Still employed, real feedback…
As someone who sat through countless hours with BCG during integration, the amount of trust 7-11 put into a 3rd party consultant was scary from the start. Decisions were made too fast to capture synergy, which is the whole benefit of merging, but the ego was so big that it prevented them from believing in a different way. As Speedway performance began to plummet, there was an about face and tactics began to change for the better.
There is far too much middle and VP level management. This is not a hard business, but the number of meetings would suggest we’re building rockets.
Japan’s business is doing poorly, which increases pressure on the US segment. After a year of seeing the two companies operate together, my humble opinion is that business would be best served by dividing the companies into two, franchise and corporate stores. There was a lot of assumptions made that the combined leverage would be good for all, but almost every deal I’ve seen to this point has gotten worse. Suppliers openly talk about how difficult and unreasonable 7-11 is to work with, which comes from 7-11 losing the ability to be humble and focuses too much energy chest puffing because they’re the biggest.
That said, there are a LOT of great people in this company who work hard and do the right thing every day to support the stores. End of the day, 7-11 is a great franchise based company, but I think they’re in over their head with this size of a corporate operation. When you’re responsible for it all, you have to work hard and figure it out. What I’ve seen to this point is a lot of finger pointing and blame for problems, while senior leadership spends a lot of time micromanaging product decisions.
After taking time to digest layoffs, seeing good talent let go, while a direct underperforming peer remain employees, I can’t say I have much faith in the direction they’re going.