How can retailers improve operational efficiency?

Why do most retail strategies fail? (~5:20)

Ron: Welcome to season two of Frontline Fridays, brought to you by YOOBIC. I’m your host Ron Thurston, and this season we’re digging deeper into what it really takes to lead on the front lines of retail and hospitality. Together we’ll explore the biggest shifts in frontline work and how smart leaders are navigating them to drive results where it matters most. Each episode you’ll hear from top executives, industry experts and powerhouse operators who share practical tactics you can put to work immediately.

So here’s the big question for today. Why do some strategies look brilliant in the boardroom, but collapse in the store? And more importantly, what can leaders do to close the gap?

My guest today is Kevin Ertell, founder of Mistere Advisory and author of an upcoming book, The Strategy Trap: Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right. Kevin’s career spans global retail operations at Nike, Sur La Table, Borders and Tower Records. His new framework, the Six Cs of Execution, is built to help leaders turn ambition into action, and to make sure strategies actually show up in stores, not just on slide decks.

Kevin, welcome to Frontline Fridays. Good to see you.

Kevin: Ron, good to see you my friend.

Ron: You have this incredible background with these brands that I introduced you with briefly, but in the spirit of this book that you’ve written, I’d love to have you go through a bit more of your background, and why it felt like this was the right time to write a book about execution.

Kevin: I started on the front lines. I started as a clerk at Tower Records. Greatest job ever. Tower was so formative for me. I started on the front line, I worked with customers every day, I knew the ins and outs of retail, and Tower was a company that believed in promoting within. So I was at Tower for 20 years. I started as a clerk and I left as a senior vice president. It was a great ride, and being around music all the time was amazing.

After Tower I went to other places. I was at Borders, where I ran Borders.com and the Borders loyalty program. I was at a company called Online Shoes as the CMO. I was at Sur La Table, where I led digital, tech and marketing. And I spent seven years at Nike, in a few different roles. Initially leading the digital business for the running category, then global digital operations, and the last job I had there was global retail operations. So a full circle back to the stores again, before I went off and started my own consulting business.

Ron: And that’s relatively recent.

Kevin: I left Nike at the end of 2023 and started the business a few months later. It’s called Mistere Advisory, and I help companies with strategic execution, as well as executive coaching and advising.

Ron: Your background across multiple parts of our industry is the part I find most interesting, because you had marketing, product, stores, and growing up in stores. I often reflect that my own skillset today wouldn’t be the same had I not grown up in stores.

Kevin: The experience you get as a store manager is such valuable experience. I think any corporation anywhere should hire store managers from retail, because they’ve been through it all. They know how to manage people, they know how to deal with a crisis, they know how to deal with P&Ls. They’ve done it all, and they’re incredible people.

Ron: Corporate roles don’t prepare you for the breadth of skill sets required to run stores. So tell us why you wrote this book.

Kevin: This is a passion topic for me. The subtitle is why companies fail at execution and how to get it right. It’s pretty well known that most strategies fail, and the number one reason they fail is poor execution. So I really wanted to tackle that. It’s something I’ve always been pretty good at.

I looked out there and I saw lots and lots of books about how to write strategies. We definitely don’t need any more. Relatively few on how to execute, and most of the books I saw on execution were written by academics and consultants. I wanted to bring the operator’s perspective to it. Someone who’s been there and done that.

I also didn’t want it to be just my point of view, so I interviewed a lot of other operators. Over 60 people, to hear everybody’s best practices, and then I tried to pull all of that together into one framework that would be practical and easy to read and understand, but that actually had some how-tos to take away and make a difference.

What did 60 operators say breaks execution? (~6:30)

Ron: Of those 60-plus people, what surprised you? And what didn’t?

Kevin: What surprised me most was that I started by talking to people in retail, the people I knew best, but I would always ask people who they knew who was a good executor. Eventually that took me into all sorts of different industries. What I started to find is that it didn’t matter what the industry was. Some of these truisms were always the same. I was able to pull together a best-practice framework that just works no matter what.

And I think the reason it works no matter what is because this is all about people. The strategy might be an idea about an idea, but the execution is about creating conditions for humans to actually turn that idea into reality. It doesn’t matter what the industry is. The human piece of it is the same.

