. We coach the people side of a growing production floor: the promoted tradesman, the fraying crew, the owner who cannot leave the building.
Book a consultation20 minutes. Bring your hardest people problem.
Sound familiar?
The problems that never show up on a P&L.
Morale is cracking under overtime
The work demands aggressive OT and the crew is fraying. Recognition, capacity math and scheduling are leadership problems before they are staffing problems.
Your best tradesman is now a struggling supervisor
75% of manufacturing supervisors get zero leadership training. Promote without a playbook and you trade one great operator for two holes.
The new salaried lead still thinks hourly
The title changed, the mindset did not. Owning outcomes instead of clocking tasks is a taught transition, not an automatic one.
Wild decisions, no feedback loop
The floor improvises process on the fly and nothing feeds back into how work should run. Every shift becomes its own experiment.
The process lives in three aging heads
Tribal knowledge is walking toward retirement, and the people holding it were never given a reason to teach.
Every decision still walks into your office
Nobody is ready to lead because nobody is allowed to practice. The owner stays the bottleneck and never gets their life back.
Who you'd be working with
Proof, not theory.
Efren Barriga started as a TIG welder and was the technician who got promoted with no playbook. He spent eight years at SpaceX writing one, with more than a decade of leadership experience behind everything he coaches today.
R&D to rate production, five programs deep
The hardest seat in manufacturing is the program that does not exist yet: no team, no tooling, no process, and a design still moving. He took four of them from development hardware to rate production at SpaceX, then did it again with Model-Z in modular housing, concept to full production in weeks.
His first leadership seat was the classic trap this page describes: best welder on the floor, promoted to lead, handed a seven-man second shift and a quality crisis on flight-critical hardware, with no playbook. He wrote one. 160 hours of structured training built with engineering, recurring weld defects cut by more than 80 percent, and a team that doubled its output. Everything he coaches today started in that seat.
After SpaceX he took a modular-housing line from 2,100 labor hours on the first unit to 376, and from one unit every two to three days to two units a day. Today he runs an aerospace welding company serving commercial and military aircraft on a Nadcap approved floor, the property management company he founded nine years ago, now operated by an AI bot workforce, and XAI Forge. The welding company is the same Downey shop where he laid his first aerospace welds as a young journeyman. In 2026 he came back to run it.
The systems half of this playbook is one page over: the same floor he coaches on is the one running the Shop Execution System, live data and all. Leadership and systems are one discipline here, not two engagements.
What we work on
Six fights worth picking.
Front-line leadership
Turning tradesmen into supervisors on purpose: the playbook, the coaching, and the first 90 days.
The hourly-to-salary shift
Expectations, compensation logic and the mindset move from clocking tasks to owning outcomes.
Overtime and morale math
Capacity planning, scheduling discipline and recognition systems that keep a pushed crew from breaking.
Standards and accountability
Holding the line without micromanaging: pay logic, attendance standards, and what to do about the ghost you think you cannot fire.
Feedback loops and decision rights
Who decides what, and how the floor feeds improvement back into the process instead of improvising it.
Knowledge capture and succession
Getting what the veterans know out of their heads and into the operation before it retires with them.
Let's talk about your floor.
Bring the problem you have stopped saying out loud. First conversation is free, and you will leave with something to try Monday morning.
Book a consultation