John Hawkins, operations leader, Springfield, Missouri.

I'm John Hawkins, a fractional and interim operations leader based in Springfield, Missouri. I work with privately held manufacturers and industrial companies in Southwest Missouri, the Ozarks, and across the Midwest.

I have more than two decades of experience in industrial manufacturing and change management. Through my career I have served in every organizational capacity, from the front lines to the executive team. I have led a team to grow a business from $20m to $32m in a deteriorating market in under 4 years. I have led multi-site plant operations in the United States with a $12m operating budget, and I have spent time overseas integrating an acquired manufacturing operation—aligning how the American and European plants designed, built, and supported their product. I am comfortable in the plant, with a dealer, and in the boardroom.

I am a US Navy nuclear-trained veteran. I am a Lean practitioner, and I have managed work built to 3-A Sanitary Standards, ASME, UL, ASHRAE, PED, and many others. That background shows up in how I lead: procedures exist for a reason, safety comes first, and improvement has to survive contact with a real plant.

In later interim and advisory work, I have helped $150m+ manufacturers put operating metrics and financial literacy in the hands of the people closest to the work, resulting in massive annualized savings. I have also led operational and balance-sheet cleanups for smaller organizations to secure private equity capitalization.

I have started and run businesses of my own. I know what it feels like when operations start to slip, and I know how expensive it is to hire a full-time executive before the company can truly fill the seat.

Today my practice, DE Fractional, is built around two situations I see often in this region. The first is a leadership transition: an owner or CEO who needs to step back from day-to-day operations to focus on business development, without the plant losing its rhythm. The second is a growth-stage company that needs senior operations leadership now, but would bloat G&A by hiring a full-time COO or VP of Operations too early. In both cases I come in as an embedded operator—usually one to three days a week, and sometimes full-time on an interim basis—until the cadence is in place and the internal team can carry it.

I live in Springfield, where I serve in the community in various volunteer positions and am a graduate of Leadership Missouri. If you want to talk about your operation, you can reach me directly.