(FORTUNE Small Business) – In the upper Midwest, small manufacturers are folding almost as fast as Dust Bowl farmers during the Depression. You'd think that Omega Plastics, a Michigan parts maker, would be struggling to survive. It's not.

Omega produces plastic injection molds and prototype parts for the auto, health-care, and electronics industries faster than almost anybody. The factory can start a job on Friday night and deliver parts on Monday. Business is picking up again after an economic slump that put Omega in the red back in 2002. Sales this year will approach $9 million, up from around $8 million in 2003, according to Omega CEO Jeff Kaczperski, 37, who took over the family business four years ago.

Omega's speed and quality control have won the company a loyal following. Many of Omega's 150 customers are smallish manufacturers racing to get a new product into production. They call Omega on short notice, ask for a mold and a few hundred parts for test models or market research, and then disappear. With a client list like that, Omega can go from feast to famine in no time at all.

Kaczperski wants to snag bigger jobs with fatter profit margins. To do that, Omega plans to concentrate on big Fortune 500 accounts. The company already has a couple of giant clients. That nifty pop-up dispenser lid on a popular brand of premoistened paper towels was prototyped at the company's factory in Clinton Township, just outside Detroit. The snazzy red handle on one of Milwaukee Tools' reciprocating saws was first transformed from line drawings to real life at Omega.

The problem for Omega and many small suppliers like it is that doing great work for a handful of production engineers at a big corporation rarely turns into companywide renown and a steady cascade of orders. "If something goes wrong, word travels fast," says Kaczperski with a rueful laugh. "But if you do a good job, the people who hired you want to keep you for themselves."

Besides providing prototypes to big companies, Omega five years ago began taking on jobs requiring it to produce several thousand small plastic parts at a time. That sort of low-volume production is a growing market with decent margins. In fact, it's far more attractive than pursuing high-volume production, which has thin margins and has largely moved offshore.

Three experienced consultants agreed, at FSB's request, to visit Kaczperski and offer practical advice. Charles Maynard is a supply-chain management expert and a partner at Capital Consulting & Management in Charlottesville, Va. Andrew Krasner is head of strategic services for Fry, an Ann Arbor website-design company whose clients include Eddie Bauer, Brookstone, and Spiegel Catalog. And Barbara Gucfa (pronounced Goots-fah) is an auto industry expert at the Southfield, Mich., offices of A.T. Kearney, a strategy and operations consulting firm.

Kaczperski's first meeting is with Maynard, a serious, athletic sort with close-cropped graying hair, whose previous clients have included Gateway. The two men sit down in Omega's austere conference room, decorated with golfing posters. Maynard quickly zeroes in on a crucial problem. Omega's top executives all have different criteria for what makes a valuable customer. Salespeople value big jobs, with little regard for profits, because they are compensated based on the size of the contracts they land. The CFO values clients that pay on time. Engineers appreciate clients who don't make a lot of changes in their specifications.

Maynard urges Kaczperski to put his top brass through consensus-building meetings, where they can air their differences. The salesmen need to understand why the engineers favor certain jobs. Do the engineers understand why the salesmen chase big contracts?

"But the criteria will remain squishy," Kaczperski argues. Nonsense, Maynard replies: It's all about quantification. Omega should measure how many hours of salesman time it takes to land a contract and determine exactly how much it costs to continue retooling a mold when a customer keeps changing design specs. And the entire management team must sign off on its measures of performance. "If you have a lot of opinions on how to move forward, you never will," he warns.

The next consultant to arrive is Andrew Krasner, a stocky, hirsute expert on all things Internet. Kaczperski is quick to admit that Omega's site isn't what he wants.

"It kind of has a '90s feel to it," he says. "Not modern, not interactive ... a brochure." But when Krasner asks what Omega's customers want from the site, Kaczperski and three other Omega executives admit they aren't sure. "We only have suspicions," says sales director Chris Buch. "Some people are exploring. They want to know if Omega is the company they want to use. We also hear from our salespeople that existing customers would like to use our site to see where their order stands."

Krasner suggests that Omega concentrate on turning casual browsers into new customers. "That can be tricky," he admits. It's essential to get visitors to provide their names and contact information, but lots of people worry that their personal data will be sold or otherwise abused. "You've got to establish a privacy policy, state it clearly on the website, and make sure you abide by it," says Krasner. Omega should limit the number of people who see the data, since rogue employees are most likely to cause problems.

