Managing Unequally, Part 1: Finding The Impact Stores

Identifying the impact stores that skew overall district performance.

In the last article I made the case that you cannot fix an average, and that the real measure of a multi-unit leader is how many stores are hitting expectation, not what the district rolls up to. Here is the story behind why I believe that.

This was back in the early 2000s. Long before video calls or anybody using AI to make sense of a report. I had a district of 18 stores and we were sitting at 85 percent of plan. The district was doing okay in a lot of ways. Good people, good stores, plenty going right. But we were missing plan, and I knew we should not be. I had done well up to that point in my career and I wanted to continue to be someone that “made their plan.” This current situation was not where I expected to be. It felt a bit overwhelming.

When every report starts to look the same

Here is what that period actually felt like, and it may be familiar to many other leaders. Every day I looked at the same reports. Sales, comps, the usual metrics. And after a while it all started to run together. You look at the district number, you feel that low-grade frustration, and you cannot quite put your finger on it. You know you are doing a lot of the right things. You have several stores that are performing great. And still the number will not move.

So you try something. Then you try something else. You push a little harder on the thing that seems most broken this week. Next week you push somewhere else. You are busy and working hard each day. But you are managing the whole number, and the aggregate is not a thing you can actually reach out and fix, especially not quickly.

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.” — Confucius

The moment it clicked

What broke the pattern was stepping back. Instead of looking at the business as a day or a week, I zoomed all the way out and looked at it year to date. Same information. Different frame. And it just clicked.

Four stores. Four of my eighteen were the bottom performers, and they were dragging the entire district down. Time for a little math. I added up their dollars missed to plan and compared it to the district's total miss.

Those four stores were almost the entire miss.

Then I looked a little further and found two more. Not nearly as bad, but not carrying their weight either. Sitting just under where they should have been. Six stores. And, guess what… If those six stores just got back to plan, or even close to plan, the district would be over plan. Because my strong stores were already performing well, and as long as they kept doing what they were doing, they would carry us up and over the line.

I had been treating this as a district-wide problem, spreading myself and the approach across everyone. In reality, it was a six-store problem.

Suddenly, this seemed much more manageable.

The part I am not proud of

I am going to pause here for a moment, because I think this is where most of the value is for anybody reading this. You have to be willing to be honest with yourself when you start taking steps back. Dismiss the pride, the expended effort, the relationships, and the best of intentions. Look closely at what the numbers are really telling you and match it to your honest gut feelings as well.

At least two or three of those stores were not surprises.

I knew those managers were struggling. I had been working with them. It was on my list. But I had never connected what I knew about those individuals to what was happening to my district number. You can be aware of a weakness and still completely underestimate its weight. The things I already knew were not going well in those stores were having an oversized effect on the entire district. I had not noticed it until I allowed myself to take that step back and look at things through a fresh lens.

There is also a time management component hiding in this story. I thought I was pretty good about rotating through the district. I saw my team regularly. But there were stores, especially the outlying ones, that I just did not get to as often. They were good stores, so I would call them and move on. And that carried over to the other stores as well. Location, routine, and sometimes convenience influenced my schedule more than it should have.

What I decided to do about it

Once I could see it, the decision was simple. I was going to go spend real time in those stores. And I want to be very clear about what that did and did not mean, because it is easy to misinterpret the next part. I did not work harder. I did not work longer. I did not add hours to my week or start answering email at midnight. (I am not sure I could have.) I spent the same time differently.

This is the point here. Your time is a fixed budget. Right now, most of that budget is probably being spent on a rotation, or on the stores that end up fitting neatly together for travel. This is very different from spending it where it will move your number. Six of my stores were sitting on the entire gap between where we were and where we needed to be. So that is where the time was going to go.

Why this is the wrong month to skip this

If you are reading this heading into the fourth quarter, this matters more than it did in March. Q4 is where your full-year P&L gets decided. Your performance metrics, your bonus, your team's bonus. And there is a version of the next few weeks where you keep staring at your district number, keep pushing on whatever feels loudest, and roll into January telling a story about why you came up short. It is also easy to get caught up in the daily scurry of planning for the holiday season, concentrating on only the merchandising and freight flow components that impact stores.

However, there is another version where you take one afternoon, pull your year-to-date numbers by store, and find out that the difference between missing and making your year is sitting in four or five buildings. It is not too late to make a real difference in your results. But you cannot do it by managing the average.

Taking action before part 2 of the story

• Pull your year-to-date results by store. Not the district roll-up. Store by store.

• Rank them by dollars missed to plan. Not percentage. Dollars, because a large store missing by three points can outweigh a small store missing by ten.

• Then add up the misses from the bottom few and compare that number to your total district gap.

I think a lot of you are going to find what I found. That most of your problem lives in a handful of buildings, and that your 18-store problem has been a six-store problem the whole time.

In the next article, Part 2, I will walk you through what I actually did once I got into those stores. I share more about what the conversations sounded like, what happened with the manager who did not make it, and the part that surprised me most…

Do you know which stores are having the biggest impact on your district right now?

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