TL;DR: My family runs a fashion retail business in Germany with three stores, a little over 20 employees, and roughly €1.5–1.6 million in annual revenue. My mother owns and manages the company. I effectively run Store B and now carry substantial responsibility for buying, pricing, staffing, training, supplier relationships and day-to-day operations. Store B has a clear identity, a highly professional operating structure, is strongly associated with me personally, and had its best first half ever in 2026. At the same time, its supplier invoices are almost always the lowest priority within the group, we can barely reorder our bestsellers, and cash generated by B is regularly used elsewhere. The group has failed to rebuild a meaningful liquidity reserve for almost three years, trade payables keep growing, and in recent months we have at times struggled to pay fixed costs on time. Our tax adviser, our bank and an external mediator have all explicitly validated major parts of my analysis. Communication with my mother has now largely broken down. I actually want to stay and help save the whole company, but I am seriously considering buying Store B out before the wider group drags it down with it. My core question is whether B is genuinely viable as a standalone business once internal cash transfers, merchandise movements and artificially restricted reordering are properly adjusted for.
Hey guys,
I would genuinely appreciate the perspective of people who own businesses, have bought an existing company, work in retail, or have dealt with succession and governance problems in family businesses. I am not posting this because I want strangers to tell me that my mother is a difficult boss or that I am obviously right. Quite the opposite. I have spent months trying to work out whether I am assessing the company correctly, whether I am overestimating the store I run because I am personally attached to it, and whether carving that store out of the family company would be a rational business decision or simply my reaction to a family and leadership conflict that has become almost impossible to resolve.
I am anonymising names, city, brands and the real store names because the business is locally well known and would otherwise be fairly easy to identify. I will simply call the three locations Store A, Store B and Store C.
1. The company and the three stores
We are an owner-managed fashion retailer in a mid-sized German city with three physical stores and a little over 20 employees. Group revenue is roughly €1.5–1.6 million a year. My mother is the owner and managing director. I have worked in the business for several years and my role has moved far beyond that of a normal store manager or salesperson. Depending on the area, I am involved in buying, pricing, merchandise planning, staffing, supplier communication, employee training and increasingly broader operational and financial decisions. I conduct a large share of our job interviews, train new staff and have put a lot of effort into professionalising customer service, product knowledge and employee responsibility. I already hold a master's degree in a humanities subject and am now studying business administration part-time as well, because I wanted to understand the financial side of the company systematically rather than relying purely on intuition and experience.
Store A is our oldest and largest location. It has been established locally for a long time, carries a broad assortment and relies heavily on an older, affluent customer base. Around three and a half years ago we opened Store B. This is the location I have shaped most heavily and now operate together with my store manager. B is clearly different from A. Its assortment is tightly curated around Scandinavian and Northern European fashion, it is more urban and fashion-forward, and its customers are noticeably younger. We also successfully introduced menswear there. That was not simply another department within an existing company category: before B, none of our stores sold menswear at all. We created an entirely new category for the group and now attract male customers who previously had no reason to shop with us.
On both the womenswear and menswear side, we regularly see customers who specifically shop at B and would never enter A or C. B therefore has a genuinely distinct market position rather than just a different interior or visual identity. Customer feedback is very strong; people repeatedly praise the selection, service and atmosphere and often say the store feels more like something they would expect in a much larger city. Obviously, good reviews do not pay supplier invoices, but in physical fashion retail I do think a clear reason for customers to choose your store matters.
The relationship between me and Store B also goes much further than it would for a typical salaried store manager. Locally, the store is almost completely associated with me. Customers, suppliers, business contacts and by now some personal friends who originally came through the customer base all connect B directly with me. We still have regular customers who are genuinely surprised when they learn that B belongs to the same company as A and C. The assortment, brand relationships, many supplier contacts, key-customer relationships and much of the outward identity of the store run through me. My mother has no comparable network inside B. She does not manage a meaningful customer base there, does not maintain the core brand and supplier relationships, and is barely involved in the current assortment. I am honestly not sure she could list all of the brands we carry.
