Case Studies

A charity chain of 13 shops had implemented a new strategy two years earlier which wasn’t working.  Shop sales were down, the staff teams were losing motivation and profits were dwindling.  The consultancy carried out a review of each of the shops and interviewed staff from the central teams. It then gave the charity a new strategy, an overall analysis of the business along with a series of central and local recommendations.  The charity trustees and staff agreed a strategy implementation plan and the charity is now seeing a significant and sustained increase in sales, profits and motivation.

This Fundraising Director of this national charity wanted to diversify its fundraising streams to include the unrestricted income and profile raising benefits of charity shops. They asked the Charity Retail Consultancy for a strategy to set up a network of shops.  The charity leaders worked with the consultancy to agree the rationale and expectations of the move into retail. Within two weeks the consultancy delivered a full feasibility study and strategy alongside a current analysis of the strengths, innovations and opportunities of the charity shop sector.

The relatively new regional charity had quickly built up a successful portfolio of shops.  However, the CEO was concerned that the shops’ rapid growth presented an element of risk, and the charity shops lacked some necessary checks and balances.  There was no shop operations manual or formal processes, and there had been no central training programme for the recently appointed shop managers and volunteers.  The Charity Retail Consultancy met the senior team and visited a number of the shops to fully understand the business needs.  It then created a bespoke operations manual, which was volunteer and staff friendly and that removed the risks identified by the CEO.  The consultancy introduced the manual to the teams alongside a relevant training programme for the shops and central staff. This ensured the manual was understood and valued, and that the CEO was confident his teams had the knowledge and skills to meet internal and external expectations.

The Fundraising Director was recruiting for a new national Head of Retail.  Finding the right individual for the charity and the role was essential in order to secure the continued growth of the shops’ income, profit and profile.  Not being a specialist retailer, the Director contacted the Charity Retail Consultancy to request support in developing a new job description, person specification and advertising tools. The consultancy supported the charity in devising the appropriate toolkit, and supporting both the shortlisting and interviews.  The recruitment process was smooth and swift, and the Director of Fundraising was very pleased with the resulting appointment.

A charity with 4 shops chose not to appoint a retail manager but to invest in shop manager mentoring sessions alongside monthly shop visits by the Charity Retail Consultancy.  We worked with the charity’s business manager to agree plans and targets for individual shops and staff, and then agreed how to make these happen with the teams and measured targets against progress every month.  The visits were topped up by training sessions to ensure that the staff had the skills they needed to deliver on the anticipated outcome.