Ron: The actual output of the work, or the competencies required to do that work within that industry, might be different. But the environments that we thrive in as humans and as leaders, it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling. Look at your career. You sold records, and great footwear, and books. I sold computers and luxury handbags. It isn’t really about what you’re selling. It’s how you’re leading.

Kevin: Exactly.

Ron: So what didn’t surprise you?

Kevin: What didn’t surprise me is that the conversations were always about the people. They weren’t about the strategy stuff, creating moats, where can we win. It was never about that. The best people I talked to, who had the most success in executing, were always talking about people. That didn’t actually surprise me, because that’s been my experience.

What is retail execution in stores? (~8:30)

Ron: So let’s dig into this framework. Walk us through it at a high level, and then we’ll go deep.

Kevin: I break it into two phases: setting the stage, and showtime. And within each of those phases are three Cs, so six Cs total.

The first three Cs are co-creation, clarity and capacity. We’ve got to build this together, that’s co-creation. It’s got to be so clear and simple that everybody can understand it and it’s meaningful to people, that’s clarity. And capacity: we’ve got to have room to actually execute this. We can’t just drop it on top of everything else. So that’s setting the stage.

And then in showtime, it’s communication, coordination and coaching. Communication is everything. We’ve got to stay on top of it, and we as humans are actually pretty bad at communicating with each other, so a real focus on that matters. Then getting very structured, that’s coordination. And coaching is an aspect of leadership. It’s a subset of leadership, but in the context of execution it’s about actively managing the situation, helping motivate people, making sure messages are being delivered, providing the right incentives to create the conditions for people to actually go out and get the work done.

That’s the big picture on the Six Cs.

How can retailers improve operational efficiency? (~9:40)

Ron: Of the first three, setting the stage. Why is that such an important part of successful strategy execution?

Kevin: As I talked to all those people, probably the most common theme I heard was that you have to slow down to speed up. That was very consistent across all of it. And that is not the natural tendency of many executives, who are type A and just want to go.

You have to take some time to set the stage, to set the conditions, so that you can go fast later. What I find is that if you don’t do that, you’re going to slow down later. And when you slow down later, it’s going to be in a much worse way than if you’d just slowed down to begin with.

Ron: And then showtime. You’ve put the work in, you’ve slowed down, but showtime is really where it can speed up.

Kevin: Now you’re starting to activate, but you’ve done this work upfront. Even in the book I talk about how showtime doesn’t mean it’s all done.

I tell the story of Hamilton, of Lin-Manuel Miranda. All the work he did early on. Hamilton didn’t start as a play. In his mind it was going to be a concept album. He had this idea, he co-created, he started to work with lots of people. He shaped it, he turned it into something that was ready to put in front of an audience. But he didn’t put it on Broadway right away. He went off Broadway, he put it out a little bit, he tested it, he worked on it, he refined it.

Strategy is the same way. You’ve got to take that time upfront to even get to that off-Broadway production. That’s maybe the pilots you’re going to do in a few stores. But then you have to build in lots of time within that to ask: is it working? Is it not working? Where do we need to adjust? Really be thinking about this entire process across all those phases, and iterate and iterate until you’re really humming. Then you’re ready for Broadway, and then go for it.

How do retailers standardize store execution? (~16:00)

Ron: I’ve heard you mention this idea of the messy middle. Tell me what that means and where it sits in your framework.

Kevin: You might have some senior executives who have big ideas, and they use their executive language to talk about them. And then you have the frontline, whether that’s retail or any kind of business, where all the action happens and where the customers meet the business.

And in between all of that is the messy middle. That’s where the chaos happens. It’s where the conflicts happen. It’s where communication breaks down.

That’s always been my focus. How do I take all this chaos and create clarity out of it, and bring some structure to it? Really, that’s what the Six Cs are about. They’re all about bringing some order to that messy middle, so that everyone can operate in a much better, more structured way, understand their component in the context of the broader strategy, and therefore make it happen.

Ron: I often think about co-creation as the one that’s most misunderstood in retail. Departments work in silos, because the function of each department is so unique and the skill sets are so specialised. Planning and allocation, finance, buying, marketing, merchandising. The actual ability to co-create, to think about stores, is really complex. I have not seen it done particularly well.

Kevin: No, it’s off and on, which is why most strategies fail. If you do everything within your function, you might be really tight within the function, but execution breaks down in the handoffs. It’s the cross-functional stuff where it all breaks down. You have to be able to look at the big picture, the North Star, have that really clear, and understand the role each function plays in getting there. They can’t do it alone.

