Outdoor Store
The Management One® charter concept is working very well. Every charter implemented produced a positive outcome.

This two store operation also has a significant internet business. The management was in a state of transition to younger managers that were not owners. Winning@Business™ was implemented to better effect this transition. The process was successful in determining which of these individuals was commited to the business for the long term. In addition several teams were chartered that resulted in significant benefit to the business. The vision of the business and the strategy were important in determining the true direction of the current owners which was different than what they initially believed.

Initially they wanted to drive annual growth to around the +25% range, and since the charter team work the average growth rate for each month has been 20%. Prior to the charter work, the average growth rate had been an anemic 6%.

They have created several charters to bring payroll under control. The target was set for payroll at 16% of sales (not including payroll taxes, health, etc). Recently that payroll number had been drifting steadily upwards, hitting an all time high of 17.7% of trailing 12 month sales a few months ago. The charter work started to take root about six weeks ago, and since then payroll has come down to 17.5% for the trailing 12 months, is still dropping, and has actually been between 15% and 16% of the sales over the latest six weeks. The owner is now very confident that they will gain firm control of payroll.

The buying department is working a charter around two issues: inventory turns and profit margin. Even before they finished their initial reports, they started to see improvements in both areas, especially turns. The steering team set the turns target at 3.0, last month They came in at 2.9. The inventory is healthier than it has ever been. Especially significant is that the "sale tunnel" load is steadily shrinking as a result of various charter-inspired efforts. The company had reached the unhappy point where the standing value in the sale tunnel had been hovering around $300k — today it is $237k and continues to drop about $2k a week. The buyers are implementing changes that will definitely result in less inventory going into the tunnel at the end of the selling season. An all the while margins have actually been a little higher than has been the case for the past few years.

The charter concept is working very well. Without exception every charter we've implemented has produced a positive outcome, and among the staff at large there has been complete buy-in to this way of problem solving. Most everyone now hopes they get to participate in a charter.