Holland Ricker.
Cornerstone was founded by Holland Ricker, a multi-format retail operating executive with leadership tenure across big box grocery, grocery, convenience, and automotive aftermarket.
He has run a 670-store convenience region, held enterprise field operations leadership across a national grocery brand, led the retail integration workstream on a planned 500-store, 11-banner, 19-state acquisition, and turned a multi-state region from underperformer to top-tier operating income in five months.
He has also run the merchandising side at enterprise scale, across a 392-store, $15.6 billion supermarket business, where execution was the product. Planogram compliance moved from 65% to 92%, worth $35 million in incremental revenue. Fresh department planograms and a value and pricing strategy lifted pilot market sales 3.8%. Private brands grew $25 million, 14% year over year, across a 7,500 store enterprise, and field deployment and training reached organizations of more than 35,000 associates.
From the sales floor to regional vice president, and from the shelf to the category, across big box grocery, grocery, convenience, and automotive aftermarket. The four-wall P&L gets built on the floor, and the margin inside it gets built on the shelf.
The method is also written down as software. Cornerstone Systems is seventy-one operating tools built out of the way this work was actually run, from the store walk and the weekly purchases-to-sales read to the hiring panel and the first ninety days. Five of them are loops, holding an entire operating cycle in one file so each stage reads what the last one found instead of asking for the same numbers again. Every tool runs in the browser, needs no account and no upload, and nothing entered ever leaves the buyer's own machine.
He lives in Tampa, Florida.
- Diagnose before executing. Weeks on the floor tracing every miss to its operational root, before a single change is announced.
- Build a team that can own the fix without you. A turnaround that depends on one leader is a temporary fix wearing a turnaround's clothes.
- Recognition engineered, not improvised. Specific, public, and tied to the behaviors that drive the business. People repeat what gets celebrated.
Where to start
Engagements start with a conversation about what is actually happening in the business, not with a pitch. If a short piece of paid work would be more useful than a call, the Operating Diagnostic and the Week-Back Sprint are both fixed in scope and end on a date.