For private equity

You own a chain valued below what you paid. We'll direct the turnaround.

Nobody on your staff has to supervise the operator. We find the fixes in the chain's own sales history, put a dollar range on each fix, and give you a plan to press the operator to implement.

Where sponsors get stuck

What the operator's reports can't tell you

You bought the chain with a plan to grow it. A few quarters in, the plan hasn't landed, and the operator's explanation is a list: fuel prices, weather, a new competitor, a soft category. Some of that's true. The reports you get can't tell you how much.

Those reports rank stores against their peers or against the chain average, and that ranking misleads in both directions. A store on a busy corner can beat its peer benchmark every month while running a mediocre operation, because the location is doing the work. Another store can slip 1% in the year a competitor opens nearby. Every standard metric calls that a decline. We call it the best-run site in the chain, because our prediction for that store, given the new competitor, was a 10% loss.

Both stores are illustrations.

Finding the real problems means reading every store against what that store should be selling. Few sponsors have someone on staff with the time to do it, and hiring someone to supervise the operator is slow and expensive. Testing each idea in a handful of stores takes 3 to 6 months per question, and a turnaround needs answers to several.

What you need is a short list of fixes, sized by someone other than the operator, with a range on each, so you can press the operator to put them in and then check the result. When you sell, the same record shows the buyer and your own investors that the gains came from those fixes rather than from changes across the whole category.

Why this suits a sponsor

No experiment to run. We work from the chain's historical sales record, building what each store would have sold had a given change never been made. That means no holdout stores and nothing to install. It's faster than a 3-to-6-month test-and-learn program, and it's hands-off for you.
Specific fixes, not a diagnosis. You get the changes to make and the stores to make them at, each with a dollar figure attached.
A range on every number. Every estimate comes with a confidence interval that bounds how wrong it can be, so you see the low end before you commit money.

The methods are published ones: difference-in-differences, synthetic control and Bayesian structural time series. What we bring is years of trial and error with them, including where each method fails and the checks that catch those failures before a number reaches you.

What a turnaround engagement covers

What customers say is wrong at each store, read from the text of their reviews
What the changes the chain already made actually returned, measured against what those stores would have sold had the changes never gone in
The fixes that pay at each store, ranked by what they're worth, each with a range
Which stores get capital first, which come off the list, and what has to change at the rest
Whether each store actually put each fix in, read from the register and from photos taken in the store
Every store measured each week against what it should be selling, so you can see whether the gains hold

You take the plan to the operator. We track whether it's being run and whether it's working.

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How it's priced

Quoted to the engagement, scoped to the number of sites and the fixes in play, and agreed before any work starts
Billed monthly across the engagement rather than as a single up-front fee
Weekly measurement at every site continues after the fixes go in, billed per site per month

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