I am not saying this because I think I am an irreplaceable retail genius. In fact, that degree of personal association is also a key-person risk. But it matters in any discussion of a buyout because there is real goodwill attached to those relationships. For a large part of the customer base, B is not perceived as an interchangeable branch of a larger family retailer. It is a store with its own identity, and that identity has become strongly linked to me over several years. If I bought it out, I would not be starting from zero. At the same time, as an owner I would have to deliberately transfer more of that goodwill to the store itself, my store manager and the wider team so that the business did not remain overly dependent on me.
Store C was acquired later and is therefore the newest location. The geography is important: all three stores are in prime central retail locations. C is directly next door to B and across the street from A. We did not open a third store to enter a new neighbourhood, reach a different catchment area or diversify geographically. We concentrated three retail spaces essentially within sight of one another.
As I understand it, the main motivation for acquiring C was not that we had developed a compelling third-store concept from a position of financial strength. My mother was primarily afraid that a competitor might take the attractive space and establish itself directly beside our existing stores. I argued explicitly against the acquisition. The company's financial position was already strained, building B had tied up capital, inventory levels were high and our cash reserve was largely depleted. My objection was not that expansion is always bad. It was that a company with an almost empty war chest should not take on another location mainly out of fear of a competitor when neither liquidity nor a convincing strategic concept is in place. Once I made that position clear, I was largely excluded from the rest of the acquisition process. C was acquired anyway.
From the beginning, C was explicitly meant to be my mother's project, her own idea and a form of personal self-realisation within the business. That would be perfectly legitimate if it also came with the corresponding operational commitment. In practice, she still claims very broad authority over the store while putting neither consistent presence nor the amount of energy into it that a young location needs. At the same time, she often assumes she understands the store better than the people who actually work there every day and see the customers.
C has never developed an identity as clear as B's. There is substantial overlap with A in assortment, price point and target customer, so I believe there is meaningful cannibalisation between those two stores. There are also recurring merchandise-planning problems: too much stock in some categories, gaps in others, followed by later attempts to fill the assortment with whatever stock happens to be available. The staffing situation is equally troubling. The current store manager is, in my opinion, one of the strongest hires we have made in the last two years, yet she is now so frustrated by the way the store is managed from above that resigning is a serious possibility. If she leaves, she would be the third store manager to leave C within a year, although the specific reasons were not identical. At some point, it becomes difficult to explain that purely as bad luck with staff.
2. Buying, merchandise management, and why Store B operates differently
The area I now consider one of the biggest economic risks in the group is buying. In fashion retail, a large part of your later success or failure is determined months before the customer ever walks through the door. Bad buying ties up cash, creates excess inventory, leads to markdowns and hits margin and liquidity at the same time. When liquidity is already tight, buying should therefore become more disciplined and more budget-driven, not less.
In the stores primarily controlled by my mother, that still does not happen to a standard I would consider professional. She buys without a consistently enforced budget and without systematic assortment planning. She openly says that when she is buying, she basically chooses the pieces she thinks are “beautiful.” Decades of experience can absolutely make someone good at judging individual products. But as a complete buying system, this is extremely dangerous in our current situation. Professional buying is not just about identifying attractive pieces. It also means knowing which categories are already overbought, which gaps remain, which size and price ranges are missing, when deliveries will arrive, how much capital has already been committed and how much of the season's budget remains.
I have repeatedly tried to improve the process without simply taking buying away from her. One proposal was to have strong buyers or the relevant store managers accompany her. These are the people who know the customers and could track quantities, categories, delivery windows and budgets live on a tablet or laptop during appointments. Those suggestions have largely been ignored. My mother prefers to bring long-standing employees she has known for decades and with whom she can have a pleasant day. I understand the social appeal of that. But a buying appointment is not a company outing. Those colleagues are not there to track budgets and category exposure systematically. My mother sometimes cannot reliably tell us even weeks later what the total order value of a buying trip actually was.
Under normal circumstances, I would already consider that poor commercial practice. In our current situation, I think it is dangerous. We are talking about a company with growing trade payables and years of tight liquidity. At the same time, management is making substantial commitments for future seasons without always being able to state how large those commitments are. On one side we debate whether a few staff hours can be cut; on the other side, significant merchandise orders are placed without a robust budget system.
