Operating partner for multi-unit brands

Real operators. Stronger tomorrows.

Build the teams, systems, and operating infrastructure your business needs for its next stage of growth.

Let’s build See the work
Two SKALA operators walking the store floor before opening, one carrying a crate

See. Plan. Do. Check. Act. Repeat.

What we do

We find what needs to be built next.

Growth gets harder when your systems do not keep up. SKALA identifies the constraint and gives your team a clear path to build what the next move requires.

Our focus areas:

A store leader talking through the work with four team members on the sales floor, one taking notes

Build a Business That’s ready For growth.

How we work

We get close to the work. Then start building.

Growth exposes what the business has outgrown. We get into the operation, find the constraint that matters, and agree on the next move before building more than you need.

Then we work alongside your team to put the solution into practice, so it keeps working without us.

Build capability that stays after we leave.

  1. Find what matters.

    Start with the operating problem, not a predetermined solution.

  2. Prove the next move.

    Focus on the smallest meaningful change that can show progress.

  3. Build it into the business.

    Create the routines, ownership, tools, and team capability to make the improvement stick.

  4. Leave the capability behind.

    The goal is a stronger operation, not an ongoing dependency.

Articles

How we think about growth.

A collection of articles with steps you can take now.

  • See more articles

About

Operator experience.

Over 12 years, Tavis Scholz has built teams and departments from the ground up while helping scale a multi-unit retail system.

  • 7×Systemwide sales growth
  • 160Store projects delivered
  • 21 173Locations
  • 50 500+Field team members
  • US + CanadaFranchisor infrastructure built

SKALA brings that operating experience to brands preparing for their next stage of growth.

An operator in a SKALA jacket walking between locations along a city street, notebook under one arm

Let’s build.

Tell us what you are building and where the operation needs to get stronger.

Field Operations

Your Best Manager Cannot Be the Operating System

How to turn one manager's judgment into a field system every location can use.

Tavis Scholz · 19 September 2026 · 5 min read

You have one. Every multi-unit operator does. The manager whose store just runs. Labor lands, shrink stays low, the team stays, the reviews are good, and when something goes sideways at another location, she’s the one you send. You’ve thought about cloning her. You’ve probably tried: put her in charge of training, had new managers shadow her for two weeks, asked her to write down how she does it. And the other stores still don’t run like hers.

That’s not a talent gap in the rest of your bench. It’s a transfer problem, and it has a specific cause.

Why "Just Write It Down" Produces a Folder Nobody Opens

Roughly 80% of the processes in a typical business are undocumented. That number gets quoted a lot. The part that matters more is what the documented 20% actually contains: the official process, not the real one. Documentation captures the workflow. Your best manager’s edge is the judgment she applies to the workflow, and those are different things.

Ask her to write down “how to run a store” and you get a bad manual, for the same reason a great chef asked to write down “how to cook” produces a bad cookbook. Expertise is stored in the situations where it gets used. She can’t narrate it cold. So the shared-drive folder gets built, the calendar invite goes out, the two-week shadow happens, and six months after she gets promoted or leaves, her successor has quietly rebuilt half of what she knew, badly, and is still learning the other half by breaking things.

Documentation captures the workflow diagram. Tribal knowledge is the judgment that gets applied to the workflow. Those are different substrates.

Verti

Median tenure in most operations sits around three and a half years. Knowledge isn’t walking out the door at retirement. It’s walking out continuously.

What Actually Gets the Judgment Out

The method that works is unglamorous: sit with her, one real case at a time, and ask why. Not “how do you schedule,” but “why did you pull Tuesday’s mid shift last week and not the close.” Not “how do you handle shrink,” but “why did you count the candy wall on a Wednesday.” Never let it float into the abstract.

A knowledge-capture team ran this with a senior insurance underwriter who could not describe her renewal process on a blank page. Case by case, asked why this file gets approved and that one doesn’t, she talked for an hour on every decision. Every reason came out. None of them were in her team’s SOPs.

That last step is where most operators skip ahead. Encoding one person’s habits into the system institutionalizes the quirks along with the judgment. The output you want is a working profile: the case types she sees, the reasoning behind each call, the exception library, the triggers that make her escalate, and where she looks first when a store feels off.

Documents Don't Run Stores. Routines Do.

Here’s the trap on the far side of the capture: producing a document and calling it done. A documentation project produces documents. What you need is something that runs, every store, every week, whether or not she’s in the building.

