Product details

By fourth quarter, 2019, Lisa Sedlar, CEO of Green Zebra turned her attention to revenue and margin growth for the Oregon-based, healthy convenience-store (c-store) chain she founded six years earlier. Feedback from investors convinced her to push her startup closer toward profitability, before expanding her three-store Portland operation. To help with her planning, Sedlar brought on a veteran of the local tech sector, Lenka Jelinek, to evaluate Green Zebra's operational readiness to scale. Jelinek's first assignment involved an evaluation of Zebra Cash, the customer loyalty program launched in 2013. As Sedlar explained, 'Frankly, I haven't designed our loyalty card program well. My guess is there's more we could do there'. Although LPs had become a growing trend among c-store competitors, Sedlar had nagging concerns about their cost effectiveness. She needed an objective analysis of the Zebra Cash revenue and margin potential, an assessment made more urgent by the fact that she had cash in the bank to fund operations only through Q1, 2020. Although Sedlar realized that an optimized LP wouldn't solve all her cash flow challenges, the question was whether it could relieve some of the short-term financial pressure. Beyond the cash flow impact, there was also the question of whether the Zebra Cash program had strategic value given future expansion plans.