15 stores, one customer-first culture, rebuilt from the floor up.

Petstop is one of Ireland’s leading pet retailers, 15 stores, well-run, with the kind of merchandising and store standards you only get when the operation has been growing fast and the team takes real pride in the floor. That growth came at a cost. The culture had drifted, quietly, towards task-first: replenish, face up, tidy, restock, repeat.

The stores looked exceptional. But the team weren’t consistently greeting every customer. Approaches on the floor were reactive rather than proactive. The experience varied store-to-store. Anthony Gallagher, Owner and Managing Director, brought me in to lift the customer experience back up to match the standard the rest of the operation was already hitting, and to do it consistently across all 15 stores.

The brief was practical: shift from reactive to proactive, build a coaching habit that store managers could keep running once I’d gone, and make every Petstop store feel like the same Petstop store regardless of which one a customer walked into.

I’ve trained 140 of Petstop’s 150 frontline team members directly, in-store, not cascaded. Bi-monthly training sessions on site, monthly follow-ups, coaching calls and online sessions stitched together a programme that runs around the trading rhythm rather than on top of it.

The toolkit is the durable part. Workshops fade; templates don’t. Every store leader now has the same operating documents and runs the same daily rhythm, which is what made the consistency across 15 sites possible in the first place.

Cadence: bi-monthly on-site training rounds, monthly follow-ups, online coaching sessions and 1:1 calls with store leaders. Started 2024, still in flight through 2026.

The headline metric: mystery shop scores. One of the toughest stores had historically sat at 50–60%. After the programme, that same store has scored a clean 100% on multiple visits. Averages across all 15 stores now sit above 90%. The gap between top store and bottom store has narrowed sharply.

Underneath the numbers is the cultural piece I care more about. Sales associates are now proactively engaging customers, greeting on entry, approaching on the floor, asking the open question rather than waiting for one. Managers are using the observational coaching framework to give feedback in the moment, and the team are taking learning moments rather than getting defensive when feedback lands.

• Before → After Stores faced perfectly, but customers walked in without being seen.
• Before → After Approaches on the floor depended entirely on which staff member was on shift.
• Before → After Each store ran its own briefing, or didn’t run one at all.
• Before → After Feedback between manager and team felt high-stakes and rare.

After: one operating rhythm across all 15 stores, the four moments of CX coached on the floor, and observational feedback running as a daily learning loop. Manager retention has held at 100% since the programme started.