Our client, a global oil producer, wanted to improve its convenience retailing profitability in Europe where their turnover was rising but profits were stagnant or declining.

We were asked to help them design and implement an approach to improving profitability that would engage the local teams to take ownership of the challenges and to transfer skills to the core project team and to the local country teams.

We worked as a joint client/Egremont team to deliver an approach called hothousing.  This is a fast-paced method of delivering quick sales and profit growth from any part of an organisation that can be ring-fenced while the team experiments. A cross-functional team is trained in new change and management skills, allowed to experiment and expected to work on the big opportunities for performance improvement.  This performance improvement is measured and creates the business case for rolling out the new ways of working.

We worked in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Germany with head office functions and the stores and once this phase was completed and our team left, , the client team continued to roll out the approach across Europe.

Net income after tax doubled or tripled for each country, 30% of products were taken out and sales increased by 10%.  Staff turnover was halved and the typical payback ratio by country was 7:1.