Crue IQ helps advisory firms, financial sponsors, and corporate teams answer complex strategic and operational questions — from rapid diligence to long-term transformation.
Automotive · Aerospace & Defense · Consumer Products · B2B DaaS · Healthcare · Construction · Energy · Hospitality · Industrial Equipment
Crue IQ brings operator-grade thinking to the questions that don't fit a standard consulting model. Twenty-plus years across competitive intelligence, primary research, industry benchmarking, and analytics platforms, paired with hundreds of factory visits and hands-on operational work.
Clients range from $15M specialty manufacturers to $150B+ Fortune 10 enterprises — PE-backed, private, and public. Engagements range from one-week diagnostics to multi-year platform transformations.
Most engagements start with a short call to determine fit. Here's how Crue IQ typically engages with each type of client.
Crue IQ subcontracts through boutique and global advisory firms, bringing senior delivery capacity and topical depth in operations, strategy, and analytics. We integrate with your methodology, work to your brand, and scale through our network when an engagement calls for more hands.
Comprehensive transaction services: buy-side and sell-side operational diligence, commercial diligence, and market studies. Projects ranging from pre-close through 100-day planning, rapid operational maturity assessments, and value creation support. Fifteen-plus completed transactions across industrials, manufacturing, consumer products, and recreation. Engagements typically run two to eight weeks.
Direct operational work like performance improvement, supply chain and capacity readiness, analytics and reporting, and program management. Often engaged with the sponsor in the loop, occasionally engaged independently by company leadership. Focus is execution, not another slide deck.
Direct engagement with strategy, operations, and CI leaders on the questions that don't have a template. Diagnostic and roadmap work, performance programs, analytics platform design, enterprise strategy and alignment. Experience with companies ranging from $15M specialty manufacturers to $150B+ Fortune 10 enterprises.
Buy- and sell-side operational and commercial diligence, market studies, expert advisory.
Cost reduction, turnarounds, and performance management.
Rapid assessment, supply chain readiness, and finite capacity scheduling.
Analytics platform design and redesign, automated workflows, ML algorithms, quality-at-source data systems, CI function design.
One-day to one-week operational maturity diagnostics including opportunities, prioritization, directional impact and risk.
Cross-functional buy-in, data-driven target setting, portfolio management, win/loss analysis, change management.
Scoped engagements with defined deliverables and timelines.
Part-time integration with your team for ongoing strategic support.
On-call expertise for deal teams, boards, and leadership on critical decisions.
Crue IQ is solo by design and scalable by network. For engagements that call for additional capacity or specialized depth, Crue IQ can draw on a network of trusted senior consultants and operators with complementary expertise. Clients get a senior principal on every engagement, and the bench they need behind them.
Representative engagements Joe has led or directly managed across his career, brought to clients today through Crue IQ. Client names anonymized where required.
Rebuilt an industry-leading benchmarking platform serving every major global OEM from paper to digital using Lean methods. Developed an ML algorithm that redefined how the industry measured productivity.
Led a 14-person team for rapid on-site assessments using a 50+ criterion methodology. Identified $10M+/week in profit-at-risk and delivered a prioritized remediation roadmap.
Built a Python-based production schedule and capacity model that simulated 9,700 operations through 400+ workcenters for a publicly-traded space company. Established the data-driven production baseline for annual operating plan approval.
I've spent twenty years trying to close the gap between how smart people think about operations and how real operations actually work.
Most of that time was at Oliver Wyman, where I led operational and commercial diligence across more than a dozen private equity transactions and spent years as custodian of one of the automotive industry's most-referenced benchmarking programs. The platform had been a paper-based exercise when I inherited it. I rebuilt it end to end: an 800-element value stream map, quality-at-source data validation, automated workflows, and an ML algorithm that redefined how the industry measured productivity. By the time I handed it off, it was serving every major global OEM, running at $5M in ARR with zero churn.
That work set the pattern for everything since: take something that ought to work, figure out why it doesn't, and rebuild it on better bones. I've done it as a senior strategist at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, as managing director of an engineering services firm, and in subcontracted senior advisory work through boutique and global consultancies. Along the way, more than a hundred factory assessments at benchmark OEM plants, fifteen-plus transaction diligences, and a lot of time on shop floors watching lines that weren't running the way the KPI deck said they were.
Crue IQ is what I built to do this work independently. The practice is a single principal by design — so clients get the senior person in the room, every time — and a network by necessity, because the best engagements often call for more hands or complementary depth. Either way, the work is mine.
The best first step is a short discovery conversation, fifteen to thirty minutes to understand what you're working on and whether Crue IQ is the right fit. If it's not, you'll hear that, and where possible, a pointer toward someone who is.