Three companies. Eighteen years. The Same System.
The descriptions below are drawn from my own record. Read the first line of each — they describe the same intervention, two decades and three companies apart.
TELUS CORPORATE RETAIL STORES · VICE PRESIDENT · 2000–2004
What I built
A store management performance model that drove consistent performance across the retail chain, focused on target setting and coaching performance.
What changed
107% of 2001 sales target. 122% of 2001 EBITDA target. Subscriber churn down 57% year over year. Points of distribution up 76% while holding capital spend to 80% of plan. Consistent 20%-plus year-over-year sales growth. Employee engagement up 20% — best in company and best in class, every year, with unprecedented low attrition.
Why it matters
This is the case that answers the question every HR leader is holding but rarely asks — whether a performance push will cost them their people. Here it did the opposite, for five consecutive years.
WOW MOBILE BOUTIQUE · SVP & MANAGING DIRECTOR · 2015–2018
What I built
Non-negotiable operational and sales standards, with rebuilt practices for recruitment, store management, and coaching for performance.
What changed
Sales up 60%. EBITDA up 300%. Store productivity up 60%. Employee turnover down 15%. Industry-leading customer experience at an LTR of 92%.
Why it matters
93 locations, six wireless brands, an outsourced operator without the infrastructure of a large corporation. This is the case that proves the method does not depend on big-company resources.
ROGERS BRANDED RETAIL · VICE PRESIDENT · 2018–2021
What I built
A store management and leadership model to drive consistent performance across the retail chain, focused on target setting, behavioural standards, and coaching performance.
What changed
Productivity up 15%; sales productivity and customer satisfaction up 20% following a reset of workforce management standards.
Why it matters
362 corporately owned stores and more than 3,000 people — the largest and the most recent of the three. This is the case that proves the method holds at scale.
Why Three Matters
One strong result can be timing, context, or a talented individual. Two can still be read as coincidence. Three — from the same components, in three different companies, across eighteen years — is a pattern.
A pattern is the only thing that credibly transfers to an organization I have never seen. That is the whole argument: consistency is a system, not a personality.
These examples are counted in locations because that’s where I spent my career. The problem isn’t retail, and it is not geography.
It appears wherever there are more managers than one person can lead directly — a plant with forty supervisors, a hospital, a claims operation, a contact centre, a head office of three hundred. Same spread, same causes, same fix. The unit that matters is the manager, not the building they sit in.