Ron: Retail is a perfect example, because you might have all these functions in corporate, but it all comes to life in a store at the same time. To be effective, it has to arrive complete, and you have to understand how it all fits together. And it has to include the store. The store is generally the recipient of this, and their voices are not always included in co-creation.

How can stores boost employee morale? (~14:10)

Kevin: For me, the main points of co-creation are that you get alignment, you get validation, and you get commitment. You need to involve people at every aspect of what’s going to be involved in bringing the strategy to life in order to get there.

There’s something called the IKEA effect. The behavioural scientist Dan Ariely did the study. He had a few groups of people. Some groups got an existing piece of IKEA furniture, and he asked them how much it was worth. Other groups got the box and had to build the furniture, and he asked them what it was worth. The people who built it themselves valued it 63% higher than the people who just got the furniture.

Just the act of being involved in it, and understanding how it came together.

Ron: They had to work for it.

Kevin: They had to work for it, but they created it. And once they created it, they valued it higher. They were much more committed to it.

So the idea of co-creation is not just about getting all the ideas and making sure you have a well-rounded view, which is super important. It’s also a huge part of getting the alignment and the commitment. It plays such a critical role. It’s the first part of the book, because it’s the most important thing.

Ron: We hear the word collaboration a lot, but I think co-creation is a much more valid way to describe it. Collaboration can feel fluffy. “We’re going to collaborate on this.” But “we’re going to co-create something” feels more substantial.

Kevin: It is more substantial. And you get the best out of everybody that way.

How do you apply the Six Cs as a store manager? (16:55)

Ron: If I were a store manager again today, and we picked up your book, walk us through how the framework would apply to frontline leadership.

Kevin: You can take the exact same ideas and put them in really any environment.

You start with co-creation. Maybe it’s this week’s business, this month’s business, what’s going on this quarter, the season. Get the team together. How are we going to pull this together? We know what our objectives are, we know what our targets are for the season. How are we going to get there? What do we know? What do we not know? What have we got to do together to make this happen? Get the team involved in that.

The next is clarity. That’s about those targets. What are the metrics we’re going to use that really matter? Why do they matter, and how do they fit together? How are we setting up our goals, and have we set up goals that cascade? Not just the broad revenue goal, but what’s the goal for each part of the team? Maybe there are some sales associate goals, maybe there are some backroom efficiency goals, because that’s critical to provide fuel to the sales. How do they all fit together?

Capacity is super important in the store. We can’t just load all this on top. If we have new stuff coming in, what is moving out? What are we stopping? What are we reducing? In the book I talk about reduce, reuse, recycle, in terms of the tasks we’re doing, and even the processes we have. Maybe we could reapply something in a different way. And team: who’s got transferable skills that we might move?

And then you really map out communication within the store. Who’s talking to who, about what, and when? What methodology are we using? What systems are we using? Where is that message going to be repeated?

How to improve frontline employee communication (~18:40)

Kevin: In the book I talk about a time at Nike when we had Kara Lawson come in and talk to the team. It was a store managers’ meeting, and Kara Lawson is the coach of the Duke women’s basketball team.

She talked about “early, loud and continuous” as the method of communication she teaches her players. She’d say: I want you to be early. If you see a pick coming, call it out early. And we’re in an arena, so you’ve got to be loud. And continuous, because they might not have heard you the first time.

I thought that’s such an excellent way to think about communicating anything. If you’re in a store: what’s coming? Do it early. Be loud, in every way you can think of to talk about it. And don’t say it once. You have to say it a lot of times for it to stick.

And then coordination matters in a store too. What are our checkpoints? How do we know where things are going?

And last but not least is coaching, which is a critical component of a store leader. How are you, now that you’re in the season, paying attention to everything, motivating people, answering questions, clearing obstacles, making it easier for your team?

You could do that on a single day. You could find ways to navigate all six of those Cs in a single day.

Ron: And if you constantly have that at the top of your head, you’ve got to get through all these Cs every day, you’re going to crush it.

Kevin: You’re going to crush it every day.

Ron: What I love about the simplicity of the Six Cs is that anyone could pick this book up and say, I want to apply this to my work. For frontline hospitality and retail leaders: don’t wait for your district manager to come in and teach you the Six Cs. Pick up the book, test and learn, and try things with your team. You’re not breaking any company policy by testing new leadership skills. That’s how you get better.

