George Palmer - Founder, Make Advisory

The problem is rarely where the pain is felt.

The missed deadline, the friction between teams, the costs that keep climbing: those are symptoms. The cause is usually sitting quietly upstream, in a process built for a smaller business than the one you're running now. Finding it and fixing it there is what I do.

How I got here

I joined Boutique Modern in 2013 as one of the first four employees. I started on the factory floor, moved into procurement, then production management, then director level. By the time I left as Operations Director in 2025, six functions reported to me: manufacturing, supply chain, construction, design, quality and maintenance. Over those twelve years the business grew from £400k to £10m in revenue.

That growth was not linear or smooth. It meant building functions from scratch, rescuing ones that were failing, and restructuring how the business ran at almost every stage. Everything I know about operations came from building it, breaking it, and rebuilding it inside a real business, not from a textbook.

How I work

Most manufacturers already have the answers inside them. The people closest to the work know the constraints, the workarounds, the things that quietly don't function. I find that capacity by asking the right questions of the right people, then turning what I learn into changes that hold on the floor, not just on paper.

I work alongside teams, not above them. You get an honest appraisal of what I see, early and directly. That view gets tested and shaped by the people who know the operation best, and the best fixes usually come out of that. What you will always get is a straight answer.

Why Make Advisory

I founded Make Advisory because I needed this kind of partner myself. Not a firm with a methodology to sell. Not a full-time hire the business wasn't ready for. Someone who could come in, see clearly, work hands-on, and leave the operation in better shape than they found it.

After years of doing that work inside one company, I became the partner I was looking for.

Who I work with

I work with steel fabricators and offsite manufacturers: volumetric modular builders, panellised system builders, and the fabrication shops that supply them. Businesses where the programme gets recovered from more often than it gets met, where margin never quite matches how hard everyone is working, and where the founder still can't leave the floor for a week without something slipping.

If that sounds like your situation, tell me one problem and I'll come and look at it.