In the daily routine of retail and franchise stores, we see two types of managers – the "blank slates" who start each day from scratch, and the "hoarders" who maintain endless to-do lists.
Regardless of the manager's profile, one truth remains: they're drowning in tasks that generate neither satisfaction nor results for their store. Between non-negotiable commitments like stock orders and payroll, they can barely breathe before putting out the fires that erupt daily through WhatsApp messages, phone calls, and emails.
These interruptions take up about 80% of a manager's time, leaving very little room for improvement. A typical day becomes a jumble of reactions to emergencies that teach neither the manager nor the employees anything.
This reactive pattern creates a vicious cycle where each completed task generates three more, turning the day into a succession of emergencies that yield no solutions for stores. With 80% of the time taken up by interruptions, there's little room for strategic improvements, leaving managers stuck in a constant state of multiplying responsibilities without intelligent prioritization.
The real currency in retail operations
This is precisely why the most precious resource in franchise stores and in retail in general is attention, not money. Where managers direct their limited time and energy determines a store's success or failure. But there's a problem: the traditional management approach makes it nearly impossible to cultivate attention.
Concentration works like sleep. You enter it gradually, and if you're interrupted, you have to start all over again. The fragmented nature of retail operations, with constant context switching between tasks, makes deep thinking nearly unattainable.
Think about what happens when a store manager tries to analyze data after hours of putting out fires. They sit down, open a spreadsheet, and try to make strategic decisions while messages keep coming in. This is not the environment in which the human brain functions effectively.
This cognitive reality creates a prioritization paradox: the very nature of retail operations makes it nearly impossible to define where to focus, which in turn maintains the cycle of reactive management.
Why Your Brain Can't Prioritize
Effective prioritization, one of the main pillars of Precision Retail, requires comparing multiple opportunities simultaneously. For a retail operation with ten stores, each with ten potential areas for improvement, there are one hundred possibilities to be evaluated.
For each opportunity, managers need to consider:
Impact: What is the potential gain if we improve this metric? This requires understanding current performance, the theoretical maximum possible, and calculating the difference between them.
Trust: How confident are you that this solution will work? Have we done this before? Has anyone had success with this approach?
Effort: How difficult will it be to implement? What resources will be required? How long will it take?
Our brains can't make multidimensional comparisons efficiently. We think in series, not in comparison operations. Even experienced managers struggle with this.
One of our top operators, responsible for eight Subway stores, began seeing an 8% to 10% drop in revenue compared to the previous year. He immediately suspected fraud or cost issues and focused his full attention on it.
What he missed: the store was located in an airport where flight schedules had changed significantly. The staff was also closing 30 minutes early every night, despite heavy customer traffic until midnight. The real opportunity wasn't in cost control, but in extending hours.
We were able to detect this trend with the platformVisio, analyzing in minutes the images from the store's cameras throughout the days, synchronized with the purchase receipts.
After adjusting the schedule, profits increased bymore than 300%—the equivalent of opening four or five new stores without any capital investment. The operator was experienced and motivated, but without the necessary tools, he simply couldn't see this opportunity because the amount of daily tasks didn't allow for that kind of thinking.
The ICE Model: Bringing Method to Chaos
The ICE prioritization model wasn't something we invented—it's used across a variety of industries—but we've refined its application specifically for retail operations. It creates a systematic approach for deciding where to focus limited resources.
ICE stands forImpact, Trust and Effort, with each component receiving a numerical score:
Impactassesses how much an initiative contributes to business objectives. If you're currently at X and can potentially reach Y, the difference between these points represents your impact score.
Trustmeasures the level of certainty that the proposed solution will achieve the desired impact, based on past experience and proven approaches.
Effortanalyzes how simple it is to implement the initiative, considering the time required, the availability of resources and the possible obstacles.
Multiplying these three scores generates a final score. This allows you to clearly identify, within a prioritization ranking, which initiatives deserve immediate attention.
When applied correctly, this model transforms chaotic decision-making into an objective and safe process. Instead of responding to whoever shouts the loudest, managers can focus on initiatives that deliver the greatest return on the time and energy invested.
How ICE helps you prioritize
Let's look at a real-world implementation. A fast-food chain with 30 units wanted to increase its gross revenue. As franchisees, they had limited control over marketing and customer flow, so they focused on extracting more value from existing customers.
