Management Consulting for Aggregate Producers — Operator-to-Operator

Aggregate Consulting provides management consulting for sand, gravel, crushed stone, and dredge-based operations. The work is owner-to-owner and operator-to-operator — practical guidance from someone who has actually run plants, built circuits, paid the payroll, and lived with the consequences of bad decisions. Most engagements start with a single question the owner or general manager already knows the answer to but wants confirmed by someone outside the building: Why isn’t this making the money it should?

What We Look At

Every operation has a different bottleneck. The work isn’t a one-size template — it’s a structured walk through the parts of the business where money quietly leaks out. The areas we work on most often:

Plant bottlenecks — finding where the circuit is starved or backed up, whether it’s at the crusher, screen, washer, or stacker; assessing whether the bottleneck is mechanical, electrical, layout, or operating practice
Crushing, screening, and washing circuits — evaluating whether the plant is configured to produce the product mix the market actually buys; identifying low-yield stages, oversized recirc loads, undersized screens, and washer inefficiencies
Dredge feed consistency — diagnosing why a dredge-fed plant is underperforming when the issue is upstream of the plant entirely
Maintenance drag — separating preventive maintenance from reactive maintenance, evaluating parts inventory, downtime tracking, and the real cost of every avoidable failure
Cost-per-ton — building a true cost-per-ton model from operating data (not catalog rates) and identifying which line items are out of line with comparable operations
Production claims vs. reality — testing whether claimed production rates can actually be sustained given the plant, the deposit, and the workforce
Reserve-to-plant alignment — asking whether the plant is sized for the deposit; oversized plants on undersized reserves, and undersized plants on long-life deposits, are both expensive mistakes
Owner/operator decision-making — bringing an outside perspective to capital decisions: expansion, upgrades, replacement versus rebuild, acquisitions, divestitures

What You Receive

A written assessment with findings, prioritized recommendations, and — where appropriate — order-of-magnitude estimates for the changes proposed. Engagements range from a half-day phone consult on a single question to a multi-week on-site evaluation. The work is paid by the hour, by the day, or on a scoped-project basis, depending on what makes sense for the question.

Why an Operator’s Perspective Matters

John M. Pitts, Jr. has spent 36 years owning, designing, building, and operating sand, gravel, crushed stone, and dredge-based operations across the country. The advice we give is what we’d give ourselves if we owned the operation. We don’t oversell, we don’t push expensive solutions when cheap ones will work, and we don’t pretend a problem is solvable on a slide when it really isn’t.

Calculate Your ROI

For a quick preliminary look at the financial impact of an operational improvement, use our ROI Calculator.

Discuss Your Operation

Call 940-341-2011 or contact us to discuss your operation and where you suspect money is being left on the table.