The simplicity of great frameworks and models is that they apply to all. You don’t have to be a senior vice president to learn the Six Cs.

Kevin: I’m eager to see what people think of it and how they apply it. I tried to make it very practical, very simple, very easy, with step-by-step stuff in there, so it would be useful out of the gate.

What if store teams say they don’t have time for this? (~21:55)

Ron: Stores are under daily pressure to deliver, and we’re handing them another tool. What’s your response to “it’s something else, something new, I don’t have time for this”?

Kevin: I go right back to slow down to speed up. It’s very easy to get into the cycle of “I don’t have time for this”, but the reason you don’t have time for it is because you keep saying you don’t have time for it. I’ve been there for sure. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in that.

So at some point you have to slow down to speed up. And the payoff is so much better when you get really organised and you set something up where the people on your team can be more effective. When they can be more effective, not only do your business results show it, but they’re much happier.

People are more confident in their work when they know what’s expected of them and they understand how it sits in the context of the broader goals. They understand what success is and how they’re doing on the path to getting there. We all love that. It gives you so much more confidence when you know that. So it’s worth taking the time to do it. You will see the results, without a doubt.

Ron: And the teams that observe their leaders doing what you’re describing, instead of a constant hair-on-fire panic, “we missed the day yesterday and my DM’s calling me”…

I write in Retail Pride that one of the top ten reasons we love retail is that Saturday is the best day of the week. You can almost always predict it. It’s going to be the highest volume. You’re going to have the least distractions, the highest traffic. Everything works in your favour on those big days. If you co-create it and say, what do we need to do today in order to win, how do we do that? Maybe that’s your morning meeting. Maybe you’re trying something different, or you’ve had three call-outs already. You’re in this constant state of co-creation and re-co-creation in order to win, instead of being frustrated and then losing and starting the model over again.

Kevin: I love that idea. Even if you think about it from the perspective of the associate rather than the manager. The manager says to you: here’s what’s going on today, here’s the issues we’ve got to deal with, here’s what success looks like. How do you think we can get there? You’re out there every day. What do you think?

How do you feel about that? You feel great about that. “Let me tell you, I’ve got some ideas.” And then you go and do them. Sometimes they don’t work, but you learn something from that.

Ron: And then that person is engaged in their work and they’re ready to add more. Think back to your career at Tower Records. I’m sure people gave you stretch assignments and asked you to do things you weren’t ready to do.

Kevin: Tower gave you a ton of autonomy in the stores. I was a product buyer. We didn’t have central buying. I bought product.

The first section I bought product in, I was very ambitious as a clerk, and I wanted to move up and do different things. There was an opening to be the classical buyer. I was the only one in the store who knew anything about classical music, and that was only because I’d played in the high school band. So I didn’t really know anything about it, but I wanted to jump into it. And I did.

The manager I had said: I get that you don’t really know anything about classical music, but there was this one customer who came in every Saturday and bought lots of stuff. And he said, I’m going to talk to him and see if he’ll tutor you, and I’ll give him free records for tutoring you.

And that’s what happened. This guy took me through the section, taught me a bunch of stuff. And then all of a sudden I’m buying the classical music for the store. I’m bringing the right product in. The section is growing, it’s doing really well. All because I got the chance, and I was given a chance to co-create it, build the strategy, and make it part of the store.

Ron: When I think about strategy and execution at store level, that’s also about communication. How it looks and feels, when it’s done, how it’s done, and thinking about it from a multi-generational standpoint, because it gets more and more complex as you map it out.

Kevin: That’s the other part about retail. Everyone on your team needs something different, and some are part-time. Field roles are often 40-plus percent part-time. Co-creating with people where this maybe isn’t their chosen career, or it’s one of three jobs, is a real way to engage people. Same in hospitality.

Ron: And that adds a level of complexity that I think is underestimated.

Kevin: It’s challenging, but also kind of a beautiful thing. Someone who has multiple jobs, or multiple parts of their life, brings a diversity to your team that, if you lean into it, gives you ideas you never would have gotten otherwise.

What does getting execution wrong look like? (~27:50)

Ron: Any other stories you want to highlight from the book as we wrap up?

