James Chabiel

Today marks 10 yrs since Tecovas was founded, and almost 9 yrs since I joined as the 5th employee. I took the biggest career risk of my life — joining a small startup selling cowboy boots online and out of a single Austin showroom on Saturdays. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. From taking turns working that showroom, to 56 stores today, we’ve come a long way. Here are 10 things I’ve learned along the way: 1. Growth is never linear. The line from startup to success is messy — full of pivots, rebuilds, and learning curves. The key isn’t avoiding the chaos, it’s adapting through it. 2. Believe in people before there’s proof. When I joined, I didn’t bet on a business plan. I bet on a founder and a vision. That belief has carried us further than any spreadsheet could. 3. Curiosity wins. The leaders who thrive are the ones who stay curious — about the customer, the team, the data, and themselves. 4. Get close to the customer. Every employee, at every level, should spend time in the customer service inbox or working in a retail store. There’s no better training to understand the product, the customer, and the experience. 5. Assume positive intent. In a high-growth environment, misunderstandings happen. Assuming positive intent builds trust, keeps teams aligned, and allows space for the best ideas to emerge. 6. Trust, but verify. Trust is the foundation of speed and scale — but so is verification. Both matter equally. In a fast-moving business, accountability and transparency keep the wheels from coming off. 7. The right team evolves. We’ve rebuilt and reimagined our leadership team multiple times. It’s not a sign of instability — it’s a sign of growth. Every chapter requires new strengths. 8. Numbers matter, but people drive them. The data always tells a story — but it’s a human story. Culture, communication, and clarity create the results you see in the numbers. 9. Understand every lever of the business. Someone once told me “No matter what you oversee, understand every lever of the business like an air traffic controller.” Understand how every piece of the business connects, how each decision ripples across the system. The best CFOs aren’t confined to the balance sheet — they’re orchestrating the entire flight path. 10. Be a player-coach. Dive into the action, get into the weeds, and truly understand the details. A leader who can operate at ground level will make better, faster decisions when they rise back up to 100k feet. The best leaders can do both and know when each is needed. I’m deeply grateful to Paul Hedrick, our founder, whose relentless pursuit of product perfection and commitment to always doing what’s right set the foundation for everything Tecovas stands for. And to David Lafitte, our CEO since 2022 — a tremendous mentor who’s challenged me to grow, think differently, and elevate how I lead every day. #Leadership #GrowthMindset #StartupJourney #BusinessLessons #CareerReflections

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A solid Q2 print for Walmart. US Comp Store sales were up 4.6% slightly ahead of the 4.4% industry average, and e-commerce was up 26% for the second largest e-com site in the US. That's far faster digital growth than the industry (5.8%), and Amazon (~11%). Store delivery (think fresh, frozen, and same-day) and 3P marketplace led the way. 2025 is going to be a year of clear share gainers and losers, and Walmart continues to be in the gainers colum.

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You may find it odd that a CFO is sharing this piece, but I think this is a great article from Chip Wilson, distributed in the Wall Street Journal this week on how Lululemon lost its soul. The issue with Lululemon is not that they had (or didn't have) smart financial people. This is a crucial part of any successful business. The classic error occurred when the main conversation was on how to maximize profit(s) in the short term, rather than how to create amazing products for amazing guests with amazing people first and then financial management being used to support this dream first mentality. When you lose sight of the north star of amazing products, with amazing people, for amazing guests, you begin to take short cuts that lead to long term decline. This does not mean unfettered growth with no financial metrics in place, but a relentless focus on the important things first in conversations (innovation, culture, product and customer experience) followed then by conversations on how to make this profitable and sustainable over time (not necessarily in one or two quarters). These two functions can work beautifully together but finance must be second and support the creation of true business value, not just short term, unsustainable profit(s). I have found that the companies that succeed over many years and decades are ones that adopt a founder led/visionary mentality first, innovate constantly and then are supported by absolute excellence in business operations and finance. The reverse can work for a time and is celebrated by Wall Street in the short term but it does not create long term business value. When I think about the CFO I strive to be, it’s not just about bringing absolute excellence in financial and operational management.  It’s about aiding the dreams of visionaries and founders to create amazing products and services for amazing guests and to develop/support amazing team members. It will be interesting to see how Lululemon reacts to this article.