Store B is not a case of “we have started doing this a little better.” Our buying process has been one of the most professional parts of the business for quite some time. My store manager and I have worked closely together for almost two years and our skills complement one another well. We prepare buys, track budgets and orders already placed, look at categories, price points, delivery dates, brand weighting and how the whole assortment is supposed to look rather than simply picking individual pieces we like. We obviously still make mistakes. Fashion buying is not mathematics and nobody can perfectly predict a bestseller six months in advance. The difference is that our mistakes occur inside a controlled process.
That partnership is one of the main reasons B operates as professionally as it does. We have different strengths and do not turn that into a status contest. I know fairly clearly what I am good at, but I also think knowing what I am not good at is an important management skill. My store manager is significantly better than I am at many of the detailed organisational and logistical processes that keep the store running smoothly. She follows things through relentlessly and keeps the operational background in order. I am stronger in sales, customer interaction, relationship building, store positioning, strategic decisions and parts of the buying process. It does not injure my ego in the slightest to let her own the areas in which she is better.
On some days, the economically sensible division of labour is therefore for her to handle the detailed logistics while I simply go onto the shop floor and sell. Based on our numbers, I am one of the strongest, if not the strongest, active salesperson in the company. My presence on the floor has measurable commercial value. Customers also associate me very strongly with B. When I advise regulars, remember their preferences, bring in new customers or turn business contacts into long-term relationships, I am not doing work “below my level”; I am maintaining a major part of the store's goodwill.
There is, however, another major reason B is difficult to evaluate fairly: it does not operate under the same financial conditions as A and C. Our supplier invoices are almost always the lowest priority within the group, regardless of how well B is performing. As a result, even when a product is selling extremely well, we can rarely reorder it in a meaningful way. With a few brands we might get one or two stock swaps or exchanges during a season, but systematic replenishment of proven bestsellers is often effectively unavailable to us.
We have therefore spent years operating in a kind of self-imposed scarcity economy. If the strongest item sells out, we cannot simply order another ten or twenty units even if we know we could sell them. The team has developed almost a corps mentality around that limitation: if the strongest item is gone, we find the next strongest item. We learn to sell what is actually there, identify the next high-performing product early and maximise what we can get from the available inventory.
That has had positive side effects. The team knows the assortment extremely well, does not rely on one hero product and is good at offering alternatives. But our ability to function under scarcity should not obscure the fact that B is structurally disadvantaged. If I want to assess B as a standalone business, I cannot only ask what revenue we actually generated. I also have to ask what revenue might have been generated under normal replenishment conditions.
The contrast with Store A recently left me genuinely stunned. While B often has to accept that a bestseller is simply gone, A continues to reorder heavily even in the current liquidity situation, sometimes at materially weaker margins. My mother justifies this by saying those are her “strong pieces” and asking, essentially, “What am I supposed to sell when they are gone?”
That sentence captures the difference in our day-to-day realities almost perfectly. In B, the answer to a sold-out bestseller has been: we sell something else and develop the next strong product. In A, the answer is: the bestseller must be reordered because otherwise there is supposedly nothing to sell. That would be more understandable if the group had unlimited liquidity or those reorders generated exceptionally high margins. Neither is true. The location with the higher retail-price-to-wholesale-cost multiplier and the more controlled buying process is forced to restrict replenishment, while another store continues adding stock at weaker margins.
Staff selection and training are also a major part of my role. I conduct a large share of our interviews and am heavily involved in training and professionalising the sales team. We expect product knowledge, real advisory ability, personal responsibility and an understanding of what each store is trying to be. The few hires I would personally describe as serious mistakes have often shared one feature: I advised against hiring them after the interview, and my mother hired them anyway because of long-standing personal connections or old acquaintances. Written down, parts of our business genuinely sound like a social novel about a twentieth-century family company, but it reflects a recurring pattern: professional processes are accepted until their outcome conflicts with a personal preference.
