Operations turnarounds for multi-location retail & food

Every store, profitable inside its four walls.

Four Walls is led by an operator with 20+ years running stores, districts and multi-state regions for national grocers and big-box retailers. We help chains of 5 to 500 locations fix labor, cost of goods and shrink, one store at a time.

Take the free Scorecard (5 min) Request a Diagnostic

Not sure where you're leaking? The Four-Wall Scorecard takes 5 minutes and shows your weakest wall.

Operator experience

In operations20+ yearsGrocery, big-box and specialty retail, from assistant manager to regional leader.

Led at once50+ storesMulti-state regions with thousands of team members.

Openings10+ storesOpened on a written playbook, from hiring plan to first-month P&L.

LanguagesEN · ESBilingual frontline training and store coaching.

Where stores leak money

Sales are up. Profit isn't.

Most chains read the top line of the P&L and stop. The money is usually lost further down, in four places.

LaborSchedules built around who's available, not when customers walk in. Overtime in one store, idle hours in the next.
Cost of goodsStores order by feel, with no set stock levels. Waste and markdowns quietly eat the margin.
ShrinkMost of it isn't theft. It's receiving errors, spoilage and markdowns that nobody tracks.
New-store openingsHiring, training and ordering start too late, so new stores take months to break even.

How we work together

Start small. Expand once it's working.

Start here

Four-Wall Diagnostic

From $5,000

Two weeks reviewing your store P&Ls, labor, cost of goods and shrink. You get a ranked list of fixes for the next 90 days.

5x guarantee: we find at least five times the fee in annual margin, or you don't pay.

Then

Turnaround project

From $35,000

8 to 12 weeks in your stores putting the fixes in place: labor model, order levels, scorecards and coaching for field leaders.

Ongoing

Fractional Head of Operations

From $10,000/month

One to two days a week as your operations leader, until you're ready to hire one full time.

See all services and pricing

Free · 10 questions · 5 minutes

Which of your four walls is leaking money?

Score your chain on labor, cost of goods, shrink, and openings & leadership. You'll see your weakest wall and the first fix, right on the page.

Take the Scorecard

The Store Walk

One store fix, every other Tuesday.

Practical operations ideas from 20+ years of store walks. Each one is short enough to read before your first visit of the day.

Free. First issue coming soon. Unsubscribe anytime.

Services & pricing

Fixed scope. One quote. Results you can measure.

Every engagement starts with your numbers and ends with a system your team runs without us. You get one fixed quote before we start; the ranges below show where it lands by chain size.

Entry offer

Four-Wall Diagnostic

$5,000–15,000

We review your store P&Ls, schedules, ordering and shrink reports, then walk your stores. You get a ranked list of fixes with the dollar value of each.

Price: $5,000–10,000 for under 20 locations; $10,000–15,000 for 20 or more
Timeline: 2 weeks
Guarantee: If the Diagnostic doesn't identify at least 5x its fee in annual margin improvement, you don't pay for it.
Credit: The Diagnostic fee is credited in full toward a turnaround project started within 60 days
You get: Store-by-store P&L review (sampled for chains over 50 stores), store walk notes, a 90-day plan ranked by dollar impact
Best for: Chains that know margins are slipping but not exactly where
Sample: See what the findings look like

Turnaround

Margin & labor turnaround

$35,000–150,000

We rebuild schedules around traffic, set order levels for every store, and give field leaders one scorecard to run their stores by.

Price: $35,000–75,000 for chains under $20M in sales; $60,000–150,000 for larger chains
Option: Tie part of the fee to results, such as a share of the first year's margin gain above an agreed baseline
Timeline: 8–12 weeks
You get: Labor model, order levels, store scorecard, weekly P&L review routine, field leader coaching
Best for: Chains with negative or flat store margins

Growth

New-store opening playbook

$25,000–50,000

A repeatable plan for opening stores that make money in their first month: hiring, training, opening order levels and the first 90 days of KPIs.

Timeline: 6–10 weeks, built around your next opening
You get: Opening timeline, staffing plan, training plan, first-90-day scorecard
Best for: Brands opening 2 or more stores in the next year

Loss prevention

Shrink reduction program

$20,000–40,000

We find where product goes missing (receiving, spoilage, markdowns or theft) and fix the processes behind it.

Timeline: 6–8 weeks
You get: Shrink audit, process fixes, bilingual staff training, monthly tracking
Best for: Grocery and food chains with shrink above plan

Ongoing

Fractional Head of Operations

$10,000–24,000/month

A senior operator acts as your operations leader one or two days a week: running the weekly P&L review, coaching district managers and leading store openings.

