Store Operations Interview Series

Julian Mills is the founder of Quorso, a high-growth software company used by some of the world's largest retailers to simplify daily work for their District & Store Managers. I caught up with him after the Store Operations Council meeting.

What is the greatest challenge facing retail stores today?

Store and District Leaders are critical for coaching store teams, enforcing customer standards, and embedding company strategy. But 63% intend to leave their job in the next 3-6 months because they’ve lost control of their day-to-day lives, (according to a?recent McKinsey survey).?

Information overload and top-down micromanagement are burning out the next generation of retail leaders and having a catastrophic impact on both culture and profit.?

Saving Store and District Leaders from exhaustion, disillusionment and churn is the most critical issue facing enterprise retailers today.?

What’s causing Field Leader burnout?

The data explosion and advances in omnichannel have led to information overload. Field Leaders receive 30+ BI reports/dashboards per week and spend 6+ hours analyzing it all because only 0.4% is actually relevant to them.?

At the same time, increased store complexity is being tackled by micromanagement. Task Management tools give Field Leaders 200+ weekly actions to complete. Their roles have become 100% about compliance and 0% about fun.?

This combination of BI and Task Management technology is not suitable for modern retail and is making teams ineffective, businesses bureaucratic and performance sluggish.?

How are leading retailers doing things differently?

?Dollar General, who added 1,100 new stores to their 18,000+ network this year, have tackled this problem head on. They’ve ditched endless reports and tasks in favor of Quorso’s smart, guided, data-driven actions for each manager.?

This streamlining and prioritizing of daily work has improved the KPI ranking of stores using Quorso by 8 places and increased their sales by $2,900 a month (=0.7%). Managers are completing 27% more of their standards-related tasks on time and spending 4.2 hours less on analysis and admin. Instead they are using this time for more valuable activities, like coaching teams and delighting customers, and their stores all now rank in the top 50% for Customer Satisfaction.

Zak Brining, SVP, Corporate Store Operations, explains "Investing in District Managers and other Field Leaders is critical to Dollar General's success. Quorso is unique in the marketplace. It combines best-in-class analytics to identify personal priorities for each manager, with an intuitive workflow that guides them to take the right actions in seconds."

Hear more?from Dollar General’s District Managers.??

What might be the big store operations story for 2023?

How world leading retailers are turning their Field Leaders from burnt-out robots into laser-focused superheroes!

Q5. Will we see you at the NRF show?

Yes! Level 1, Booth 962, opposite the Big Ideas stage.?