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Launched same year as Walmart, Kmart should be a retail titan Instead, by 2002, fragmented systems drove it to bankruptcy 📉 In our latest Capital & Clarity newsletter (link in comments), we dive into the real issues behind Kmart's collapse: Silos across merchandising, supply chain, and finance. Numbers existed, but no one connected them. The result was bloated inventory, frozen cash, and vendors walking away. The lessons are clear: 1️⃣ Tech + Finance = Leverage Walmart invested in IT to unify data in the 70s. Kmart didn’t. Without integrated systems, finance can’t be the arbiter of trade-offs. 2️⃣ Promotions Without Modeling = Death Spiral Discounting looks like growth until finance maps the real cash cycle. Without that lens, promotions erode margin and liquidity simultaneously. 3️⃣ Culture of Instinct > Analytics At Kmart, executives ignored data that challenged instinct. Today, founders must force finance into the strategy room, not let it sit in the back as “reporting.” -- Kmart had capital, brand recognition, and scale. It still fell because finance wasn’t the unifying framework. #cpg #retail #dtc #kmart #walmart #privateequity #restructuring #cashflow #financialmodeling #cfo

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Same-day grocery is easy to promise and very hard to do profitably. Most retailers start with the P&L. They ask: how do we make same-day work without destroying margins? They add fees, cut assortment, outsource the experience. On paper it looks fine. In reality, NPS drops, repeat rates fall and the unit economics never really improve. At Rohlik Group we took the opposite path. We started from customer obsession: would I be proud to offer this to my own family? That meant same-day delivery as a standard, 15-min time windows, ultra-fresh product and almost perfect availability. NPS became our daily report card. I still read NPS comments every morning. Every late van, every bad substitution, shows up immediately as a lower NPS, and we treat it as a defect in the system, not a problem with the customer. To deliver same-day at scale while keeping a very high NPS (80+ in all markets), you cannot rely on spreadsheets and point solutions. You need an AI-native operating system that: • Sees the whole journey end-to-end – from demand to fulfilment to last mile. • Orchestrates people, robots and vans in real time to keep every promise. • Optimises every decision for both customer happiness (NPS) and contribution margin. When you do this, customer obsession and economics stop fighting each other. You can be faster, more reliable and more personal than the local store, and still be profitable order by order. That is exactly the system we built inside Rohlik. And we are opening it up as Veloq – an AI-driven operating platform that helps grocers deliver same-day service with top-tier NPS and strong unit economics. Let me know if you are interested in learning more!

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In a recent post about JCPenney's performance, Neil Saunders shared a graph of the company's revenues since 1973. To more clearly understand what's going on at JCP and where it is on its lifecycle, I stripped out Eckerd Drug's revenues (they sold it off in 2003) from the whole dataset (using some conservative assumptions) to analyze JCP's core retail business over time - the result is the attached chart. Without Eckerd's revenue, this graph vividly illustrates the lifecycle of JCPenney’s core business (across catalog, stores and eCommerce). It's easier to see the transitions between the lifecycle stages and how the business has thus far managed to prolong its stay in the Decline stage over the past 11+ years. 1973–1990 (Introduction to Growth): Revenue grows steadily from $4.0B to $8.0B, reflecting store expansion and catalog success. 1991–2006 (Growth to Maturity): A sharper rise to $15.9B in 2006, driven by e-commerce (exceeding $1B by 2005) and post-Eckerd sale focus on core retail. 2007–2013 (Maturity to Decline): A decline begins in 2008 ($14.7B), with a dramatic drop to $9.7B in 2013 (-24.77%), tied to Ron Johnson’s failed pricing strategy. 2014–2019 (Decline Stabilization): Recovery to ~$11B by 2018, but never regaining its 2006 highs. 2020–2024 (Deep Decline): A steep fall to $8.5B in 2020 (bankruptcy, 154 store closures) and further to $6.5B by 2024, reflecting competition from Amazon, Walmart, and many others.

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Retail Staffing: The Ongoing Tug of War Between Finance & Operations Let’s be honest — few conversations are as consistently debated in retail leadership rooms as store staffing. Finance wants to optimize labor cost, keep GMROL strong, and protect the P&L. Retail ops wants coverage, service quality, and customer experience — especially in high-touch formats like footwear. And both are right. But here’s the real challenge: staffing can’t be standardized across all retail categories. A footwear store is not an apparel store. A high-margin, high-service brand isn’t the same as a fast-turnover volume play. That’s why any serious staffing discussion needs to go beyond hours and headcount. It needs to ask: Are we deploying labor where it generates the best return? Some of the KPIs we track to answer that: GMROL – Are we getting the right gross margin return for our labor investment? Sales per Labor Hour – How efficient is the sales output per hour worked? Conversion & Staff Productivity – Are we turning footfall into revenue? Labor Cost % of Sales – Is our cost aligned to our sales volume and service model? We also consider the nature of the product: Footwear: more backroom handling, size trials, longer selling time — but higher basket size and margin. Apparel: faster transactions, higher volume, more folding/merchandising — requires speed and efficiency. So what’s the answer? It’s not cutting staff blindly or throwing bodies at the floor. It’s about category-aware staffing models. It’s about building agile finance teams that partner with ops. It’s about aligning KPIs to both profitability and customer experience. What’s worked for you in balancing finance discipline with retail floor realities? Do your staffing KPIs reflect the true complexity of your category? Let’s discuss.👇

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