Price: $10,000–12,000/month for 1 day a week; $18,000–24,000/month for 2 days a week
Commitment: 3-month minimum
You get: A senior operator on your leadership team without a full-time salary
Best for: Private-equity-backed and founder-led chains of 10–50 stores

Every price above is a range until we've seen your numbers. You'll get one fixed quote, in writing, before any work starts.

Sample Diagnostic findings · illustrative

What you get at the end of week 2

A ranked list of fixes, each with the stores it applies to, its yearly value, how long it takes and who owns it. This sample is an illustrative 12-store chain with about $19M in sales, not a client.

#	Fix	Where	Yearly value	Time to install	Owner
1	Rebuild schedules around traffic by the hour	9 of 12 stores	$410k	6 weeks	District managers
2	Set order levels for the top 300 items	All stores	$210k	4 weeks	Store managers
3	Count every delivery against the invoice	5 highest-shrink stores	$95k	1 week	Receiving leads
4	Record markdowns and waste with a reason; weekly cost-of-goods review	All stores	$80k	2 weeks	Store managers
5	Weekly counts of the top 50 items	All stores	$55k	Ongoing	Inventory lead
	Total opportunity		$850k a year

Every Diagnostic is backed by our 5x guarantee: if the findings don't add up to at least five times the fee in annual margin improvement, you don't pay for it.

How a project runs

The same four steps, every time

Weeks 1–2 · the Diagnostic
Walk
Store visits, P&L review and interviews with your field leaders.
End of week 2 · the Diagnostic
Plan
A ranked list of fixes with the dollar value of each. You choose where to start.
Weeks 3–10 · the turnaround
Install
New schedules, order levels and scorecards, run with your teams until they stick.
Weeks 11–12 · the turnaround
Hand off
Your leaders own it. We check the numbers again 30 days later.

Next step

Not sure which one you need?

Start with the free Scorecard to find your weakest wall, or request a Diagnostic and we'll find it for you.

Take the Scorecard Request a Diagnostic

About

An operator, not a slide deck.

Four Walls is led by a retail and grocery operator with 20+ years inside stores: from assistant manager to running flagship stores, turning around underperforming stores, and leading multi-state regions. Every engagement is led personally by the founder.

20+ yearsin retail and grocery operations

50+ storesled at once

10+new stores opened

Dozensof leaders promoted to store manager and above

How we work

What we believe about stores

We work in English and Spanish, with chains across the U.S. and Canada.

Why no names on this site? The founder's name, full work history and references are shared before your first call, and we're happy to sign a mutual NDA before we see a single number.

The P&L is the mapEvery engagement starts with store-level numbers, not opinions. We read sales, labor, cost of goods and shrink in that order.
Fixes happen on the floorRecommendations only count once they're running in your stores. We stay until your teams own them.
Simple beats cleverOne scorecard, one weekly meeting, three fixes at a time. Systems your managers will actually use on a busy Saturday.
Field leaders make it stickDistrict and store managers carry the change. Coaching them is part of every project, not an add-on.

Next step

Let's walk your stores.

Start with a two-week diagnostic. You'll know where the money is going and what to fix first.

Request a Diagnostic Take the Scorecard

The Store Walk

One store fix, every other Tuesday.

A newsletter for multi-unit operators: owners, COOs, district managers and store directors. One idea, one example, and one tool you can use that week. Read issue 01 free.

Every other Tuesday morning. First issue coming soon. Unsubscribe anytime.

Coming up

The first six issues

01
Your store P&L is telling you three things. You're probably hearing one.
Read sales, then labor, then cost of goods, in that order. Read it now
02
Labor is a scheduling problem, not a headcount problem
Build schedules around traffic by the hour.
03
Shrink is a process problem wearing a security badge
Receiving, ordering and markdowns cause more loss than theft.
04
The backroom layout that decides whether orders get filled
Where you store things decides whether orders get filled.
05
How to open a store that's profitable in month one
Hire, train and set order levels before opening day.
06
The first 90 days in a store that's losing money
The first 90 days: one scorecard, one meeting rhythm, three fixes.

The Store Walk · Issue 01 · read it free

Your store P&L is telling you three things. You're probably hearing one.

Most operators read the store P&L the same way. They look at sales, compare them to last year, and move on. If sales are up, the store is "doing fine."

That habit hides a lot of losses. Sales tell you whether customers showed up. They don't tell you whether you made money from them. A store P&L answers three questions, in this order.

1. Are we selling enough? Look at sales against plan, not just against last year. Then divide sales by labor hours. A store can beat last year and still be understaffed for the traffic it has, or overstaffed for the traffic it doesn't.

