Most companies frame this as a budget decision and get it wrong. The better question is which of these three things you need — daily presence, credentialed judgment, or program construction — because they are separable and priced very differently.
Someone visible on the floor daily — doing inspections, coaching, catching things in the moment. This is valuable and it does not require a CSP. It requires reliability, credibility with supervisors and enough training to know what to escalate.
Recordability determinations, program adequacy decisions, whether a control is sufficient, how to handle an inspection, what to tell a regulator. These carry legal consequence and require credentials and experience. They also consume very few hours.
Building the programs, calendar, training matrix and records structure. This is project work with a beginning and an end, and it is the most labor-intensive phase by a wide margin.
You need all three continuously, the site count or hazard profile justifies it, and you can attract a credentialed person to your location and keep them. Above roughly two hundred and fifty employees in higher-hazard manufacturing this usually pencils.
You need judgment and construction but not daily presence, or you need coverage now rather than in four months. This is the common situation between fifty and two hundred and fifty employees.
You need presence but cannot justify a credentialed salary. A site coordinator handles daily presence with a fractional director carrying judgment and sign-off above them. This is usually the best value structure and the least commonly considered.
A full-time hire gives you continuity and presence, and it exposes you to a hiring market where credentialed EHS professionals are scarce and mobile. The average first EHS hire at a company with no existing program leaves inside two years, usually because they were given a mandate without authority or a system.
Fractional gives you seniority immediately and costs a fraction of total employment cost, and it does not put a person on your floor every day. If what you actually need is someone walking the plant at shift change, fractional alone is the wrong answer and we will tell you that.
We would rather lose an engagement than sell you the wrong structure. If a full-time hire is right, we will say so — and we can build the function first so the person you hire inherits something that works.
Total cost of employment for a credentialed director in manufacturing runs well into six figures once salary, bonus, benefits and payroll burden are included — plus recruiting cost and the months the seat sits empty.
Yes, including the opening conference, document requests, walkaround and citation response. Having a credentialed professional manage it changes how the inspection unfolds.
Then you hire, and the transition is clean because the system was documented as it was built. Several clients have used us to build the function and then hired into a structure that already worked.
No. A consultant delivers a report and leaves. A fractional leader owns outcomes on an ongoing basis, sits in leadership meetings and is accountable for the same measures an employee would be.
Answer the questions above honestly. If presence is the binding constraint, you need a person on site. If judgment is the constraint, you need credentials, not hours.
Twenty minutes to work through what actually needs owning at your operation and at what level.
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