Michael Hoang

Situation: A fast-growing craft food business running on informal, verbal-only production systems, knowledge concentrated in a couple of people, no production buffer, and a second-location decision looming.

Insight: The business was not failing at execution, it had outgrown its own informal systems. The fix was not more capacity, it was structure.

Approach: Five-week engagement applying Lean waste analysis and organizational growth-stage theory. Six targeted process changes designed to preserve, not replace, the craft culture that made the business work.

Impact: A “selective formalisation” strategy delivered with a full implementation roadmap: batch labelling, demand-driven scheduling, documented procedures, and a structured staff improvement channel.

Situation: A 28-year-old family-owned industrial finishing business with a small, loyal client base and a single processing oven that governed the entire operation. A 40-minute bake cycle capped daily throughput, and lead times stretched to 3-10 days during peak demand.

Insight: The business already ran on Lean principles, but improvements had been implemented top-down, and inconsistent incoming material quality was quietly driving rework and longer waits. The fix was not a bigger oven, it was standard work and floor-level engagement.

Approach: As part of an MBA team, I built a value stream map and takt-time analysis to confirm the oven as the system constraint (sustainable at roughly 10 jobs a day on a 40-minute bake), then designed a kaizen and 5S training program, visual scheduling to cut oven changeovers, and standardized incoming-quality criteria, all without touching the quality reputation that built the business.

Impact: A recommended plan targeting average lead time under 5 days for 90% of jobs and on-time delivery above 95%, achieved by engaging the people already doing the work, not by adding capacity.

Situation: A 30-year-old nonprofit motorsport club ran a flagship annual race weekend that had drawn as many as 85 racers at its peak, but relied almost entirely on word-of-mouth for new participants, with no lead-capture process and no marketing to its own driver-training program, its most obvious existing pipeline.

Insight: The constraint was not market size, it was that the highest-value segment (tenured members, roughly 60% of the base) had never been marketed to on its own terms. Competing on price and inclusivity, the way lower-cost rival circuits did, would have cannibalized the exclusivity that made the event valuable in the first place.

Approach: As part of an MBA team, I helped segment the membership base by tenure and income and build customer personas to guide targeting. The strategy leaned into exclusivity rather than against it: positioning the race as a bucket-list opportunity at a historic track, adding camaraderie-driven touchpoints instead of discounting, and rebuilding the talent pipeline through the club's own driver-training program rather than paid acquisition.

Impact: A low-cost, high-leverage plan: a simple website intake form to capture interested leads where none existed before, a digital push through email and enthusiast forums, and a mentorship pipeline for driver-training graduates, designed to grow registrations without diluting what made the event exclusive.