Going Through It
In almost 30 years of running a business, I’ve had a few periods where I genuinely didn’t know how we were going to get through. The 2008 housing crash wiped out our U.S. pipeline. COVID undid a lot of what we had built in the years leading up to it. People have come and gone. […]
The Practice of Priority
I have learned that being busy and making progress are not the same thing. For years, one of the easiest traps for me was looking at a long list of things to do and treating all of them like they mattered equally. They don’t. If I have ten things on my list, there are probably […]
Take Care of Yourself First
One of the things I have had to learn over and over again is that when work gets stressful, my instinct is usually to give it more of me. More hours. More effort. More time thinking about it. Sometimes that is necessary. But I have also learned that there is a point where more effort […]
Before You Hire a Survey Company, Ask These 5 Questions
Every survey company is going to tell you they are accurate. They will tell you they are fast, experienced, technology-driven and precise. That doesn’t tell you very much. If you are a retailer choosing a survey partner, the better question is: what makes those claims believable? A good vendor-selection process should look past the sales […]
How to Get More Survey for your $: 4 Things to Consider
A lot of site surveys are scoped as if the goal is to collect as much information as possible. That is usually the wrong goal. The real purpose of a site survey is to move uncertainty out of construction and back into planning, where problems are still cheaper to solve. That means the best survey […]
The AI Hype Machine vs Your Reality
Every retail executive is being sold the exact same dream. Vague, high-level pitches promise that artificial intelligence will deliver instant, “superhuman” operational capabilities overnight. It creates the illusion that a “solution in a box” is coming to magically clean up your floor plans, organize your data, and optimize your store footprint. Here is the plain-spoken […]
Getting Ready for AI – Part 7 – The 20 Store Sandbox
Most retail leaders get paralyzed by scale. They look at a fleet of 500 or 1,000 stores and ask: “How could we ever afford to clean all that data?” They wait for a magical, enterprise-wide technology package that promises to solve everything overnight. That technology isn’t coming to save messy workflows. If you want to […]
Getting Ready for AI – Part 6 – From Cost Center to Revenue Enabler
For decades, retail store planning has been viewed through a single, limiting lens: an operational cost center. The mandate was simple—turn out store drawings as quickly and cheaply as possible. When store planning is squeezed strictly for cost reduction, spatial data gets treated like disposable scratch paper. Floor plans are drawn, archived as static “artifacts,” […]
Getting Ready for AI – Part 5 – The Real History of Modern AI
In our previous piece, Process Discovery is Your Real AI Strategy, we established a core operational reality: AI is not merely a software procurement exercise. It is a complete operational overhaul. Every retail executive wants the instant magic of enterprise AI. They want to query a store layout, search thousands of locations instantly, and deploy […]
Getting Ready for AI – Part 4 – Process Discovery is your real AI Strategy
Welcome to Part 4 of our series: Getting Ready for AI. In our previous posts, we established why store data must shift from static artifacts to dynamic assets, and why your people must be prepared before you touch new technology. Today, we are tackling the operational engine that connects them: your process. When retail leaders […]