Your shop is better than your Google results.

The buyers and engineers who used to call around now shortlist suppliers on Google and ChatGPT before they ever pick up a phone. If you’re not on that list, the RFQ goes to a shop that is.

I build industrial visibility from scratch for the $2 to $25 million manufacturer the big industrial agencies won’t take. You count the quotes.

For: owner-run manufacturers in Chicagoland with roughly 10 to 150 people. Fabricated metal, machining, plastics, packaging, contract food, medical device suppliers. Sales has always run through relationships and shows. There’s no marketing department, and there probably shouldn’t be one yet.

Not for: companies with a marketing team and $10,000 a month to spend. You’d outgrow me in a year. Call Gorilla 76 in St. Louis. They’re one of the best industrial agencies in the country and they start where I stop.

If you’re not sure which side you’re on, email me and I’ll tell you honestly. I’d rather point you somewhere than over-promise.

• The research happens before the call. Engineers now spend 62% of the buying journey researching online before they contact a single vendor. (TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2026)
• A lot of that research is happening inside AI. 66% of B2B buyers now regularly use AI tools to research vendors, and 92% say it shaped their shortlist. (Semrush, 2026, 519 U.S. B2B professionals)
• Familiar wins ties. When two suppliers look technically the same, 70% of buyers pick the one they’ve heard of. (TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2026)

Here’s the part that works in your favor. In that same Semrush study, only 7% of buyers said they noticed a vendor in an AI answer because they recognized the name. They noticed the one that clearly matched what they were looking for. A 40-person shop with clear capability pages can show up next to a company fifty times its size. That’s the whole opportunity, and almost nobody your size is taking it.

Scope of work. Read it the way you’d read a quote.

• Capability pages by process and material. Not a “services” page. A page for each thing you actually do: CNC machining, 5-axis, sheet metal fabrication, powder coating, thermoforming, blister packaging, whatever it is. Written the way a buyer searches and the way an AI reads. This is the core of the program and it’s where most manufacturer sites fail.
• A site Google and AI assistants can read. Structured data on every capability and product. Crawlers unblocked. Technical fixes done and documented so you can see what changed.
• A counter on every quote request. Web forms, phone lines, RFQ forms. All tracked from month one. Your monthly report says how many quotes came in and where they came from. Not impressions. Quotes.
• One shop floor day a month. I come to the plant with a camera. Your machines, your people, your parts. It becomes the photos on the capability pages, the video on your LinkedIn, and a hiring page that shows what the job actually looks like. No national agency does this at this price, because they’d have to fly in.
• Google Business Profile and directory cleanup. Your name, address, and phone matched everywhere Google and the AI tools check, including the industrial directories that feed their answers.

Optional: bilingual hiring module. Spanish job pages and job ads for the production floor, written by a native speaker (me), not a translation button. Hispanic and Latino workers hold 22% of Illinois manufacturing jobs. (Illinois Extension, 2022 data) Your best next hire may not be reading your English careers page.

What’s not included: paid ads. Thomasnet management. A podcast. A 40-page strategy deck before any work starts. Anyone junior.

FoodPharma is a B2B contract manufacturer. Ninety-day engagement. Four months of flat traffic before we started, then +54% at peak about 30 days after implementation, with a higher impressions floor that held through the following quarter.

That’s traffic, not leads, and I label it that way on purpose. If an agency shows you a chart without saying what it’s a chart of, ask.