Richard Koster
Mr. Koster has over 20 years of experience in retail food, franchising and automotive services amongst others. His retail food focus has been on maximizing unit profitability and revenue enhancement. Revenue enhancing activities include menu development, pricing, redefining the retail proposition and location analysis. Cost reduction activities include analysis of labor and food and paper costs, repairs and maintenance and real estate strategy. Network planning and segmentation is also been part of the consulting proposition where an action plan is developed for each retail site based on both its performance and the opportunity provided by the local trade area. Turnaround activity has included major cost cutting exercises (including head office relocation, staff reduction and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing spend); improving working capital (e.g. reducing inventory by changing distribution partners and including a buy-back of inventory to improve cash flow) and taking a hands-on approach to improving receivables and payables.

His automotive experience covers leasing, new and pre-owned car sales and aftermarket retail services. He has worked on the both turnarounds and growth strategies for leading auto leasing businesses and conducted economic reviews for automotive retailers leading to new network strategies. In aftermarket retail services he has developed rollout strategies that refocused both geographical expansion into more profitable locations and delivered new retail propositions.

Other retail franchise assignments include network and customers segmentation programs that have driven both rationalization and franchisee unit economics. All his consulting projects have involved a detailed economic analysis of business performance and customer profitability and both the preparation and analysis of business plans and financial statements.

John Sarto
John Sarto has over thirty years of diversified experience as Chief Financial Officer for medium to large public and private companies in a wide variety of industries including; technology and consumer products companies, a well known women’s apparel company, a highly visible public sporting goods/toy company, an industry leading credit card company, and a diversified business information services company. He is strategically and operationally oriented and accustomed to financially complex situations and has acted as Chief Restructuring Officer in turnaround environments. His experience has focused on right-sizing and re-engineering revenue and infrastructure in a number of companies. In addition, he has extensive experience in negotiating restructuring and refinancing both secured and unsecured borrowings with lenders, raising capital, and M&A evaluation and negotiations.

John is a CPA, with a MBA in Finance from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a BS in Accounting from Saint Peters College.

Bill Wolski
Bill Wolski has over 20 years of experience in consulting. His clients include national apparel, automotive, fashion accessories, gifts, office supply retailers. His Supply Chain Management expertise includes transportation expense reduction, transportation mode optimization, logistics strategy / network analysis, distribution center design and operations improvement, and warehouse management systems applications.

Mr. Wolski is a team leader, who has reduced transportation expenditures across various modes of transportation. He has managed the development of supply chain strategies which resulted in a reduction of pipeline inventory in excess of $200 million and significant reduction in store replenishment cycles.

He has engineered and implemented labor standards which have resulted in labor savings exceeding 15% for his clients. He has facilitated outsourcing of logistics to 3PLs, after analyzing opportunities and authoring a Request for Proposal.

Mr. Wolski holds a BA of Economics from Syracuse University, a MS of Industrial Engineering from the State University of New York, and a JD in Law from Pace University.