How I work
Four kinds of engagement. All of them start on the floor, not in a meeting room, because that is where the difference between the plan and the reality is visible.
Every engagement can be structured with a base fee and a performance element tied to agreed targets.
Commercial audits and advisory
The Store Performance Audit
One day on site during live peak trading. I watch what actually happens at the busiest hours: how the floor is covered, where replenishment breaks down, how queues form, what stops people buying. At the end of the day you get an unedited debrief on what is costing you money, ranked by what it is worth.
€3,000 for a single site. That covers preparation, the day itself and the written debrief. Travel and accommodation are billed separately at cost.
€7,500 for three sites across three days, which is usually the more useful version: one site is a sample, three is a pattern.
If you go on to the 30-Day Store Performance Programme within six weeks, the audit fee comes off it.
You get:
- One day on site during live peak trading
- Direct observation of execution and friction points
- End-of-day debrief with prioritised actions
- Focus on traffic conversion, average transaction value and workforce deployment
The 30-Day Store Performance Programme
For businesses that already know roughly what is wrong and need it fixed rather than described. Thirty days to diagnose, redesign the routines, train the people who will own them, and hand back something that holds after I leave.
The test of this work is not what changes during the engagement. It is what is still true two quarters later.
Interim leadership
When a leadership seat sits empty, drift starts immediately. Standards slip before anyone reports it, and margin follows.
I step in at short notice and run the operation: stabilise the team, hold the standard, protect the trading, and give you the time to run a proper permanent search rather than a rushed one.
I did a three-month version of this at Ralph Lauren, covering a simultaneous General Manager and Assistant General Manager absence at another site, supporting it across sales, profitability, engagement and shrink until permanent leadership was in place. That assignment is what led to my dual-site remit.
Typical situations:
- Sudden or planned leadership vacancy
- Peak trading periods that need senior capacity on site
- Multi-site clusters going through structural change
- High-stakes store openings
New store commissioning
The most exposed fortnight in a store's life is the one around opening. Capital expenditure is at its peak and operational readiness is usually at its lowest.
Corporate project managers build the store. Retail operators open it. The gap between construction handover and the first transaction is where launches quietly go wrong: stockroom architecture nobody planned, visual direction that cannot be executed with the team you have, a floor that looks finished and does not sell.
I take temporary ownership of that phase. Stockroom architecture and inventory intake, translation of visual direction into something the team can actually maintain, team onboarding, and the operating routines that need to exist on day one rather than week six.
I opened a new site in Roermond that went on to set the commercial benchmark in the global network.
Outlet in particular. Most of my opening and operating experience is in outlet, and outlet does not behave like full price. Traffic is destination-led rather than incidental, volumes are higher and more concentrated, the price architecture changes what sells and how fast, and the centre operator is a stakeholder in your launch whether you plan for that or not. I can lead full-price openings, and have supported flagship operations in the UK and France. But outlet is where the edge is sharpest, and it is where most advisors have the least real experience.
Commercial leadership training
Most store managers are promoted for being excellent at selling and are then held accountable for a P&L nobody taught them to read.
This programme closes that gap. It is built for store and area managers, and it is specific rather than general.
Participants leave understanding how the choices they make in an hour affect the number the business reports in a quarter.
- Margin and cost structure: what actually moves it
- Staffing economics and productivity mapping
- Sell-through timing and its effect on profitability
- Turning KPIs into decisions rather than reports
Fees
Audits are priced openly: €3,000 for a single site, €7,500 for three.
Everything else is scoped against the engagement, and structured as a base fee plus a performance element tied to targets we agree before I start. I would rather carry some of the risk than ask you to take my word for the result.
I am not interested in engagements where nobody can tell afterwards whether it worked.