I'm Steve Kent. I've spent over forty years making quality systems work.

Where the forty years went

Over four decades I've worked as a Quality Manager and then a Quality Director in semiconductor companies, mainframe and personal computer manufacturers, aerospace companies and small manufacturing businesses, as well as startups and contract work with contract manufacturers.

That range matters more than any single role in it. I've seen what a quality system looks like inside a large, demanding operation, and inside a startup still working out what it makes. What I've learned is that the size of the company changes almost everything about what the system should look like, and almost nothing about what the auditor expects to see.

I've led ISO 9001 and AS9100 certifications from inside the company. I've also sat on the other side of the table — and I still do. I'm a qualified ISO 9001 and aerospace auditor, and I work under contract for an accredited certification body, conducting ISO 9001 audits.

That matters more than it sounds. Knowing what a clause says and knowing what an auditor is actually looking for are two different skills, and most of the value I bring comes from the second one. When I tell you what a registrar will ask, it isn't secondhand. I'm often the one asking.

A few of the jobs

An aerospace company that had lost its certification

The quality system had failed so completely that the company lost its certificate before they brought me in. I rebuilt it and got the certification back. Then came a run of fourteen consecutive audits that produced a single minor finding between them.

A startup, from nothing

I built the entire quality management system from scratch at a startup that went on to be acquired for more than $10 billion. No inherited procedures, no legacy system to fix — just a blank page and a company growing faster than its paperwork.

Small semiconductor companies

ISO certification built from the ground up, in companies small enough that the quality function was often one person wearing several hats. The same situation most of my clients are in today.

A large mainframe computer company

ISO program manager, responsible for taking the organization through certification. The opposite end of the scale from a startup, and the place I learned how much of a quality system is really about getting a large number of people to do the same thing the same way.

Why Falcon Quality exists

I started Falcon Quality because I got tired of watching consultants give vague answers to direct questions, then charge far too much for them.

I know what it's like to need those answers. Twice, back in the early days of ISO 9001, I took a company through certification largely on my own — finding the answers one requirement at a time, and working out how to tune a quality system to meet ISO 9001 and then the aerospace requirements on top of it. It taught me how hard it is to get a straight answer when you actually need one.

Small manufacturers still get handed advice designed for companies twenty times their size. They're told they need a document controller they can't afford, a consultant on retainer for a year, and a quality manual thick enough to stop a door. None of that is true. A shop with a few dozen people can build a system that passes a registrar audit and genuinely helps them run the business.

So the course is built around the struggles I had early on: the requirements I didn't understand at first, and the places I got stuck. It comes with the templates, forms and detailed instructions to get past them, at a price a small shop can actually justify. Making that available has been a goal of mine for a number of years. I wrote every part of it myself, out of what I've watched succeed and fail in real shops.