Delivering the Kalibrate Standard: Derek Ackerson

In this blog series, we take a closer look at how our team supports our clients in achieving their strategic objectives. In some organizations, it might be going ‘above and beyond’ to get the job done – but we just call it ‘the Kalibrate Standard’.

This edition features Derek Ackerson, Principal Consultant & Senior Manager in our analytics team.

Tell us a little about your role.

My job involves assisting clients in a variety of industries – I work with everyone from restaurant operators, healthcare, veterinary, education and services, general retail. Each vertical is different – different sales channels, customer relationships, competitive intensity, and market dynamics – so it keeps us on our toes.

We also work with private equity companies looking to see just how big a prospective acquisition or portfolio assets could grow. They tend to be high tempo projects. Often the client will have deadlines to act – when those come in, we’re all hands to the wheel.

But whatever the vertical, our primary objective is to create insightful analytics that allow the client to be data-driven in response to the business challenge they’re aiming to answer.

How does your role interact with the rest of the team?

I have touchpoints with lots of functions. We have a great team of data analysts working alongside us with statistical modelers. They’re extremely proficient in what they do. I also interact a lot with implementation teams, account managers, and project managers.

We try to achieve a feedback loop between the various Kalibrate teams and the clients. We’ll iteratively provide the analytical study, take feedback from the client – if they’re happy, we progress to the next milestone in the solution we’re building for them. Pulling in the expertise of different specialties means we’re as effective as possible and creating analytics that are as robust as possible.

What types of problems are the clients you work with trying to solve?

Clients use us to assist in their real estate site selection, market optimization, and market research. We build solutions that assist our clients to better understand their customer profile, competitors, market change, and to discover the factors that best explain a successful location for their industry.

The bottom line is effective use of assets – that might be in the form of investment in new unit openings or how to maximize profitability from the existing portfolio based on upgrades or rationalizing units. The numbers involved can be huge – that’s why they look to us to guide and validate based on robust data.

Give us an example of a particularly challenging client question.

There’s plenty! We get to work with some of the real market leaders – building models that will effectively guide a location strategy across portfolios of thousands of units. We’ve just completed a model for a 3,000-unit restaurant that will be deployed internationally. But we also get to work with operators that are smaller, doing great, and set their sights on expansion.

As an example, we have an Indian restaurant client. They had six locations when they engaged us and were adding eight more. The challenging – or perhaps ‘different’ is a better word – feature of this project was that the client wanted to shift their customer profile to target a younger demographic in a different ethnic segment.

Usually, operators have a good idea of their customer profile, what makes units profitable, and want to find the locations of the best fit. In this case, they wanted to recalibrate their model towards a different customer profile, open the locations, and see how their restaurants performed. Effectively, the question is ‘can we operate successfully in locations that would typically be ‘out of profile?’.

And how did you solve that?

We added additional weighting to our model towards a younger demographic and the ethnic segment targeted to give them more locations options outside of what would be considered the to-go for their concept at that moment.

We’ll revisit the performance after year-one and year-two to see whether their profile did indeed shift. If they’re successful – or we can learn about what worked and what didn’t – it would hugely increase the white space potential of that client. It’s very typical of the work we do, just an atypical use case – I’m excited to see how they progress and grow.

And that’s a critical point about progression. When building a turn-key solution for our clients, we don’t end our engagement there. It’s never ‘build the solution, see you in two years.’ Both the client and our team are learning more all the time so it’s key to wrap the findings into the modeling as we go.

What’s the most rewarding part of your role?

When a client renews a relationship with us – we know we’ve done a good job.

It’s rewarding working with clients as they grow. Some of our clients have worked with us for many years, going from single unit operators to hundreds, dozens to thousands, and everything in between. I suspect I’m on a few clients’ speed dials – because that’s what we’re hired to do; bring the expertise to help them succeed. The fact we’re often in constant dialogue just reinforces that we’re trusted as a partner.

Also, when you’re driving through a shopping center and you’re counting the clients – that’s rewarding to know that some of the abstract analytics that the team put together manifest into stores in the real world. When you see a store that you recognize, know the location has been recommended by our team, and see it thriving, that’s another highlight for sure.