Roman Szymczak: I design systems that scale retail profit.

I've spent over 30 years on the shop floor — managing departments at Metro Group, leading system rollouts across 100+ Kaufland hypermarkets (Schwarz Gruppe) , and running P&L accountability as CEO in grocery store chain. And one pattern repeated itself everywhere: companies were managing products, not categories. Buying teams chased supplier deals. Pricing reacted to competitors. Merchandising was treated as aesthetics. Nobody asked the one question that actually matters — how is this category supposed to make money?

That's what CMF360® was built to answer. It's my proprietary operating model that integrates category strategy, pricing architecture, assortment design, promotional policy, and team competencies into one unified system where every SKU placement, price point, and promotion has a defined role in the category's margin structure. Not in theory. In practice, across 500+ companies in FMCG, DIY, Pharma, and Food. The result is always the same: category management stops being an analytical function and becomes the most powerful profitability lever in the business.

Here's what I tell every leadership team I work with: the promotion isn't your problem. The absence of a system is. I've seen chains run 400 promotions a year and wonder why structural margin keeps falling. The answer is always in the architecture of decisions — not in the price tag.

Every engagement I lead starts with a Margin Leak Diagnostic. I look at four areas most organizations never audit together: pricing inconsistencies across the category, non-rotating SKUs quietly draining working capital, promotions cannibalizing regular sales, and the silent misalignment between what the manufacturer wants and what the retailer actually needs. In a convenience chain, fixing these four areas delivered a 5.5 percentage point margin increase and a 22% reduction in ineffective promotions — without touching a single shelf price. The mechanism is always the same: stop reacting to the market and start designing your margin intentionally.

The first thing I do in every project before any strategy document, before any data analysis — is walk the store. What I find on the shop floor in the first 30 minutes usually tells me more than six months of sales reports sitting in someone's inbox.

From there, every transformation project I lead covers five areas: category strategy aligned to clearly defined P&L roles; pricing architecture built around how shoppers actually read the shelf not how category managers build spreadsheets; assortment optimization that removes margin drag without risking revenue; planogram redesign grounded in shopper behavior research; and a Category Model Review process that keeps the system running after I leave. That last part matters most to me. A transformation that only works when I'm in the room isn't a transformation it's a temporary fix. Every engagement ends when your team can run the model independently.

Margin loss never announces itself. In 30 years of retail, I've never had a client come to me saying "we have a structural margin problem." They come saying sales are flat, promotions aren't working, or the category is losing relevance. The margin problem is always already there hiding in decisions that looked reasonable at the time.

The five patterns I find most often:

• Non-rotating SKUs occupying shelf space, locking working capital, invisible in standard reports
• Promotional cannibalization volume goes up, structural margin goes down, and nobody connects the two
• An invisible price strategy logical in Excel, completely unreadable for the shopper standing in the aisle
• Important segments out of sight your highest-margin products sitting in the worst shelf positions
• Reactive pricing prices moving in response to competitors instead of defending category role

I identify and eliminate these through structural margin analysis, shopper behavior research, and in-store shelf audits — three tools that have to work together to show the full picture. In a 120-store supermarket chain, this combination delivered an 18% reduction in non-productive SKUs, a 16.8% increase in value margin, and a 14.2% improvement in sales per m². Margin leaks don't appear in sales reports. They appear in the decisions made three seasons earlier and that's exactly where I look first.