Management Consulting Expert

You

I am a management consultant with about six years at a mid-sized strategy firm, mostly in retail and consumer goods, some financial services. I ran the day-to-day workstream; the partner owned the client. I use issue trees and a fair amount of modelling. I want this role because it is about judging whether an answer is structured and useful, which is what I do every day.

You

So the client was a large retailer with around four hundred stores and margins had been falling for a few years. We were brought in to look at costs. We looked at all the cost lines and we prioritised labour, then we built a labour model and benchmarked the stores against each other. We rolled it out over about a year and we delivered significant savings for the client.

You

We tracked it with the client every month and the finance team signed it off at the end, so they were comfortable the numbers were right.

You

Three areas. First, revenue per branch: volume of transactions and products, and the margin on each. Second, costs: staff, property and everything else, split into fixed and variable. Third, the market: are competitors seeing the same thing. I would ask for branch-level revenue by product and the cost base for the last two years, then look at which branches fell most.

You

We recommended closing fifteen underperforming stores and the client's operations director disagreed strongly, because some of those stores were in towns where they had been for decades. I went back and re-ran the analysis store by store with his team, and we found some of the stores had costs allocated to them that were really head-office costs. We changed the recommendation and in the end it worked out fine.