The delivery mechanism at store level is the routine, not the manual. A routine defines when the work happens, who does it, what sequence is followed, how completion is confirmed, and how exceptions escalate. That’s the form your best manager’s judgment needs to take to survive contact with a store she’s never seen.

One prerequisite worth being honest about: this works against whatever data she already uses to read a store. POS, labor, inventory, reviews. If you don’t have that layer, build it first. Buying software before the method exists is paying to digitize the chaos. The value split is roughly 70% method, 30% tool.

When to Do This

Most operators start the capture after a near-miss: she gives notice, or gets sick, or the store she left behind falls apart within a quarter. That’s the expensive version. The cheap version is doing it now, while she’s engaged, while the cases are fresh, and while the second and third best managers are around to validate what she says.

Three things worth un-learning:

  • Promoting her preserves the knowledge. It moves the person. The judgment still lives in exactly one head, now further from the stores.
  • Having her train everyone else transfers the system. Training moves explicit knowledge well and tacit knowledge poorly. Judgment has to be recorded in action, not lectured.
  • Her method is the system. Until two or three other strong operators confirm it, it’s one person’s logic mixed with personal habit.

Tavis Scholz is the founder of SKALA, an operating practice for multi-unit brands. He spent twelve years building teams and opening stores across the U.S. and Canada. He is based in East Tennessee and can be reached at tavis@buildwithskala.com.

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Store Development

Why New Store Openings Fall Behind: 5 Handoffs Your Checklist Must Control

The owners, dependencies, and decision dates that keep routine surprises from becoming opening delays.

Tavis Scholz · 19 September 2026 · 5 min read

The opening date was set the day the lease got signed. Everybody agreed to it. There’s a checklist, a long one, and every line on it will get done. And the store will still open three weeks late, because the checklist never had the one thing that actually decides an opening date: who owns each handoff, what it depends on, and the date by which a decision has to be made.

Most openings run 90 to 180 days from lease signing to doors open. About 40% of them slip. When you go back and look at where the time went, it’s almost never the construction crew. It’s the space between teams.

Every boundary between teams is a risk point.

Hubler

A typical opening moves through roughly three dozen milestones and touches 15 to 20 people across real estate, legal, construction, IT, ops, HR, and the landlord’s side. Each time the work passes from one of them to the next, it costs two to five days on average. Five handoffs decide most of the schedule. Here they are, with what your checklist needs to say about each.

1. Lease to Pre-Construction: The Site Handover

A signed lease does not mean the site is ready for work. Delays start here because the premises condition, landlord obligations, access rights, permit status, and utility connections never got validated before the schedule got locked.

Treat the handover like a delivery you’re inspecting. Possession date. Loading access and delivery restrictions. Work-hour limits. Ceiling heights, floor condition, storefront condition. HVAC, electrical, and plumbing capacity. Fire and sprinkler coverage. Signage rights. Landlord-controlled areas. Have real estate, construction, ops, IT, and facilities all look at it, and get the answers in writing.

2. Design to Permits: The Third-Party Clock

Permitting is the single largest source of delay, for three reasons: it happens before construction can start, it depends on somebody else’s review queue, and it varies wildly by jurisdiction. The same tenant build-out clears in four to eight weeks in a fast suburb and takes eight to twelve or more in a major coastal city.

The control here is a permit tracker, owned by someone on your side, not assumed to be handled by the general contractor. Each required approval, who’s responsible, submission date, expected approval date, what it depends on, current status, and the trigger that escalates it. Building, electrical, plumbing, signage, health, fire, occupancy, food handling, business registration. Whatever your format needs.

3. Procurement to Construction: Long-Lead Equipment

Rooftop HVAC units and electrical switchgear have run twenty to forty weeks to procure in recent years. That breaks the old assumption that you order them once construction is underway. Signage and landlord deliverables round out the usual hiding places. All of these run on their own clock, in parallel with the build, which is exactly why they get missed.

4. Construction to Operations: The Readiness Gate

Two mistakes live here. Delaying the opening over a scratched wall, and opening with a failed fire inspection. The punch list needs to distinguish opening-critical defects from post-opening corrections, and it needs to do that before the final walkthrough, not during it.

Define who has authority to sign off on construction completion, IT, security, merchandising, operations, HR, compliance, and the final go or no-go. Then require evidence, not confidence: inspection certificates, test results, photos, training records, inventory reports, system screenshots, vendor completion forms. If leadership decides to open with something unresolved, the rationale and the mitigation plan get written down. That protects the business from informal risk acceptance.

