Retail Acumen is changing…

I wanted to explain why the new logo visible here that does not marry up with that on the primary website (www.retailacumen.com). The reason is that for a long time now, well over 12 months, I’ve been brewing a whole new focus and service offering for Retail Acumen. I’ve had a whole new visual identify created, and at long last I’m beginning to extract all the ideas from my head and into the cohesive service offering that will be announced soon!

The old way of engaging consultants is dying out…

I realised a long time ago, provoked by the demise of 2 of my biggest clients, Woolworths & later Thresher, that the retail market was changing forever. That the old way of engaging consultants (never ending projects, massive day rates, limited evidence of ROI… you know the story…) was dying out. With so many redundancies the market was suddenly awash with experienced retailers, willing to offer themselves available for contract work, on-demand, to support projects and to supplement the now much leaner permanent teams that remained… a very flexible and appropriate resourcing model for the sector at this time – lower risk, considerably lower cost and arguably of no noticeable difference in quality.

What does this mean? What is the future for “consultants”…

Since I started the business I have never really wanted to be called a “consultant” – when I was on the retailer side, working on projects with some of the biggest consultancies in the world, I knew that whilst each individual consultant was a decent person and typically highly intelligent and hard working, as a collective we despised them! Being known as an experienced practitioner, an ex-retailer myself (and the same is true for my team) has always been really important to me. I never wanted to be accused of borrowing someone’s watch to tell them the time…

Where we are today I think this is more true than ever before – I am certain there is not a single person working in a retail business today who doesn’t worry about their future – the market has been hit so hard by the global economic downturn that surely no one is resting on their laurels?

So, I believe that the traditional consulting model will only be tolerated by a few, with the deepest pockets or the most desperate need. Beyond that I don’t believe there is any appetite for engaging consultants in the “old way”.

Retail Acumen – Doing what we do best…

Given my feelings about the future for consulting, the market and the needs / wants of retailers I set about rethinking what I was offering.

There were a few case studies with clients that really stood out for me – where we’d made a significant difference. The common theme had been that we’d been able to approach a very specific business objective, turn around a massive amount of analysis very quickly, and present insights that enabled the retail client to focus in on the activities that gave them the best results for the least efforts.

What was also important about these case studies was they existed within longer term engagements, but hand on heart, if we’d ONLY delivered these specific activities the client would probably have had 80% of the ROI that we delivered… and guess what? It was coming from 20% of the time they were buying. (P.S – Even so, I must stress, the clients were typically more than satisfied and felt the investment in our time was very well made – which makes me wonder exactly how much wastage there really is on consultants!)

Trusted Experts, Exceptional Results…

The old Retail Acumen strap-line was “trusted experts, exceptional results” – these were based on values that were incredibly important to me and yet reflecting on this revelation that only 20% of our time on projects was delivering 80% of the ROI overall I knew I needed to fine tune to ONLY deliver the elements which were represented by that 20% – thereby massively accelerating my client’s ROI and ensuring there was no investment in our time which was anything other than value-adding. This way, and only this way, did I feel that as a business we won the right to call ourselves trusted or to claim that we delivered exceptional results.

Retail Acumen - Rapid ROI through detailed analyses, delivering insights into performance that you can act on…

So, the old website at http://www.retailacumen.com will soon transform completely! In the meantime this blog will be the platform for the early release of information about the new products and services.

These will be focused around the following retail business objectives – which all support each other and which can be tackled one at a time, so as to realise ROI from each step…

• Increasing Sales
• Improving Return on Space
• Intensification of Assortment
• Optimisation of Supply Chain

I would really welcome your views, the content is literally only just coming together (as I have explained it has been mulling in my head for a long time) so it would be incredibly valuable to get input from others sooner than later, and for sure before I invest in a new stand and various marketing materials for The Retail Conference

I look forward to reading your feedback.

Oh – 1 more thing – do please follow the Retail Acumen company pages here on linkedin - http://www.linkedin.com/company/retail-acumen, join the Retail Acumenlinkedin group - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=1952600&trk=anet_ug_grppro and follow us on twitter -http://www.twitter.com/retailacumen

Thank you for reading and I look forward to delivering those exceptional results for your business in the future.

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