Founder's own business
Running retail on numbers: 12 years of pricing, purchasing and stock
Our co-founder ran a tire retail and service business from 2012 to 2024: pricing, purchasing, stock and payroll were his daily numbers.
The task
Keep a small retail and service business profitable: price tires against the market, decide what and when to buy from suppliers, and keep enough stock to serve up to 50 customers a day without freezing cash in slow sizes.
The data
Point-of-sale and warehouse system records, supplier price lists, payroll and cost records. Kept by the owner, not published: this case is about the decisions, not about the dataset.
The approach
- Pricing reviewed against supplier costs and local competitors, size by size.
- Purchasing split across 3–4 suppliers, so no single price list or delivery delay set the margin.
- Stock of about 3,000 tires watched for sizes that sell weekly and sizes that sit for months.
- Payroll and overhead tracked as a share of revenue, with 2 employees on staff.
Results in numbers
Where this applies
Most catalogues carry a long tail: a fifth of SKUs makes most of the revenue, while hundreds of items sell rarely or have stopped. We measure days of supply per SKU, flag what has gone quiet and show the cash tied up in it.
Read the method
Have a similar question about your data?
Start with a free 20-minute call. You get a written quote with fixed scope and price.
More case studies: E-commerce retention model on 500,000+ transactions · Staking fund portfolio: the range of outcomes, not one forecast