Over £1m online in the first year, and a stock-take that stopped taking a week.
An independent footwear retailer with several stores, growing faster than the systems underneath it. I rebuilt the operational side first, then went back and did the same for the people side. Two projects, one business, and the second only worked because the first one had already happened.
The situation
Stock was the immediate problem. Nobody could say with confidence what was in the business, where it was, or what had stopped selling months ago. Stock-takes ate a week at a time and were out of date by the time they finished. Anything that didn't sell quietly turned into money sitting on a shelf.
Underneath that sat a second problem nobody had framed as one: rotas, onboarding and training were all being done by hand, by managers, in the gaps between serving customers. Every new starter was a fresh improvisation. Every week's rota was hours of somebody's evening.
Both are the same failure in different clothes. The business had grown past the point where you can hold it in your head, and nothing had been built to take over.
Phase one: the stock
- Vend POS rolled out across the estate
- DEAR inventory management, so stock existed in one place rather than several
- Barcode scanning end to end, replacing counts done by eye
- WordPress e-commerce, properly wired to the stock system
Phase two: the people
- Deputy for rotas and time tracking
- An onboarding process that survives a busy Saturday
- Training built around the way the shop floor actually runs
- HR documentation the managers could use without ringing head office
Where it got to
The stock system paid for itself in recovered inventory before the e-commerce side had finished paying off. The HR work is harder to put a number on, but the managers got their evenings back, and the business was stable enough to open two more stores.
online sales in the first year
of dead stock recovered
to complete a stock-take
to build the weekly rota
Outgrown your systems?
That's most of what I do. Start with the diagnostic and we'll work out what's first.