AI and automation in the field
Where automation belongs in a multi-unit operation and where it never should. Measure first, workflow second, software last. What human in the loop means when the decision affects someone's job.
Insights.
Notes on retail turnarounds, integration, automation, and the operating discipline that separates retailers who scale from retailers who stall. Written from the floor rather than from the deck, which means most of it starts with something that actually happened in a store.
What this covers
Five threads, returned to often, because they are where multi-unit operations are won.
Turnaround leadership
The first thirty days walking stores rather than reading decks. Diagnosis before treatment. Why the first lever is never headcount.
Operational excellence systems
The standard, check, and consequence loop. Why a checklist is not the same thing as discipline, and why nobody should present a number without the action it drives.
Multi-format retail strategy
What transfers between big box grocery, grocery, convenience, and automotive aftermarket, and what does not. Roughly eighty percent of retail operations is universal. The other twenty percent is format context.
Team development and culture
Recognition engineered rather than improvised. Promoting the skeptic. What it looks like the first time somebody is genuinely trusted with something.
The difference between a dashboard and a decision
A recurring one. The scoreboard tells you the score. It does not tell you why, and the floor usually can.
Latest piece
How a store walk actually works
Thirty years of walking stores, distilled into a method: customer first, operator second, recognition before correction, and a summary that sticks.
New pieces publish here as they are written. The current thinking also runs on LinkedIn, twice a week, on the same five threads.
Free field test
Five Signs a Spreadsheet Wants to Be a Workflow: a one-page test for the file your operation leans on hardest. Print it, pin it, run it against the spreadsheet everyone opens on Monday morning.
Working through one of these right now?
The notes are the short version. The engagement is where they get applied to your operation.