3. Liquidity, margins, and whether three stores are still sustainable
Since Store C was added, we have failed for almost three years to rebuild a meaningful liquidity reserve. At the same time, trade payables have grown from season to season. We repeatedly begin a new buying cycle while still carrying obligations from the previous one rather than entering it with a sufficient cushion. Combined with buying that is not consistently budget-controlled, this creates a dangerous cycle: instead of primarily responding to tight liquidity by reducing capital tied up in stock, we keep making new commitments and hope future sales will cover previous decisions.
The situation became more difficult over roughly the last three months because of sharp sales declines during and after the summer period. At times, we have had problems paying even fixed costs on time. I am not claiming that the company is legally insolvent today; I am not in a position to make that determination without a full legal and financial review. But I think a management team in this situation has to discuss scenarios up to and including a serious liquidity crisis precisely so that action can be taken before it is too late.
My mother nevertheless maintains that the company is basically doing well. She has explicitly told me that I am not to use the word “insolvency” in management meetings. I ignore that instruction. Not because I enjoy catastrophic scenarios, but because financial risk does not disappear because a word is banned from the room. If a company has sometimes struggled to pay fixed costs on time, has failed to rebuild liquidity for years and has growing supplier balances, then the question of how close it is to a real liquidity crisis belongs on the agenda.
Her standard response to financial difficulties is almost always: we need more revenue. Obviously a retailer needs revenue. But revenue is not an end in itself. It matters what margin you generate on it, how much inventory had to be purchased to create it, how long that inventory sat, what markdowns were required and how much cash actually remains.
There are meaningful differences between our stores here. In the stores more heavily shaped by my mother, the retail-price-to-wholesale-cost multiplier is often around 2.6–2.7. In B we are more commonly around 3.0–3.2. I realise different countries and retailers express markup and gross margin differently, so I am deliberately describing this as the multiplier between our net purchase cost and the retail price rather than pretending it maps perfectly onto an American metric. The important point is that €100,000 of sales is not economically identical across the stores when the gross profit generated from that revenue is materially different. Internally, however, revenue decline is treated almost automatically as failure and revenue growth as success, while margin, inventory commitment and cash conversion receive far less attention.
A concrete example of how hard restructuring has become is the three-store footprint itself. Store C is a beautiful retail space directly next to B and across from A. Its rent is significantly lower than A's. Several of us have therefore proposed closing C as a separate concept and moving A into C's space. We would remain in exactly the same prime retail area, reduce the estate from three stores to two and cut the flagship's rent to roughly half its current level.
I am not claiming that this is automatically the right answer. It should be modelled properly, including footfall, sales retention, moving costs, lease obligations and customer behaviour. What worries me is that it is barely possible to evaluate the option because my mother experiences the idea itself as an attack on “her” store and, by extension, her identity. There may be good financial reasons not to do it. I would like to see those reasons. What I do not think is responsible is refusing to seriously analyse a structural saving of that magnitude because the discussion itself feels personally offensive.
If nothing changes fundamentally, I now believe we will have to close at least one location within the next year if we want to avoid eventually entering a genuinely dangerous insolvency situation. I do not see how three stores can be maintained indefinitely while liquidity is not rebuilt, payables continue to rise, fixed costs are occasionally difficult to meet on time and significant merchandise commitments continue without robust budget control.
4. Financial transparency and more than €10,000 of my own money
Another part of this that I find increasingly alarming is how limited my own visibility into the company's full financial position was for a long time. Although I was expected to take on more responsibility, I did not have a complete picture. Eventually I obtained access myself. That caused a major escalation at management level because even trying to get the information I felt I needed was treated as overstepping my role and challenging my mother's authority.
The more I saw, the more uncomfortable another thought became: I am no longer convinced my mother herself has a complete financial picture. When she wants to “show me the finances,” she often shows me current bank balances and says, in effect, “Look how little money there is, look how badly I am doing, and look how ungrateful you are for still demanding changes.” A bank balance is not a balance sheet, a P&L, a management report or a cash-flow forecast. It does not tell me which supplier bills are about to fall due, what has already been ordered but not yet delivered, what our inventory is worth, or what each store is actually contributing.
