Toronto
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Ottawa
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Montréal
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Boston
How a regional retailer pulled three points out of labor cost, lifted inventory turn from 4.2x to 5.6x, and recovered an estimated $1M+ in annual margin and working capital. Through a fractional COO with retail operations chops.
Revenue was holding steady year over year. Margin was not. There was no single emergency, just slow drift across the business, and the owner could feel the squeeze in cash flow without being able to point to where it was coming from.
Labor was being scheduled to gut feel rather than traffic patterns. SKU count had grown roughly forty percent over five years without anyone pruning it. Overhead allocations had not been touched since the founding partner stepped back, and store-level performance was invisible from the head office.
Each location was effectively run as its own small business. Capable managers, but no shared playbook, no shared dashboard, and no clean way to compare one store to the next.
We brought in a fractional COO with regional retail operations background. The first sixty days were a diagnostic at the flagship locations: labor patterns by daypart, SKU profitability by category, overhead allocations by store, and the gap between what the head office could see and what was actually happening on the floor.
From the diagnostic, we rebuilt the labor scheduling model around real traffic patterns, ran a SKU rationalization that pulled twenty percent of inventory out of the system, restructured overhead to match where the cost was actually incurred, and stood up a daily store-level dashboard the managers own. Disciplined retail operating, run by an experienced operator on a fractional cadence.