5. Project Team to Store Team: Day One

The opening sequence itself is a chain: signage, final inspections, certificate of occupancy, punch list, merchandising, staff training, soft open, grand open. The last handoff is the project team handing the building to the people who’ll run it. Put store associates in the final walkthrough. They think in terms of daily use and catch what headquarters misses. It also gives them ownership before the doors open.

Then remember the opening isn’t the finish line. New stores typically take 12 to 24 months to reach maturity, and the first 90 days separate the ones that get there from the ones that stall.

Why It Keeps Happening

There’s no single source of truth. The project plan lives in someone’s spreadsheet. Vendor contracts are in email threads. The compliance checklist is in someone’s drawer. Finance doesn’t know the fit-out is over budget until month end. Ops doesn’t know the fire approval is pending until opening week.

Openings run by a project manager with a standardized playbook finish on average 43 days faster than ones run ad hoc. Not because the PM is a hero. Because every dependency carries an owner, a date, an evidence requirement, and an escalation path, so control survives whoever’s in the seat.

Three things worth un-learning:

  • The checklist is the plan. A checklist without owners, dependencies, and decision dates is a document, not a control system.
  • The general contractor owns permits. Permits run on a third-party queue. You need a tracker, not an assumption.
  • Delays are construction’s fault. Most delays originate in the handoffs and the third-party clocks, not in how fast the crew works.

Tavis Scholz is the founder of SKALA, an operating practice for multi-unit brands. He spent twelve years building teams and opening stores across the U.S. and Canada. He is based in East Tennessee and can be reached at tavis@buildwithskala.com.

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Real Estate & Leasing

Before You Sign the Lease: Why a Great Site Can Still Be the Wrong Location

Evaluate the trade area, the portfolio fit, and the unit economics. Not just the address.

Tavis Scholz · 19 September 2026 · 5 min read

The corner is perfect. Good visibility, strong traffic, the right neighbors, a landlord who wants you. Everybody who walks it says the same thing. And you can still lose money there for nine years, because the address is only one of the questions a lease answers, and it’s the one operators spend the most time on.

The lease is the least reversible decision you’ll make. Staff, pricing, hours, product mix, all of that can change in a week. Square footage on a nine-year term can’t. One in four new establishments doesn’t reach its first birthday. Some of those were bad concepts. A lot of them were good concepts in the wrong box.

Two sites on the same street can differ by 30% or more in passing traffic because of a corner, a crossing, or a bus stop. So measure the address, not the neighbourhood.

MyTraffic

Six Checks, In This Order

The order matters. Cheap checks first, so you disqualify weak sites before you pay a lawyer or a surveyor. Any one of these can rule a site out.

Footfall at the door. Twelve months of it, not one. A street that lives off a summer market or a single office tower has a traffic profile that collapses for part of the year. Your rent doesn’t.

The real trade area. Where your customers actually come from is almost never a neat radius. It follows roads and transit and habit, and it stops dead at a river, a highway, or a rival cluster. Draw drive-time polygons, not circles. The primary trade area typically supplies 50 to 80% of revenue.

Demographics against your customer. Write your customer profile down before you look at the data, or you’ll talk yourself into whatever the site happens to show. Set pass-or-fail numbers: household income above a threshold at a minimum share of the trade area, residents within a ten-minute walk, enough daytime workers to carry a Tuesday.

The competitive set. Direct competitors inside the primary trade area, counted, not felt.

Accessibility. Visibility, ingress and egress, parking, transit.

The lease clauses themselves. Which is where good sites go bad.

Where Good Sites Go Bad

An office lease negotiates the box: square footage, rent, term. A retail lease negotiates the ecosystem: who else is in the center, how traffic reaches your door, whether you can grow nearby, and what share of your sales the landlord takes on top of rent. Those provisions can’t be unwound at renewal, so they deserve disproportionate attention now.

Done well, percentage rent aligns you and the landlord. Done poorly, with a low breakpoint and a broad definition of sales, it makes the lease far more expensive than the base rent suggests. Get the property, finance, operations, and legal reads before the lease process starts, in a deal memo, not a phone call.

The Question That Decides the Deal

If you already operate nearby, there’s a check the six above don’t cover. A new location posts real revenue. If a chunk of it walked over from your store three miles away, the brand didn’t grow. It redistributed.

