The Wisdom Wall

“my experience is there has never been a company that has gone from high low pricing to everyday low pricing that, that succeeded.”

“Liquidity is number one. So that, because basically if you don't have sufficient liquidity to buy you the time to fix the company, you know, you can have the greatest team in the world. You can have a great plan, but you won't be able to make it happen.”

“You can't do more than four or five things at the same time and get the organization to do it. You've got to really narrow it and say, okay, here's the 80%, I call it the 80% solution. Here's the four or five things we need to do to get 80% of the way there. And all the other to-dos, all right, are, are nice to have,…”

“it's kind of like the, the, the, the thing is, is that if this company went out of business tomorrow, would anybody care? And if the answer is no, then it's not a keeper.”

“The companies, the retail companies that are, that are in the sort of the middle, you know, and a lot of those department store companies are there are very vulnerable today because what's working with consumers as luxury, of course, because there's people always have money and off price or value price retailers.”

“But very often what I've seen is that the most profitable stores can also have the highest rent per square foot because, you know, there's a direct relationship between that and, you know, traffic and sales.”

“if you're really having difficulties, then, you know, the management always feels, oh, all we have to do is do what we're doing better and we'll be okay. But the answer really is, is that no, you've got to start doing things differently, all right, because what you're doing hasn't worked.”

“if you've got a customer that's, you know, lower middle income and lower income custom, uh, customers who have difficulty accessing credit, uh, one of the things that, that gives you an immediate Boost is if you, if you put in, uh, one of the buy now, pay later companies like Klarna or Afterpay, et cetera, because what…”

“And it's a perfect example for retailers and store managers, all right? Is that you might have a store that's in a good location and it's not performing and you know the store manager needs to be replaced and you bring in a new store manager and who's really, you know, knows what they're doing. It's almost…”

“when you tell people, most people, we need your help, all right, they usually respond because they appreciate the honesty and the fact that you're in a partnership, right? You've got all these partnerships with all different stakeholders, and when you do that, uh, you'll get usually a good response. If, If they believe…”

“the other thing too about their model is, is that the velocity of their sales is fantastic. So basically, It gets on the shelf and is sold probably most of the time before they have to pay the vendor. So that, so from a cashflow perspective, it's, it's an incredible thing.”

“the hardest thing is really, uh, um, Really being able to evaluate, uh, the, the chances of success of the company. So that's the number one thing you have to do because you have to say to yourself, realistically, can you restructure a company? Can you, uh, turn it around or not? So that's number one. And that's tough…”