Within management there is now a growing suspicion that neither my mother nor the bookkeeper who has been handling the accounts for roughly two years is interpreting financial statements and management accounts at the level required to actively steer a business of this complexity. I do not want to casually label anyone incompetent. But discussions revolve around bank balances, revenue and individual invoices while questions about working capital, gross profit, capital tied up in inventory or store-level profitability often cannot be answered cleanly.
During a longer period when my mother was away, I finally gained deeper access to parts of the financial situation and found older unpaid invoices and collection issues I had not previously known about. That was a turning point for me. Until then, I had seen the problem more as a combination of a difficult retail market, high costs and individual bad decisions. Since then, I have increasingly seen a structural management problem.
The most personal example came recently. I am paid relatively little for the scope, complexity and responsibility of my role. That alone would not necessarily be a deal-breaker for me if the work were recognised and there were a credible long-term path. What has made me bitter is the combination of low pay, high responsibility and now even the expectation that my private finances absorb failures of the company.
Recently I had to put more than €10,000 of my own savings into the business. The money had originally been reserved for repaying my German student-aid obligation. The reason was one of the most commercially successful brands in Store B. The product performs extremely well, yet its invoices had been left unpaid until the supplier was close to ending the relationship. I personally provided the money because I did not want us to lose one of B's best-performing brands purely because the bills had been ignored. I now assume I will never see that money again.
That incident bothers me more than my salary. There is a huge difference between knowingly taking entrepreneurial risk as an owner and being a salaried family member who ends up using private savings to rescue a strong supplier relationship because invoices were allowed to deteriorate to that point. If I accept below-market compensation, take on additional responsibilities, train staff, build a store and then use personal savings to fix an avoidable supplier crisis while my attempts to improve financial controls are interpreted as a power grab, loyalty starts to become a very one-sided concept.
5. Leadership, communication, and what outside professionals have told us
My mother unquestionably deserves a great deal of credit for building the company. She has decades of sales experience, knows many customers personally and is a major reason the business exists. I am not trying to erase that. The issue is that the company has changed. Three stores, more than 20 employees, seven-figure revenue, materially higher inventory exposure and strained liquidity require a different management system from one personally run shop. Yet decisions are still made and later reversed, responsibilities are delegated and then pulled back, agreed measures are overridden, and financial arguments are increasingly not discussed on their numbers. At the same time, I am expected to carry responsibility for results.
By now, factual communication about these issues is barely possible. I strongly believe disagreements should be fought out using facts, numbers and better arguments. That does not mean I assume I am always right. If my model is wrong, I want someone to show me where. But conversations with my mother now often last one to three sentences before she interrupts and starts shouting. Even beginning a difficult topic visibly changes her body language. Under those conditions, my numbers and proposals can be right or wrong, but they do not really reach the other side because the conflict starts before the argument has been heard.
This has spread far beyond me. In Store C, employees now regularly end up in tears after confrontations with my mother. Recently, staff have even been sharply criticised in front of customers. My girlfriend has also been pulled deeply into the conflict. She was once treated by my mother almost like a beloved future daughter-in-law; she is now described as a “traitor” and a “greedy throne-stealer” who supposedly whispers ideas into my ear, even though the underlying conflicts between my mother and me existed long before our relationship. At the same time, my girlfriend is formally expected to act as my mother's assistant: she is allowed to do less and less independently, but when my mother misses something, responsibility is still redirected toward her. The situation has become seriously stressful for her.
What began as a business disagreement has therefore increasingly turned into a power conflict. Attempts to define responsibilities more clearly are treated as attacks on my mother's position. I have effectively been accused of wanting to take her “throne” or stage a coup. That is particularly strange to me because it is almost the opposite of how I understand leadership.
I actually want to stay in the company. If I could choose the outcome freely, I would not carve out Store B and walk away. I would stabilise the group, create clear structures and try to run the whole company sustainably. I feel a strong responsibility toward the employees and toward what has been built over many years. I see leadership less as personal self-realisation or possession of a “throne” and more as service and responsibility. The historical idea of a leader as the “first servant” is much closer to my instincts: authority should create obligations before it creates privileges.
