I once scored three stores in the same estate on the same day. Same brand, same fascia, same playbook, same country. One scored 82. One scored 71. One scored 39.

The leadership team, when I showed them, did the thing every leadership team does. They reached for the average. 64. “Not brilliant, but not a disaster, room to improve.” And I had to stop them there, because the average was the least useful number in the room, and quietly the most dangerous.

Here is the problem with an average. It is a number nobody actually experiences. No customer has ever walked into the average store. They walked into the 39, or they walked into the 82, and they judged your entire brand on whichever one they happened to stand in. The 64 exists only on your slide. Out in the world, you are running two completely different companies that happen to share a logo.

When I benchmark an estate, the first thing I look at is not how high the scores go. It is how far apart they are. The gap between your best store and your worst store tells you what kind of problem you actually have, and the two possibilities need completely different fixes.

A tight spread, say ten or fifteen points, means you have an execution problem. Same standard, unevenly delivered. Your playbook is sound, the training landed in most places, and the gap is a management-rhythm issue. That is fixable, and it is fixable quickly, because the good stores are proof the model works. You are closing a gap, not building from nothing.

A wide spread, forty points or more, is a different animal entirely. That is not uneven execution. That is the absence of a standard. It means your best store is good despite you, not because of you, and the only thing holding that 82 together is a person you are probably not paying enough to keep.

Before I get to the examples, it is worth being precise about what drives the distance between an 82 store and a 39 store, because it is almost never the thing operators reach for first, which is location or footfall. It is these, roughly in order.

The manager lottery. In most estates, the single biggest variable in a store's score is the person running it. A brilliant manager builds a brilliant store on top of an average model. A weak one lets a good model rot. If your estate depends on the manager lottery, your score is really a measure of who you happened to hire, not what you built.

The training floor. Not the ceiling, the floor. The question is not how good your best training is. It is what the weakest new hire in your worst store received in their first fortnight. If that answer is “process and product, and nothing about how to actually hold a customer conversation”, then your floor is on the ground, and every store below the median is sitting on it.

The service-to-sales mix. I wrote about this before. A store drowning in bill payments and SIM swaps will score badly on selling not because the advisors can't sell, but because they never get the chance. Two stores with identical talent can post wildly different numbers purely on who walks through the door.

Merchandising discipline. Whether the standard survives contact with a Tuesday. Anyone can set a store to planogram on launch day. The 82 store still looks like that in month seven. The 39 store has a hero table nobody has changed since the last campaign and a best-seller on the back wall.

Now, the examples, because this is where it gets real.

There is a major UK operator, one of the big three, whose entire retail estate runs on an almost exclusively outsourced dealer model. I will not name them, because what follows is a criticism and they do not deserve to be the only ones held up while others do the same thing more quietly.

Their spread is enormous, and here is the important part: the spread is not an accident, it is baked into the model. Where the dealer is brilliant, the store is brilliant. A good operator takes the fascia, adds their own standards, trains their own people properly, and produces something that genuinely goes the extra mile. Walk in and you would happily buy.

Walk into the one down the road, run by a different dealer, and it is a different company. Because the central training material for a new hire goes little further than process and products. How to work the till. What the tariffs are. It stops well short of how to have a conversation, read a customer, turn a service moment into a sale, or make anyone feel looked after. So the good dealers write their own training to fill the gap. And most, understandably, do not, because they are running a small business on thin margins and nobody gave them a reason or the tools.

That is a forty-point spread by design. The operator has outsourced not just the stores but the standard itself, and then acts surprised that the estate is a patchwork. This is the wide-spread problem in its purest form. There is no floor, so every store sits wherever its individual dealer chooses to place it.

Now look at what happens in the same market when someone decides the standard is theirs to own.

EE has quietly built the best new store format in the country. Not the flashiest, the best, in the sense that matters: a layout designed around the customer journey rather than the fixture plan, with device display and marketing treated as core to the job rather than an afterthought. That is a standard, set centrally, and it travels.

Sky goes further on execution. Walk into a Sky store and the TVs, remotes, doorbells, watches and mobile are merchandised together as one connected-home story, displayed with the kind of care most of the industry saves only for the latest flagship phone. Neither of these is a network advantage or a pricing advantage. It is design and standards, applied on the shop floor, in a way that produces the same experience whichever store you walk into. That is a tight spread as a deliberate act, and it is the whole difference between believing in your brand and actually differentiating it.

The contrast is the lesson. Same country, same customers, same category. One operator lets the dealer decide the standard and gets a forty-point spread. The others own the standard and compress it. Nobody is being beaten by the market here. They are being beaten by a choice about who holds the floor.

Here is the encouraging part, and Verizon is the example I would put in front of any operator staring at a wide spread and assuming the fix is a full refit.

The US market has a well-documented pattern: the big operators are winning on growth and share while scoring worst of all on customer expectation. Winning, but not delighting. Verizon's answer to a slice of that is almost embarrassingly simple. In-store touchscreens that walk a customer through tariffs and pricing, instead of defaulting to the usual wall of handsets. Pricing and plan confusion is one of the single biggest sources of distrust in telecoms retail, and rather than avoid the awkward conversation, they designed it. That is not a budget line, it is a decision to fix the hard part on purpose. It is exactly the kind of move that lifts a 39 store, because it removes the friction that was dragging the score down in the first place.

Most gaps close like that. Not with a capital programme, but by finding the two or three things the bottom stores are getting wrong and making the standard travel.

If you still think the spread is a soft metric, look at what consistency is actually worth, and here Consumer Cellular has quietly settled the argument.

While the big three preach the digital gospel, closing stores and pushing everyone towards apps, Consumer Cellular spent 2026 doing the opposite, opening its 100th company-owned store and heading for 120 by year end. Company-owned, note, not dealer. The standard is theirs. And the numbers are the part every telco leader should sit with. Retail rose to 14.4% of new accounts, up from 6.3% the year before. Retail acquisitions grew 83% year on year in a single quarter. But this is the one that matters for the spread argument: customers acquired through their own stores stay with them at a rate 10% higher than every other channel.

Ten per cent better retention, from the channel the rest of the industry is walking away from. That is what a controlled standard buys you. Not just a better score on a benchmark, but customers who stay, from stores that deliver the same experience every time. The wide-spread operator cannot buy that, because they cannot promise the customer which company they are going to walk into.

So here is what I would actually do, and it costs you an afternoon rather than a budget line.

Pick three stores. Not three good ones, that is cheating, and you already know what your flagship looks like. Take your best, take your worst, and take one at random, because the random one is the honest one. Walk all three in person, with the same set of checks and an actual score at the end, not a vibe, a number. Then put the three numbers next to each other and look at the gap.

If they cluster, breathe out. You have a management problem, and management problems are the good kind, because they respond to attention. If they scatter, you have found the real work, and you have also found out something uncomfortable: that you do not currently own your own standard, someone else does, store by store.

Either way, you will have learned more about your estate in one afternoon than a quarter of dashboards will ever tell you. Not because the dashboard is wrong, but because it was built to report the average, and the average was never where the truth was hiding.

The truth was always in the spread. Go and measure it.

You don't have to build the checklist yourself. I've written down the exact twenty-five-point walk I run in operator stores, grouped into five buckets from the kerb outside to the stockroom out the back, each check scored one to four. It is the same field guide I gate on LinkedIn, but because you subscribe to this, it's yours with no form to fill in.

Walk your best, your worst and one at random this week, score them honestly, and reply to tell me the spread. I read every reply.

Read next: “The Advisor who could hear Intent”

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