The room was half full, which is the polite way of saying it was half empty.
Mel almost hadn't come. The morning keynote had been exactly what she'd expected — an energetic man with a microphone telling a room full of tired business owners that the future was bright if they believed in themselves. Mel believed in herself. She needed something new. She'd nearly skipped the afternoon session to go for a walk.
She didn’t. She sat near the back of a windowless hotel meeting room, arms crossed, legal pad unused.
When the session began, the consultant surprised everyone. He didn't open with Amazon, the online threat, or any mention of competition at all. He skipped the economy, interest rates, and everything Mel had braced for. Instead, he quietly wrote a question on the whiteboard and let it sit for a moment.
What are your most important Key Results, and how are you doing in achieving them?
Mel shifted in her chair.
She knew the sales. She knew the forecast and budget she and Tom fought over. She knew the goal for this month and the payroll budget. But Key Results? We don't have those, she thought to herself.
She didn’t know what a key result was, realizing slowly that maybe this mattered. And they didn’t have one.
The consultant let the silence hang in the room. Then he asked for a show of hands — who knows their Key Results? No one raised their hand. So, next question, who is your best customer? Write down who you think your very best customer is.
Everyone scribbled their answers. He asked, "Anyone want to share?" One hand raised. "Yes, tell us your name, your store, what you sell, and your best customer."
Mel cleared her throat, shared the basics, then described their target customer in detail. Her passion and customer focus were clear.
"That's great, but why? Why is she your best customer?"
The session took off. One question everyone thought they knew, but no one could answer.
From that point, the session shifted. A new framework emerged, designed to create greater focus. It invited a different way to think about the business: less about what was sold, more about why the business existed and how it made money. The consultant offered guiding principles:
First and foremost, the job is to find, convert, and keep customers and grow profits.
Second, make sure everything — customers, categories, SKUs — shows a profit.
All are measured by a single Key Result: ROA—Return on Assets—which combines returns on inventory, labor, occupancy, and tech expenses.
Finally, he shared a mantra for approaching the framework: Stop chasing more and choose better. Starting now, focus on doing less—but doing it better.
In other words, stop trying to be all things to all people.
After the break, the consultant brought everyone back to the earlier customer question. "Let's return: who is your best customer? I want to start with a story—a baseball story."
Enter the Mendoza Line.
Mario Mendoza. Shortstop in the 70s and 80s. Good glove, weak bat. The line named after him: .200 average. Below it, you didn’t deserve your spot.
"Every player knew where they stood against the Mendoza Line," the consultant said. "Not every season. Every at-bat."
Then he asked the room to think back to the best customer they'd described before the break.
"Now tell me something harder. Is that customer above or below your Mendoza Line?"
A few nervous laughs went up — the kind that meant nobody in the room could answer.
"Your business has a Mendoza Line running through it," he said. "Your Mendoza Line is your financial break-even point. Basically, your operating expense. Your two biggest expenses, labor and occupancy, plus sales and marketing and G&A. This is what it costs to run the business and the number you must cover to earn a profit or take a loss.”
Mel uncrossed her arms. He had her attention.
The customer Mel described—she knew her name, car, and Christmas shopping habits. But Mel didn’t know if she was above or below the line. She knew what the customer spent, not what it cost to serve, acquire, or handle her emails.
The consultant turned to a clean section of the whiteboard and wrote three words across the top.
CUSTOMERS. PROFIT. FOCUS. The three pillars for driving business success.
"Here's the whole job," he said. "Three pillars. Everything else is noise."
He tapped the first.
"Customers. Find them. Convert them. Keep them. Grow the profit they generate. But not just any customers — the ones who fit what you do best. That takes segmentation: who are they, really? What do they want? What thrills them? And it takes reverse engineering — working backward from that customer to the products you stock, the services you offer, the experience you deliver. It isn't about what you have to sell. It's about who you serve and how you make them feel."
He tapped the second.
"Profit. Make sure everything shows one. Every customer. Every SKU. Every category. Three questions."
He wrote them underneath.
Are we covering the cost to serve? Will this show a profit? Is this lifting ROA?
"I call this the Profit Truth Framework. Revenue is vanity. A customer can spend ten thousand dollars a year with you, and cost you eleven thousand to serve. You'd be thrilled to keep them. You shouldn't be. Every dollar, every SKU, every category has to have the right answer to these three questions."