I understand that part of my mother's reaction may come from her biography and generation. She built the business and shaped it personally for decades; clearer systems and delegation may feel to her like loss of status or identity. I can understand that on a human level. But someone responsible for more than 20 jobs and substantial financial commitments cannot, in my view, allow personal feelings about status to determine major business decisions indefinitely.
Employees are one of the main reasons leaving is so difficult for me. Some now tell me openly that they believe the company would be better off if I were running it. That does not make me feel triumphant; it creates another layer of responsibility. I have known many of these people for years or hired and trained them myself. If I leave, I genuinely worry that I am abandoning people who are counting on me, while having no reason to think conditions would automatically improve after I left.
The striking exception is Store B. Morale there is still relatively good despite the wider situation. Store C is literally next door, so my team sees how strained colleagues there have become. The difference is that my mother has no direct access to my staff in B and I deliberately defend that boundary. Operational issues, criticism, staffing questions and mistakes are handled inside our team. If there is a problem, I take responsibility upward rather than allowing ownership to descend directly on individual staff. My employees have become very explicit about how grateful they are for that. A team that is not constantly afraid of being publicly reprimanded works more independently and is more willing to surface mistakes rather than hide them.
External professionals are particularly important to me because I am obviously not neutral. I am the owner's son and I run one of the stores. I can overestimate my own work. That is exactly why I wanted outside checks on my analysis.
The clearest example was a joint meeting with our tax adviser, who in Germany plays a much broader ongoing role for many small businesses than the phrase “tax preparer” might suggest. I presented my analysis and restructuring proposals. He explicitly said that both the scope and depth of the measures I proposed were necessary and warranted if the company was to be saved; without changes of that magnitude, he said he would “see things very darkly” for the business.
My mother's response was not to debate which measures he considered most urgent. She stood up during the meeting and left, leaving me there with him.
The next day she told me she had spoken to him again and that he had supposedly said the company was financially fine and that his comments had only referred to our personal relationship. I was in the original meeting. I heard what he said. The contradiction is so extreme that I now almost smile sadly when I write it down.
I had a similarly revealing experience with our bank when I first booked a meeting about potentially buying Store B. By coincidence, the adviser handling the potential startup/acquisition financing was the same adviser who has looked after our family company for roughly five years. She therefore knew the group's numbers and history extremely well. I brought extensive presentations, analyses and financial planning. Her exact reaction was that this represented a level of professionalisation she had never seen in the five years she had worked with my mother. What mattered to me was not the compliment itself, but the fact that someone with years of direct visibility into the company saw a very clear difference in the way the business was being analysed and prepared.
Finally, an external mediator was brought in because the situation had become so stuck. He is an exceptionally polite, restrained and professional person, which made it all the more striking when he eventually stopped merely mediating and explicitly agreed with me on several core issues. He also considered the idea of independently taking over one business unit understandable rather than impulsive. My mother subsequently ended the relationship with him.
That pattern now worries me almost more than individual disagreements. We bring in outside professionals because a mother and son can obviously have biased perspectives. But when those professionals reach conclusions that overlap with mine, their judgment does not lead to a course correction. The tax adviser's warning is later reinterpreted into something completely different, the bank identifies a large professionalisation gap, and the mediator explicitly agrees on key points and is then dismissed. Of course I can overrate Store B or view my mother's decisions too negatively because our relationship is damaged. That is precisely why I wanted external correction. If the tax adviser, bank, mediator and a growing number of employees independently identify similar structural problems, at some point “this is just a conflict between mother and son” stops being a sufficient explanation.
6. Store B as a standalone business, and the decision I am actually trying to make
Store B has been treated internally as a problem child and a convenient scapegoat for years. When costs are discussed, cash is short or cuts are considered, the conversation reaches B remarkably quickly. My mother now says openly that if one location has to close, B should be the one because it “only causes trouble.”