Score all of it against your best existing stores. If you can’t explain why your top performers work in these terms, you can’t tell whether the new site will.

Four things worth un-learning:

  • A great address is a great site. Measure the door, not the neighborhood.
  • The rent is the rent. Percentage rent, CAM, exclusives, and co-tenancy are the real occupancy cost.
  • Strong footfall means strong sales. Traffic that converts matters. Volume without fit is a trap.
  • A busy summer street is a good site. Test twelve months, not the peak.

Tavis Scholz is the founder of SKALA, an operating practice for multi-unit brands. He spent twelve years building teams and opening stores across the U.S. and Canada. He is based in East Tennessee and can be reached at tavis@buildwithskala.com.

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Franchise Infrastructure

When Your Franchise Sales Story Outruns Your Item 19

The gap between what candidates hear and what the FDD supports is where deals die, and where the legal exposure lives.

Tavis Scholz · 19 September 2026 · 5 min read

A candidate is six weeks into your pipeline and everything has gone right. Discovery Day landed. The unit economics conversation felt honest. They’re ready to sign. Then their attorney finishes the FDD review and the deal goes quiet. Not because the numbers in Item 19 were bad. Because they weren’t the numbers the candidate had already been told.

That gap has two costs. One is the deal. The other is legal, and it’s bigger than most sales teams understand.

Three Conditions, All Required

Item 19 is the only place in the franchise sales process where a financial performance representation is allowed to exist. The definition is broad: any oral, written, or visual representation that states or implies a specific level or range of sales, income, or profit. Under the FTC Franchise Rule, making one is unfair or deceptive unless three independent conditions are met: you have a reasonable basis for it, you have written substantiation at the time you make it, and it’s in Item 19.

A representation can be perfectly accurate and still unlawful because it is not in Item 19.

HDD Law Firm

Read that twice. Accuracy isn’t a defense. A rep who says “our strongest stores tend to run higher” has just made an earnings claim, whether or not it’s true. The rule reaches oral and visual statements specifically, which means sales conversations, slide decks, and webinars. And it reaches brokers: anyone under contract and compensated on sales is a franchise seller under FTC guidance, and their projection is covered the same as yours.

How It Actually Happens

Nobody sits down and decides to break this rule. It happens over a six-to-twelve-week relationship as a rep fields the same question again and again and starts filling the silence. “That number’s a system average, yours would probably do better in a market like this.” None of that is in the FDD. All of it is now what the candidate believes.

That last point is the trap in a blank Item 19. Nobody buys a franchise without forming a view of what it will earn. If Item 19 is empty, that view came from somewhere: a conversation, a pro forma emailed during diligence, a figure mentioned at Discovery Day, a loan projection someone helped prepare. A blank Item 19 doesn’t stop the number. It pushes it into channels you don’t control.

What the Case Law Says

The franchisor sometimes wins these. In Sellstate, a Minnesota court dismissed because once the franchisees read the disclaimers, they couldn’t reasonably rely on the oral projections. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, Ben & Jerry’s, and Kiddie Academy all won on similar grounds. But outcomes depend as much on which state you’re in as on what happened. New York and others have anti-waiver laws that don’t let franchisees sign away those rights. Treating the disclaimer as a shield is betting your system on venue.

And winning the case still means you lost the deal, the legal fees, and a franchisee who’s now telling every candidate in your pipeline what happened.

The Fix Isn't Silence

Telling your sales team to stop talking about money doesn’t work. Candidates will ask regardless. The fix is giving them a specific, compliant answer that maps directly to whatever Item 19 says this year, so there’s nothing left to freelance.

If your FDD makes no claim, that answer is short and it gets memorized word for word, not improvised under pressure. If it does make one, the team needs the plain-English version of exactly what it covers and, just as important, what it deliberately leaves out: which markets, which unit ages, which outliers were excluded. The deliberate gaps are exactly where reps guess. Review that mapping every time Item 19 changes, not once when it’s written.

Three things worth un-learning:

  • The numbers were accurate, so we’re fine. Accuracy is one of three conditions. All three are required.
  • Oral statements don’t count. They’re named in the definition, and so are slides and webinars.
  • Our disclaimers make us untouchable. They’ve won cases. They’ve also lost them, and they never win back the deal.

Tavis Scholz is the founder of SKALA, an operating practice for multi-unit brands. He spent twelve years building teams and opening stores across the U.S. and Canada. He is based in East Tennessee and can be reached at tavis@buildwithskala.com.

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