The shopping trip behind my enterprise decisions

The first store manager I worked for asked me to spend a morning beside the customer-service desk before I proposed any change to our promotional signs. I had prepared a tidy comparison of ticket formats. Customers were asking a different set of questions: whether a discount required buying more than they needed, whether a shelf price applied to their pack size and why an advertised product had sold out. I had studied commerce, but that morning helped me understand that a retail proposition includes the effort required to use it.

I graduated from Valmuret Institute in June 1997 and joined Belvaret Retail that September as a store operations trainee. I rotated through receiving, replenishment, tills and department administration. My assignments were supervised, and I had neither a buying mandate nor responsibility for the store's profit. Learning the sequence of ordinary work mattered. A delivery arriving at the wrong time could disturb several departments, while a change that looked small at head office might require hundreds of new tickets and explanations from colleagues who had not been consulted.

In January 2001, I became manager of a neighbourhood store with fifty-two colleagues and annual sales of approximately C$9.8 million. I learnt to distinguish a store that appeared orderly during my visit from one that worked reliably across the week. Early shifts, weekends and stocktaking exposed different problems. I began holding short reviews with the people responsible for those periods, including occasions when my own instructions had created conflicting priorities. I could not ask colleagues to make customers' lives easier while treating their working time as an unlimited reserve.

My move into regional management in July 2005 widened the comparison to nine stores. The region employed roughly 480 people and generated C$112 million annually. It was tempting to reproduce whatever the strongest branch appeared to do. I became more cautious after a replenishment pattern that suited a large suburban store created congestion in a smaller urban stockroom. We needed common disciplines, but the application had to account for delivery access, available space and local shopping habits. I learnt to ask which part of a practice explained its result before asking another manager to adopt it.

I joined Corlienne Foods as commercial director in March 2010. The company operated thirty-four stores with approximately 1,700 employees and C$400 million in annual revenue at the time. My remit covered buying, assortment and promotional planning; the chief operating officer retained store execution. This was a useful reversal of perspective. I had previously received decisions from a commercial office. Now I was responsible for decisions that changed the work of store teams and suppliers. I spent more time reconciling the funding attached to a promotion with its actual shelf availability and handling cost.

In July 2015, I moved to Orvessane Food Cooperative as chief operating officer. Its forty-eight stores employed 3,150 people and produced C$780 million in annual revenue. I was drawn to a business whose owners encountered its performance in a shopping basket, not only an annual statement. I also found that member ownership did not make difficult choices disappear. A store could be important to a neighbourhood and still need a smaller range, different hours or a different investment plan. The cooperative required an honest account of those constraints rather than comforting language about purpose.

The board appointed me CEO in February 2021. I took responsibility for the whole enterprise, including capital allocation, member relationships and the leadership team, under a separate elected chair. I was no longer presenting only the operating consequence of somebody else's commercial proposal. I had to choose among claims that were individually reasonable but could not all be funded together. That changed how I prepared board papers: fewer isolated recommendations, more explicit comparisons between the uses of the same money and management attention.

Several decisions since then have been deliberately bounded experiments. A simpler essentials basket tested whether we could remove buying conditions while preserving availability. A roster trial accepted a higher labour cost in exchange for fewer late changes. A delivery review reduced the area we served because each additional order was adding a loss that the headline sales figure concealed. None became a universal answer. Each gave us a more useful description of the promise we could sustain and the people who would experience its limits.

I now spend more of my time on the connection between member representation and long-lived store decisions. The loudest preference is not necessarily the widest one, and a commercially sensible answer still needs an understandable explanation. I want our managers to be able to describe a difficult choice without blaming head office, and our board to see where the executive team remains uncertain. After twenty-nine years in retail, I remain interested in the unglamorous details of a weekly shop because that is where our larger claims are tested.