2. Are we paying the right amount to sell it? This is labor as a percent of sales. The question isn't "how many people do we have?" It's "are the hours in the right part of the day?" Most schedules are built around the people a store employs, not around when customers walk in.

3. Are we keeping what we buy? This is cost of goods plus shrink. Ordering without set stock levels, unmanaged markdowns and sloppy receiving all show up here. It's usually the biggest number on the page and the one that gets the least attention.

What this looks like in practice

Picture a 12-store chain with sales up 8% on last year. Everyone's happy. Then you read the rest of the page. Labor is running 2.1 points over plan because schedules follow availability, not traffic. Cost of goods is 1.5 points high because stores order by feel. Shrink nobody records costs another 0.8 points. On about $19M in sales, that's roughly $850k a year leaking out below the top line, while the sales report says everything is fine. (An illustrative example, not a client.)

Try this Monday: the 15-minute P&L read

Pull last week's P&L for each store and answer three questions, in order:

Did we hit our sales plan, and how much did we sell per labor hour?
Where were the labor hours that didn't match traffic?
What did we buy that we didn't sell, and why?

Write one fix for each. Pick the one that's worth the most money and do it this week.

That's issue 01. Every other Tuesday, The Store Walk sends one fix like this that you can use in your stores that week. Subscribe at the top of this page to get the next one.

Work with us

Start with a Four-Wall Diagnostic.

5x guarantee: at least five times the fee in annual margin, or you don't pay.

Tell us about your stores. If there's a fit, we'll set up a 30-minute call to talk through your numbers. If not, we'll tell you who might be a better fit.

Not ready to talk yet? Take the 5-minute Four-Wall Scorecard first.

Why no names on this site? The founder's name, full work history and references are shared before your first call, and we're happy to sign a mutual NDA before we see a single number.

Who we work with

A good fit, and not a fit

Good fit	Not a fit
5 to 500 locations	Fewer than 5 or more than 500 locations
Grocery, cafés, food halls, specialty retail	Online-only brands
Sales growing faster than profit	Looking for a report, not a change
Leaders willing to change schedules and ordering	Needing someone full time from day one

Four-Wall Scorecard · 10 questions · about 5 minutes · free

Which of your four walls is leaking money?

Score your stores on labor, cost of goods, shrink, and openings & leadership. Answer for your chain as a whole. Your score updates as you go.

Privacy

Privacy policy

Four Walls Advisory ("we") keeps this short: we collect only what you send us, use it to reply or send The Store Walk, and never sell it.

What we collect

Your email address if you subscribe to The Store Walk, the details you enter in the contact form (name, company, work email, number of locations and your message), and, if you ask for your Scorecard results, your name, work email, company, number of locations, annual sales if you enter it, and your scores. We only add you to the newsletter if you subscribe or tick the newsletter box. We may also use basic, privacy-friendly analytics that count page visits without identifying you.

How we use it

To send the newsletter you asked for, reply to your request, and improve the site. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link.

Who we share it with

Only the services that run this site, newsletter and forms, and only so they can do that job. We don't sell or rent your information.

Your choices

You can unsubscribe at any time, or email hello@fw-advisory.com to ask us to see, correct or delete your information.

Contact

Four Walls Advisory, 956 S Bartlett Rd, Ste 108, Bartlett, IL 60103 · hello@fw-advisory.com

Last updated November 2026.

Every store, profitable inside its four walls.

Sales are up. Profit isn't.

Start small. Expand once it's working.

Four-Wall Diagnostic

Turnaround project

Fractional Head of Operations

Which of your four walls is leaking money?

One store fix, every other Tuesday.

Fixed scope. One quote. Results you can measure.

Four-Wall Diagnostic

Margin & labor turnaround

New-store opening playbook

Shrink reduction program

Fractional Head of Operations

What you get at the end of week 2

The same four steps, every time

Walk

Plan

Install

Hand off

Not sure which one you need?

An operator, not a slide deck.

What we believe about stores

Let's walk your stores.

One store fix, every other Tuesday.

The first six issues

Your store P&L is telling you three things. You're probably hearing one.

Labor is a scheduling problem, not a headcount problem

Shrink is a process problem wearing a security badge

The backroom layout that decides whether orders get filled

How to open a store that's profitable in month one

The first 90 days in a store that's losing money

Your store P&L is telling you three things. You're probably hearing one.

What this looks like in practice

Try this Monday: the 15-minute P&L read

Start with a Four-Wall Diagnostic.

A good fit, and not a fit

Which of your four walls is leaking money?

Privacy policy

What we collect

How we use it

Who we share it with

Your choices

Contact