“Every wrong answer is a loss. Left alone over time, your business will suffer.”
He tapped the third.
"Focus. Less but better. Set clear expectations. Inspect what you expect by defining OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Rely on data at every step: use data to set objectives, select key results, and track progress consistently. Measure progress every week, not just every quarter."
Now Mel was writing. The legal pad she'd brought as a prop was three pages deep.
A guy in the second row — beard, faded polo — raised his hand.
"This sounds great if you've got an analyst on staff. I've got me, my wife, and a sixteen-year-old who runs the register on weekends. Who's doing all this?"
The consultant nodded like he'd been waiting for it.
"Good question. Ten years ago, you couldn't. You'd need a data team, a six-figure software investment, and a year of implementation. That's not the world we live in today."
He drew two lines on a fresh section of the whiteboard.
"This one is your POS. Every transaction, every customer, every SKU, going back years. That tells you what has already happened." He circled it. "This one is everything outside your four walls. Consumer trends. Category growth. What your customers' kids are searching for. That tells you what's going to happen. These are trends that point the way." He circled the second.
"For decades, this data was beyond your reach. As you point out, who has the staff or the tools to find, interpret, and use this data?”
“But what if you could easily do the analysis, get the interpretation, and begin making strategic decisions based on your business’s trends and your market and customer trends?
“Guess what? You can with AI.” He went on to say how AI makes it easy to pull these two data sets, transaction and customer history, and the current trends. One picture. Current and easy to update. Feeding those three pillars.
Then he went to the board and wrote:
AI allows you to: Optimize. Automate. Accelerate. Eliminate pain points and busy work.
"That's what AI enables within the strategy: Optimize what you have—identify your most profitable products and customers, eliminate those that aren't. Automate what slows your team—the repetitive reporting, reordering, or administrative tasks. Accelerate outcomes to achieve more with less time. AI is not the strategy itself, but it supports your business by powering these three pillars. You don't just implement AI; you design it to fit your goals. It's the engine to drive the framework."
Then he stepped back to the board and drew one more thing, below everything else, and circled it.
ROA
ROA is the primary scoreboard. One number: net income divided by assets. ROA tracks your largest investments and expenses—inventory, payroll, lease, tech—and answers two crucial questions: Are we using resources efficiently? Are our strategies successful? ROA provides the answer.
The guy in the faded polo rolled his eyes and crossed his arms.
"ROA. That sounds like Wall Street stuff. Accounting. I'm running a store. Sales are all that matter."
The consultant smiled like he'd been hoping someone would say it.
"You have a 401(k)?"
The guy nodded.
"You put money in. You want a return. You want growth. If it's performing, you leave it alone. If it's losing money, you change something — different fund, different mix. You don't just drop money in and never look at it, right?”
He stepped closer.
"Your store works the same way. Inventory is the investment. It ties up cash and is supposed to produce income. You take that income and reinvest it — in your people, your store, your technology — fully expecting a return- PROFITS. ROA is how you measure the rate at which your assets produce profits. $1 invested, how much earned? Profits divided by assets. That's it. It's not an accounting thing. It's an efficiency thing. It's a profitability thing. It's asking, every week: are my resources working hard enough?"
The guy in the polo smiled and nodded.
The room was still.
He turned and underlined the mantra he'd written before the break.
Stop chasing more. Choose better.
He let it sit.
"Here’s the thing. A business you can't measure is a business you can't grow, sell, or hand off to anyone. When you focus on the process- find, convert, and keep customers, the score (ROA) takes care of itself. It lets you build something that's yours — and someday, yours to pass on."
The room went quiet, the way a room does when a lot of people are thinking the same thing at the same time.
Mel looks down and writes a note at the top of her pad. Three words, underlined twice.
Less but better.
She flipped to a clean page. She stared at it for a beat. Then she wrote, in all caps, across the top:
CUSTOMERS. PROFIT. FOCUS.
Under the first, she wrote:
Find. Convert. Keep. — Who do we thrill?
Under the second:
Are we covering the cost to serve? Will this show a profit? Is this lifting ROA?
Under the third:
Less but better. Inspect what we expect.
And at the bottom of the page, circled twice:
ROA.
She looked at the page. For the first time that day, what was in front of her wasn't a list of things to worry about. It was a way to run the store. She couldn’t wait to tell Tom.
© 2026 Creativity Consulting Group Inc.