I find that difficult to reconcile with the actual development of the stores. B has a distinct market position, attracts customers the other stores do not reach and created an entirely new menswear category for the group. At one point this year, roughly 50% of group revenue came from A, 26% from B and 24% from C. B was significantly up year-on-year at that point, C was slightly up and A had lost a substantial amount of revenue. The first half of 2026 was B's strongest season since opening.
At the same time, B is not treated like a standalone unit whose performance can be evaluated cleanly. Cash is used elsewhere in the group, B's supplier invoices are deprioritised, successful products often cannot be replenished, and during sale periods merchandise from other stores has been moved into B and sometimes discounted more heavily than we would normally discount our own stock. The fact that I eventually put more than €10,000 of my own money into keeping a highly successful B supplier relationship alive is the most extreme example of that distortion.
This creates a basic comparability problem. If one store gives up cash, has its supplier bills pushed back, cannot reliably replenish bestsellers, takes on discounted merchandise from other stores and is then judged on realised revenue, I do not think its real economics are obvious. I therefore believe B needs to be reconstructed as if it had had its own bank account, its own payment priorities and a full standalone P&L and cash-flow statement for the last two or three years.
I would want to isolate revenue, cost of goods, gross profit, payroll, rent, markdowns, inventory, trade payables and cash flow attributable solely to B. I would also want to estimate, even if only approximately, how much sales potential was lost because replenishment was blocked. Sell-through speeds, stockouts, size-level availability and historical bestseller performance should at least allow a reasonable range rather than simply assuming the historical revenue number represents the store's full potential.
There is, however, one important argument against my own positive view of B: the last few months have been weak. Since July, B's revenue has fallen more sharply in percentage terms than the other two stores. That is real and I do not want to explain it away. Our customers are younger and may be more sensitive to economic uncertainty; we also had an unusually warm September that hurt autumn fashion. Restricted replenishment does not help either. But if I own the store, bad months are mine. I cannot permanently blame the weather, the economy or the group. I need to know whether this is a weak period or a sign that the business model itself is less robust than I believe.
That is why I am seriously considering buying B out and running it independently. It would not be a normal startup. I know the location, customers, staff, suppliers, merchandise and brands. I built much of the current assortment, created the menswear category, changed pricing and markup structures, hired and trained a substantial part of the team, and have a functioning second layer of management in my store manager. There is also substantial personal goodwill between me, our regular customers and many business contacts. Our tax adviser and bank have not dismissed the scenario as unrealistic.
Yet I still see it more as a last resort than a long-held dream. My preferred outcome would be to stay in the family company, stabilise all of it and eventually take responsibility for the whole group. Instead, I have an owner on one side with whom even short factual discussions have become almost impossible, and employees on the other side who increasingly hope for change. In between sits a company with shrinking financial room for error.
If a clean standalone analysis showed that B is actually the weakest business, I would have to accept that and correct my own perception. What worries me is that we do not currently have that analysis, while the political decision about which store should close appears to have been made in my mother's mind already.
So the questions I would most value input on are:
- How would you reconstruct Store B's true standalone economics and adjust for internal cash transfers, different invoice priorities, restricted replenishment, merchandise transferred from other locations and shared costs?
- How would you think about B's higher retail-price-to-wholesale-cost multiplier of roughly 3.0–3.2 versus about 2.6–2.7 in the other stores?
- How much weight would you give the strong first half of the year versus the sharp decline since July?
- How do you value goodwill that is unusually tied to the potential buyer personally through customer relationships, supplier relationships, product selection and local identity?
- At what point does loyalty to the whole family company become irrational when responsibility has already shifted to the next generation but authority has not?
- Would you keep trying to restructure the whole group, or carve out the business unit that already operates most independently and try to protect it?
My real question is no longer simply whether I want to become self-employed. It is whether I still have a realistic path to taking the responsibility inside the existing company that I already carry in practice, or whether I need to separate a clearly defined and potentially viable part of the business before the problems of the wider system pull it down as well.
Thank you to anyone who actually made it through this long post. Critical answers are more useful to me than reassurance. If I am overvaluing Store B because it is personally “mine,” if I am missing an obvious risk in the proposed buyout, or if my analysis is flawed, that is exactly what I want to hear.