The situation
Around thirty stores, sitting alongside a much larger supply operation. The bulk of the group's revenue came from elsewhere, which meant the shops had grown up as a service rather than as a business in their own right.
Nobody was running them like retail, because nobody had ever needed to.
The brief was to give the leadership team an outside view they could build a roadmap on, and to say the things that were true rather than the things that were comfortable.
What I did
Nine stores in two days, unannounced. An announced visit shows you the business a team can produce for a visitor. It does not show you the one a customer meets.
I reviewed the online operation from the customer's side rather than the company's. And I went looking for the commercial reporting, which turned into a finding of its own: the business could not easily say what it made, by site, by category, this month.
The report set out where to invest, what to fix, what to let go of, and in what order.
What changed
Two years on, the business has had its strongest year ever in stores, with double-digit growth.
Online sales are up 32% year on year alongside them, and pulling people through the doors rather than away from them. The estate has been ranked and reshaped. Store standards have visibly changed.
Both of the senior appointments recommended in the review, one commercial and one digital, were made.
What made the difference
Not the review. Plenty of businesses commission one of those.
A plan nobody owns on Monday morning is a document.
They put the capability in place before they chased the growth.
And they stopped treating their channels as competitors for the same customer.
If you have a strategy sitting in a drawer, the question isn't whether it was any good. It's who owns it.