They had only one team available to train employees across all locations. The question became: which stores to visit first and which sales techniques to prioritize in each store?
Using the ICE model, they analyzed each store's performance on upsell metrics: premium sandwiches, co-selling of beverages, desserts, add-ons, and discount frequency. For each metric in each store, they calculated:
Impact: How far below the benchmark was this metric, and what would be the revenue increase if it were improved?
Trust: Have you been able to improve this metric before in similar stores?
Effort: How difficult would it be to train the team in this specific technique?
This approach revealed which stores needed attention first and which specific sales techniques would generate the highest return. By allocating training resources based on this prioritization, they achieved a 14% increase in the average ticket across the group—an extraordinary result in the fast-food industry.
The power wasn't just in choosing the right stores or metrics. It was in the comprehensive approach that optimized bothwherefocus on how muchnot thatfocus.
Choosing your first prioritization mission
The first mission is crucial to building momentum and confidence in the prioritization approach. We recommend choosing an initiative that takes two factors into account:
Personal priority: What pain bothers you the most right now? What keeps you awake at night?
Juicy fruit on the lower branches of the tree: Which opportunity offers the most favorable combination of impact, trust, and effort?
The perfect initial mission is where these two factors overlap. It may not be the highest priority or the easiest win, but it's the combination that maximizes your chances of significant initial success. And when people see concrete results quickly, resistance diminishes and enthusiasm grows.
How Technology Refines Our Judgment
Effective prioritization requires processing large volumes of data and performing complex calculations—tasks where technology excels. AI and data analytics tools can help in two ways:
- Analyze store operation metricsand calculate potential impact more efficiently and accurately than humans. This includes comparing performance across units, considering seasonality, and identifying deviations that indicate opportunities.
- Bring together best practices from different stores and operations, helping you determine which solutions are most likely to work in specific contexts. This dramatically improves trust scores, expanding your reach beyond your immediate network.
Technology doesn't replace human judgment, but it can amplify our reasoning. The retail manager still makes the final decision, but with far better information and analysis than you could manage alone, especially with the limited time you have.
The virtuous cycle of prioritization
Prioritization in retail stores and restaurants isn't a one-time event; it's part of an ongoing process that improves with each cycle. This improvement happens for two reasons:
- Teams become familiar with the methodology, reducing the learning curve and friction in implementation.
- Each cycle builds a larger foundation of solutions, improving your ability to estimate impact, confidence, and effort for future initiatives.
Every business has a finite number of levers it can pull. As you document what works and what doesn't, your prioritization becomes increasingly accurate. You'll identify high-impact opportunities faster and implement solutions more effectively.
The frequency of these prioritization cycles should align with the natural rhythm of your business and the human capacity for change. In general, we recommendmonthly strategic priorities, with tactical actions that can occur weekly or even daily for some operational indicators.
Remember, the goal is to shorten learning cycles—creating more opportunities to adjust course based on results. The more cycles you complete, the faster you'll see real progress.
Overcoming Resistance to Prioritization in Your Store
If prioritizing brings so many benefits, why is it so difficult?
If you've ever tried this approach, you know how much resistance it provokes in teams. But it can be overcome in two ways:
- Education: Help people understand why traditional approaches fail and how prioritization solves these problems. Connect the model to everyday challenges so they see its relevance.
- Early victories: Demonstrate value quickly by choosing an initial mission with a high chance of success. Nothing convinces like results.
When teams experience clear prioritization, they often respond with enthusiasm. Clarity reduces stress and promotes a sense of fairness—everyone understands what's most important and how success will be measured. This alignment creates a sense of purpose and progress that traditional reactive management struggles to achieve.
The future of prioritization in retail
As retail continues to generate more data and face more complexity, the need for effective prioritization will only grow.
The combination of human judgment, structured models, and technological support creates a powerful retail management approach that transforms overwhelming to-do lists into focused, high-impact actions.
The chaos of retail operations won't disappear. There will always be a number of "fires to put out," and unexpected challenges may arise along the way. But with effective prioritization, this won't become part of the routine as it is today.
Believe me, the endless to-do list is an option, and you can get out of it.
Visio is an AI-powered platform that analyzes your store's daily operations, centralizes all information, and provides visibility into opportunities for improvement across your entire operation. With our expert support, you can define your priorities month by month and see your profitability indicators rise. Subway franchisees who use Visio achieve, on average, 40% more revenue than other franchisees in the chain.
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