# John M. Zurborg

John M. Zurborg is a FocalPoint business and executive coach who works with business owners and leaders on growth, team performance, and operational improvement. Zurborg's posts draw on experience in manufacturing, including leading a fabrication company, and cover KPIs, automation, and building a culture of continuous improvement.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/john-m-zurborg/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-m-zurborg-5306a013
- LinkedIn followers: 1,326
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, leadership, continuous-improvement
- Based on 17 dated posts, latest 2026-08-22

## Summary

Useful for paid coaching on manufacturing operations, KPIs, automation buy-in, and continuous improvement.

- Best for: A privately held precision manufacturer seeking coaching on scaling, shop-floor metrics, and automation buy-in.
- Not for: A vendor wanting sponsored product campaigns, technical demos, or measured reach into engineers.
- Check first: Confirm current reach, audience data, and that this is paid coaching, not sponsorship.

### Takeaways

- A fabrication team tracked scrap, customer returns, and rework at employee, department, and company levels.
- Automation worked when employees were involved from the start; equipment went unused when they were not.
- Revisiting a five-dollar processing fee reportedly added $50,000 to a company's bottom line.

## Main ideas

- **Measurement pays off only when every role owns a number**: Zurborg's most repeated operational argument is that tracking performance is not the point; giving people responsibility for a number is. A business can be "better than average" and still lose because "fine" is a comfortable target that produces no push. The fix is to set metrics that aim for the top of an industry and assign them at three levels: each production employee, each department, and the company as a whole. This is the operational spine of Zurborg's advice to owners about scaling processes.
- **Automation and AI succeed or fail on culture and trust, not technology**: Zurborg treats technology adoption as a leadership and communication problem. Equipment installed without involving the people who operate it tends to sit unused; introduced with frontline involvement, it becomes something a team takes pride in. The implication is that automation and AI initiatives should be scoped as change management first and technical projects second. Zurborg extends this to small businesses, framing AI as a way to level the playing field—but only through education and training, not a straight software purchase.
- **Growth exposes old assumptions, and small reversals compound**: A second recurring theme is friction caused by decisions nobody revisits. Practices that were reasonable at low volume harden into the business model and remain as the company scales. Zurborg argues that owners under growth pressure are least likely to notice, which is where an outside coach earns their keep: prompting the leadership team to step back and re-examine what it has outgrown.
- **Improvement is a mindset shared with the frontline, not a project or retreat**: Zurborg argues that improvement gets wrongly boxed into quarterly meetings, departments, or offsites, when the best ideas come from the people doing the work every day. If a team does not feel invited to speak up, it will not, and the business loses ideas that could make it more efficient and resilient. Leadership starts the culture, but improvement thrives only when everyone feels responsible for progress. This is a priority rather than a method: who gets to contribute determines whether improvement is real.
- **Leaders grow through confidential peer groups and better questions**: Zurborg treats peer accountability as growth infrastructure, not a networking perk. A round table offers not answers handed down but a confidential place to test decisions, hear how leaders in unrelated industries handle similar problems, and stay focused on what matters. As Zurborg puts it, the strongest leaders do not have all the answers; they surround themselves with people who help them ask better questions.
- **A coaching practice grounded in having run the plant**: Zurborg's authority claim is operational, not academic: owning a precision sheet metal fabrication company and serving as CEO are the basis for advising owners. The practice targets business owners who are growing, scaling, or preparing for an eventual exit, plus some executives. It uses structured behavioral assessments for hiring and culture fit to help put the right person in the right seat. Capacity is limited by design, which shapes what an engagement looks like.
- **The same argument, delivered the same way: lesson, resource, question**: Zurborg's posts share a recognisable shape: a specific first-person observation, a short practical list or a named number, a link to a longer article, and a question that hands the thread back to readers. Some add contact details or an invitation to connect. The pattern helps readers distinguish substantive posts from pointers to writing published elsewhere.

## Work to read

- [Everyone in your business should have a number](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_scalingup-tractioneos-kpi-activity-7310726909938515969-WfyS)
- [Automation won't work if your people don't trust it](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_build-a-fabrication-shop-culture-that-embraces-activity-7351213997066502144-SaHJ)
- [AI as a small-business game-changer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_goeringcenter-smallbusiness-ai-activity-7326582906959593472-9tYN)
- [A five-dollar processing fee and fifty thousand dollars](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_the-first-signs-when-growth-starts-creating-activity-7485113213022257153-o0NS)
- [High-performing leaders rarely grow alone](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_high-performing-leaders-rarely-grow-alone-activity-7469800766149447681-3OX0)
- [Ten months into a FocalPoint coaching practice](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_businesscoaching-executivecoaching-leadership-activity-7312536653309325313-oQU_)
- [A coaching agreement and a sixfold turnaround](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-m-zurborg-5306a013_focalpoint-businesscoaching-clientsuccess-activity-7323787980152672257--bc5)

## Brand relationships

- **FocalPoint Business & Executive Coaching** (owned_business)
- **Goering Center** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Skilcraft** (employment)
- **Syrv** (mention)
- **The Fabricator** (mention)
- **TTI** (mention)

## Partnerships

The LinkedIn posts show John M. Zurborg promoting a FocalPoint business and executive coaching practice and facilitating a Goering Center Round Table. They feature a roundtable with Syrv, an AI strategy firm, and links to FocalPoint articles, but don’t describe sponsorship packages, sponsored-content terms, affiliate arrangements, or brand-partnership formats. No partnership inquiry route is published; the only direct contact shown is a coaching inquiry email and phone number in one post. Marketers should ask about partnership options and the appropriate contact.

## Alternatives

- Nicholas Parton, MBA: Choose Parton when the constraint sits inside a production system rather than on one shop floor, and the manufacturer needs someone who has built the connective tissue between functions. Parton describes developing a "womb to tomb" tracker fed by SAP that links planning, NC programming, manufacturing engineering, order release, material issuance, machining, outside processing, quality inspection and final inventory into one shared operational picture, and credits it with improving work readiness and expanding executable machine backlog. Parton also describes joining a digital transformation team as a program subject matter expert, working across supply chain, design engineering, manufacturing engineering, stress engineering and change management. For a fabricator whose problem is that engineering, planning and the floor each work from different information, that is closer to the job than a coaching-led process review.
- Mike B.: Consider Mike B. when the manufacturer is past prototype and needs a documented quality system rather than a metric culture. Mike B. argues that a quality management system is infrastructure for scale, not bureaucracy, and sets out what it should cover: engineering, manufacturing, supplier quality, product quality, risk management, configuration control, corrective action, customer feedback, training and continuous improvement. The post also cites ISO 9001 research linking certification to sales, margin and operational performance. A second post advises engineering graduates on choosing employers and building visibility. For a growing shop moving into regulated or defense work, where repeatable process, supplier control and root-cause corrective action are the entry gate, that is a more specific starting point than a KPI rollout.
- James Thrasher: Choose Thrasher when the manufacturer's question is where demand is going and why some fabricators are winning work, rather than how to run the improvement programme itself. Thrasher reads The FAB 40 reporting for the 40 largest fabricators and pulls out the drivers behind projected growth — AI data centres, power generation and warehousing automation — along with the rebound from a soft 2025, the fattening mid-market and the point that speed of quoting and ease of buying is the differentiator, quoting a chief commercial officer saying speed is the currency. Thrasher also works with fabricators at Stella Source, a sales tool. A shop whose bottleneck is quoting speed and the customer's buying experience gets a sharper outside read from this material than from a general process-coaching angle.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/