Strategy consulting · Kamloops + Sun Peaks, BC
At our first engagement, 29% of the shop's owned inventory had quietly stopped selling. Nobody had noticed. In days, the owner had the full picture and a plan to recover the cash.
Measured at a Sun Peaks retailer, from the shop's own sales records.
Treeline Consulting helps owner-run shops find the cash trapped in their inventory. We are based in Kamloops and Sun Peaks and work with retailers across British Columbia and the Alberta Rockies. We read your own sales records, show you what stopped selling and what is underpriced, and build the plan to get the money back. It starts with a complimentary call.
Book a complimentary callWhy this matters
This is not a local quirk.
Overstock and dead inventory cost retailers an estimated $1.73 trillion a year worldwide. Specialty shops carry the highest cost of any retail category. Fewer than one in four retailers use the AI tools that find it.
Source: IHL Group, 2025
Owners feel it, too. Ask what share of the shop has quietly stopped moving and the guess, when there is one, lands between 20 and 30 percent, and it gets called normal. The first time we measured it, the answer was 29%.
You track what sells. Nobody tracks what does not.
You can name your best sellers from memory. That is exactly the problem. Winners get watched. The stock that sits does not. It ties up cash, and it ties up display space, crowding the floor and pulling attention from your proven sellers. None of it shows up in a report. Pricing is the same story: set by feel years ago, then rarely reviewed while unit costs and freight climb and margin quietly erodes. One owner called it a judgment call. He wanted a science.
What changes
Clear sight, then real growth.
Clarity
See the business as it actually is. What is working, what is costing you, where the cash is stuck, and what is driving it on the floor: layout, display, buying, and how engaged your team is behind what sells.
AI-powered analysis surfaces what a manual review misses. About 29% of one shop's owned inventory was dead or slow-moving. Diagnosed, with a recovery plan delivered, in days.
Recovery
Free the cash trapped in dead stock first. Then lift the margin your best sellers already earn, on a plan we build together to speed up turn across the whole store.
$11,668 freed in the first engagement, measured. Lifting margins on proven sellers projects a further $6,238 to $12,506 a year, recurring.
Growth
Grow from a position of control: clear numbers, recovered cash, a sharper floor, a stronger team, and the business running more on systems and less on your hours.
Measured off-season, year over year: gross profit up 33%, revenue up 42%, inventory turn up 65%.
What the diagnostic shows you.
Pull up your owned-inventory number and take 29% of it. That is the question worth a phone call.
The first proof
$28,728 was sitting in the back room.
Dead and slow-moving stock at a Sun Peaks retailer. About 29% of owned inventory. The diagnostic found it and sized it in days. The plan came out of the conversation the data forced: what had stopped selling on its own merit, what was a buying pattern, what needed a different answer on the floor, what was a staff-training opportunity. Working that plan together cleared roughly two-fifths of that stock in about three months, across a single off-season, the quietest months of the shop's year. No blowout, no fire sale, at a profitable 40% margin, recapturing dead capital that would otherwise have stayed trapped. The same analysis found the opposite problem on the shelves that do sell: proven sellers with eroded margins priced well below their strength. Repricing lifted margin on proven sellers without slowing how fast they sold, adding a second, recurring lever.
- $28,728of dead and slow-moving stock identified
- $11,668freed at full clearance margin, in one off-season
- +33%off-season gross profit, year over year
- +65%faster stock movement than the same months a year earlier
Cash and velocity are measured. The recurring margin gain from repricing is projected. We report numbers when they are measured, not before.
Read the full resultsHow it works
A few exports, then a plan.
You export a few reports from your point of sale. Our analysis system reads every line of your inventory and sales history from the past three years, where available, every item, every sale, every date, and lays out the first findings while we gather key context on the business. Justin pressure-tests every finding against the way your shop actually runs: your seasons, your suppliers, your locals and your visitors, your displays, how your team sells, the story a rep or an artist has built around a piece. Then he prices each move, sequences the work, and builds the recovery plan with you, shaped around your needs and your read of the floor, with a clear recommendation on the highest-value moves to make first. The diagnostic, from your data to a recovery plan, takes just days instead of months. The results come from months of working the plan together, inside the operation.
AI-enabled analysis gives us the grounded numbers. Your floor shows us the how and the why, and our experience turns both into the plan.
Our goal is simple: make this easy for you and deliver clear results. Your data lives in an account you control. We work in it only with your permission, from anonymized records, and never share it. Our system turns your raw exports into a clear picture in days, not the weeks it takes by hand. We enrich that picture with your operating context, surfacing the key trends, bottlenecks, friction points, and root causes. Then we build the plan that turns those findings into cash back in your pocket, this season.
What the diagnostic covers
Who you work with
You get the operator, not an associate.
Justin Terwiel has spent 12 years fixing underperforming businesses across retail, home services, and industry. At Michael Hill Jewellers he led a single store to a national top sales month and won four national revenue and EBIT awards. At Modern PURAIR he took full P&L ownership and, in pursuit of increasing cashflow velocity, cut accounts receivable by 75%. At New Gold he founded the Communication Specialist role for the 700-person New Afton Mine, consolidating work that had been split across two departments into a single site mandate. Engaging all levels of the organization, he launched multiple initiatives to tackle communication barriers, including the site's biweekly newsletter, publishing 216 articles across 29 issues. The through-line is the same method every time: engage thoroughly, read the data, diagnose root causes, employ the best tools and practices, refine the system and measure the result.
About JustinFind out what your shelves are hiding.
A complimentary call. No pitch deck. You will leave knowing where to look first, whether or not we end up working together.
Book a complimentary callTreeline Consulting is a strategy consulting practice based in Kamloops, British Columbia, working with small business owners across BC and the Alberta Rockies. Founded by Justin Terwiel, it pairs AI-powered analysis of a business's own records with twelve years of operating experience, reading the numbers alongside the floor: display, staffing, buying, pricing, operating costs. The owner gets a strategy built and executed together, not a report. Its first engagement freed $11,668 in trapped cash and lifted off-season gross profit 33% for a Sun Peaks retailer.