"And don't ask people to give their names right away," he adds. That, too, will scare them off. Provide clear, concise information on each web page and make navigation easy and appealing. Eventually ask them if they want a price quote and provide a form that requires them to provide their name and contact information.

Buch, the sales director, is leery. "We don't want to compete on price," he says. "We compete on speed and services." Krasner immediately shifts gears. "Fine," he says amiably. "So instead of providing an instant quote, make it clear that a salesman will follow up." He adds: "Web-based services such as Salesforce.com, Salesnet, and NetSuite will all help companies capture contact information from their websites and make it available to sales reps."

Kaczperski has been silent through much of the discussion. Suddenly he pipes up, "What's the most common mistake companies make when designing a website?" Easy, says Krasner: "They make it too hard to update the site, and it becomes stale and outdated." Not only should the pages that casual browsers see be updated regularly, but Omega should also create special pages for individual customers.

Each page could contain progress reports and a photograph of the customer's tool or part being made, along with plugs for Omega's new services. And to ensure that the site stays current, it's a good idea to make project managers, rather than IT specialists, responsible for updating their own client pages. "Make it part of their job description," Krasner urges. (There are many easy-to-use content-management packages on the market, including Content Management Server from Microsoft and similar products from Ektron, Fog Creek, Globalscape, and Starphire.)

Last to arrive is Barbara Gucfa of A.T. Kearney. Gucfa has an informal manner and a deep, throaty laugh. After whipping off her suit jacket, she quickly presses Kaczperski to explain his vision for Omega. "What do you want to do with this company?" she asks.

Kaczperski explains his plan to smooth out revenues by expanding low-volume production. He reaches for a four-page business plan, apologizing for its slightly tattered appearance. "It was taped to the wall of my office," he says, spreading the pages out on his conference table.

Gucfa asks Kaczperski to quantify the volume and profit margins that he hopes to achieve from low-volume production over the next three to five years. Kaczperski appears startled by the question. "Do companies define that precisely?" he asks.

"What gets measured gets done," Gucfa answers. Kaczperski nods. "Throw some stakes out there," he says. "They may change as we get closer."

To demonstrate how a focused plan makes a lot of the intermediate steps clearer, Gucfa pulls a thick A.T. Kearney study on the auto industry out of her briefcase. She shows Kaczperski how to mine the study for customer leads. For example, Omega is too small to supply a giant automaker, but the company could certainly make subcomponents for an auto-parts supplier. But which one?

Gucfa points to a page showing shrinking profit margins for big American car companies. Beware, she says. That means the Americans are squeezing their major suppliers, which will in turn pinch Omega. "Toyota and BMW and most foreign transplants are doing well," she notes approvingly.

Then the analysis gets more granular. "Which suppliers have the best returns?" Gucfa asks rhetorically. She urges Kaczperski to avoid electronics suppliers, whose margins tend to be thin. "If you decide to go after auto-parts makers, trim and powertrain are good," she suggests. Kaczperski might also read auto industry newspapers to see which supplier just got a fat contract to make taillights for a new Toyota truck.

She steers Kaczperski to the website for the Society of Automotive Engineers (sae.org), which has a supplier search engine. "How do we get our foot in the door with it?" he asks. Simple, Gucfa replies. Just keep track of the people Omega works with now and stay in touch when they get hired at bigger firms.

As Gucfa packs up to leave, Kaczperski seems daunted by the work ahead. "Big corporations have their own planning departments," he laments. "We have to do this day by day." Gucfa shakes her head and smiles. "You'd be amazed at the planning that some big companies don't do," she says.

A few days later Kaczperski labeled the experience "pretty interesting." He liked Charles Maynard's pitch for a companywide planning process. "In the past, we've done that piecemeal," he says.

Thanks to Andrew Krasner, he has a clearer idea of what Omega's website should accomplish. "We're going to make sure it's easy to update the content of the site," he says. "And we want to redo the home page so that it will direct clients clearly to where they want to go."

The most challenging consultant was Gucfa, he found. "Developing a really clear objective of where I want us to be—that's foundational stuff," Kaczperski says. "I'll be working on that for a long time."

FSB will check in with Kaczperski from time to time. Once he develops the perfect business model, maybe he can manufacture a few thousand copies and sell them. He'd find plenty of customers.