Retail turnaround & growth
Retail advice from someone who has spent his life committed to retail.
Levermore Consulting works with retail boards, investors and owner-operators. Mostly when a business needs turning round, sometimes when it's ready to grow. Andrew Levermore has spent forty years in retail across four continents, and he does the work himself.
Senior roles held at
What we do
Four kinds of work.
Turnaround is the bulk of it. The rest tends to follow on: once a business is trading properly again, the conversation moves to growth, and often to who's going to run it.
Retail turnaround
When a business is losing money or losing customers, the causes are rarely exotic. Margin, range, stock, cost, people. They go wrong quietly and then all at once. The work is finding which of them is actually doing the damage, and getting it fixed while there's still cash to fix it with.
- 90-day diagnostic across trading, margin, stock and cost
- Range, space and markdown reset
- Store portfolio and format review
- Interim chief executive or COO through the recovery
Growth and expansion
For retailers with a format that works and the ambition to take it further. Andrew has opened and scaled chains in markets where the standard European playbook doesn't survive contact with the ground.
- New market entry and format selection
- Rollout planning and operating model
- Buying, merchandising and supply chain build-out
- Online and marketplace strategy
Investor and board advisory
For private equity, family offices and boards with retail in the portfolio. An operator's read on whether the plan is real, whether the management team can carry it, and what the first year ought to look like.
- Commercial and operational due diligence
- Value creation planning after investment
- Non-executive and advisory board roles
- Assessment of the management team
People and leadership
Ask Andrew what made the good years good and he'll talk about the people he hired. Coaching and team-building run through every engagement, and stand on their own where that's what's needed.
- Coaching and mentoring for senior retail leaders
- Succession planning and building bench strength
- Senior retail search, in partnership with HGA Group
- Structuring head office and store operations
Who you'd be working with
Andrew Levermore
Andrew has spent his working life in retail, from trainee to CEO. Large chains, in demanding markets, usually at a point when something needed sorting out.
He learned to buy before he learned to run anything, as Divisional Buying Director at House of Fraser and then Divisional Buying Manager at Makro. He went to India as Chief Executive of HyperCITY, where he introduced the country's first hypermarket format and took it from conception to nineteen stores, returned to South Africa as Group Director of Retail Operations at Woolworths, and went back to India as Chief Operating Officer for Walmart. He then took the chief executive job at Edgars, running the business across Southern Africa, before moving to Indonesia as Chief Operating Officer of Matahari. Most recently he led the recovery of an athleisure fashion chain back to profitability.
Retail travels badly. A format that works in Cape Town needs real surgery before it works in Mumbai, and the bits that break are almost never the bits anyone worried about beforehand. Andrew has got that wrong and then got it right in four different markets, which is most of what he brings to a client.
He also advises investors and boards through Sango Capital and BRANTU, and works with the HGA Group on senior retail appointments across Africa.
Ask him what made the difference over forty years and the answer is always the same, and slightly unsatisfying: he picked good people and then let them get on with it.
The same thinking applies to the work now. Forty years in the industry has built a deep network of people who know more than he does about one thing or another, or are simply better at it. If your problem is one of those, he will say so and bring in the person who should be doing it.
How the work goes
What to expect.
There's no standing team to keep busy and no methodology to sell. You get Andrew's time, applied to the problem, in this order.
Perform a diagnostic
An honest read of where the business actually stands: sales, margin, stock, cost, range, people. Done in the shops and the distribution centre rather than the boardroom, because that is where the answer usually is.
Motivate the people
Nothing else moves until the team believes it can be fixed. That means telling them the truth about where the business stands, being clear about what happens next, and backing the good people who are already there.
Fix the product
Customers come back for the product or they don't come back at all. Range, quality, price and availability get sorted first, because everything after this is decoration if the product is wrong.
Fix the stores
Standards, layout, stock on the shelf, staff on the floor. A good range in a badly run shop still loses money, and customers notice the shop long before they notice the strategy.
Tell the customers
Only once the product and the stores are right, invest in inviting customers back. Marketing a business that isn't ready simply spreads the bad news faster.
Localise the format and the product
What works on a high street in London won't work unaltered in Johannesburg, Mumbai or Jakarta. Forty years of trading across four continents is forty years of learning where the joins are, and of adapting the format and the range to the market actually in front of you.
“An all-round retail leader and coach. He has always considered picking the right people a major part of his success.”HGA Group
Get in touch
Start with a conversation.
An introductory call is free and usually settles it quickly: whether this is a problem Andrew is the right person for, and what a first piece of work would look like.
Book an introductory call- Emailandrew@levermore.co.za
- LinkedInAndrew Levermore
- BasedSouth Africa, working globally