Kevin: I’ll tell one story about something I screwed up, where I didn’t do enough co-creation.

We were building the Borders Rewards loyalty program. We had it out in some test stores, but we had built it top down. We decided what the program was going to be, we did all the training, we sent it out to the stores. And it did not do well in those test stores.

We surveyed both the customers and the booksellers, which is what we called the associates. We found very few customers who liked the program, and the same with the booksellers. But we found some customers who liked it, and it turned out they’d always talked to a bookseller who was enthusiastic about it.

The lightbulb went off for me. I had been a clerk at Tower Records, and I knew that I really didn’t care about corporate priorities when I was on the floor in the store. I cared about the person in front of me. That’s what mattered to me most. And I realised we had totally missed that whole idea.

So we went back and we spent a lot of time out with the booksellers. What’s meaningful to you? What do your customers think matters?

And when we went to launch the program to the whole company, we built two marketing campaigns: one external, and one internal. The internal one, the whole theme was “a program you’ll be proud to share.” That was what we focused on after we got all this feedback from booksellers about what mattered to them. So we put it out there that way. All the training was around that, and here’s why your customer will value it. And it came from them.

It went gangbusters. In the first year of the program we had a stretch goal to get six million members. We didn’t think that was possible, but we were going for it. At the end of that first year we had 16 million members.

Ron: Wow.

Kevin: It’s all because we learned, and we went back, and we had the booksellers really help us drive this thing. We co-created with them, we made it really clear what it was all about, and then they crushed it.

Ron: Without even having the language behind it at the time. The framework, I should say.

Kevin: Thinking back on it, we didn’t have the framework, but we did pretty much the things we needed to do to succeed. Maybe not exactly as I now describe it. I learned a lot more in my career and got better at it. But we did a lot of that.

Ron: Think about the upside. Sixteen million loyalty members. A strategy has such powerful financial benefit.

Kevin: Absolutely. And when you build a strategy, you’ve got to lay out what your success measures are. That’s part of being clear about what this is all about.

What can a retail leader do tomorrow? (~30:25)

Ron: If there were one thing you could share for retail and hospitality leaders that they could do tomorrow to shift the dynamic of their strategy? And strategies can be small. It could be a Saturday strategy, or you’re reinventing a multi-billion dollar brand. We use the word in many different ways. But what’s one thing?

Kevin: Maybe one of the best things you can do is around clarity. Get super clear about the why and the what.

The what here is: what is the expected outcome? What is success? We’ve got to be really clear with our teams about what success looks like. And then explain the why. Why does that matter? Make sure people understand the why.

In the book I talk about getting really clear about those two things, and then delegating the how. The team that’s close to it, they’re now super clear about what success looks like, and super clear about why that matters. You’re in the heart of it. What do you think we can do to get there?

You could do that every single day. You would really get magic out of that.

Where to find Kevin Ertell and The Strategy Trap (31:18)

Ron: Where can people find you and find the book?

Kevin: You can find me on LinkedIn. My business is Mistere Advisory, and the website is mistereadvisory.com. The book is called The Strategy Trap. You can go to strategytrap.com, and the book will be wherever books are sold.

Ron: And it’s out early 2026?

Kevin: It comes out February 3rd, 2026. I’m excited to get my baby out there.

Ron: Take it from someone who has done it a couple of times: it feels great. Thank you, Kevin. Really appreciate your time. This was a pleasure, and congratulations on the book.

Kevin: Thank you, sir. Always a pleasure to talk to you, and always great to talk to your audience and the store frontline folks.

Ron: Execution isn’t the work that happens after the strategy. It is the strategy. Kevin’s Six Cs are more than concepts. They’re the difference between a strategy that gets lost in translation and one that your teams can actually deliver on.

So here’s my challenge for you this week. Don’t just hand your team a list of priorities. Ask things like: do we all understand the why? Do we have the capacity and ability to deliver? And what can we stop doing that will make room for what matters?

This shift toward co-creation can unlock momentum that may be missing in your execution, because successful execution is about doing what matters, together.

Thanks for listening, and a special thanks to YOOBIC, the presenter of Frontline Fridays. YOOBIC is the AI-powered platform that helps retail and hospitality leaders connect, train and empower their teams. Ready to make your frontline your competitive advantage? Visit yoobic.com to learn more.

Until next time, keep leading boldly, and keep co-creating.