For retailers
Where the margin actually goes
Retail strategy is rarely the problem. The thinking is usually sound, and the buying, the pricing and the marketing are usually built by people who know what they're doing. What tends to be inconsistent is execution at store level, and execution is where a surprising amount of gross margin quietly disappears.
It disappears in small amounts, across a large number of decisions, none of which are individually big enough to appear in a report. Hours scheduled to open and close a store rather than to trade it, so coverage is thinnest at the hour with the most customers in the building. Broken size runs on best sellers on the days that matter, with no record that it happened. Markdown taken at the end of a season on product that never had proper floor presence at the start of it. Replenishment run as a periodic task rather than a continuous one. Two sites with comparable footfall and assortment, and a gap in four-wall EBIT that nobody has ever properly explained.
None of that shows up as a line item, which is why it survives cost-cutting exercises. It has to be traced.
I spent ten years running stores at that scale, ending with a $75 million cross-border P&L, and the work below is what I do about it.
Every engagement can be structured with a base fee and a performance element tied to targets we agree before I start. I'd rather carry some of the risk than ask you to take my word for the result.
The work
Commercial audits and advisory
On site
The Store Performance Audit
A day on site during live peak trading, watching what actually happens at the hours that matter, rather than reviewing it afterwards in a report.
I look at how coverage maps against traffic, where availability breaks down and what it costs, how the space is working commercially, what's happening to conversion and average transaction value at the moments they're most under pressure, and where the operating routines have drifted from what was designed centrally.
Audits start from €1,000 for a single site. That covers preparation, the day itself and the written debrief. Travel and accommodation are billed separately at cost.
€2,500 for three sites across three days, which is usually the more useful version: one site is a sample, three is a pattern. Final pricing depends on store and team size.
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.
When leadership moves
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.
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
Before opening day
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.
What makes this expensive is that an opening handled badly doesn't correct itself. The habits formed in the first fortnight tend to hold for months, sometimes years, and the management team hired to open the store is frequently replaced within the first year because they were set up to fail rather than because they couldn't do the job. Replacing them costs you again, and resets the clock a second time.
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.
For the people running it
Commercial leadership training
Store managers are promoted for being excellent at selling and are then held accountable for a P&L nobody has taught them to read. This closes that gap, and it's 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
Working together
Fees
Audits are priced openly: from €1,000 for a single site, or €2,500 for three. Final pricing depends on store and team size.
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.