Larry is an Advisor & Principal of the New England Consulting Group and a key member of our retail consulting and executive leadership practice.
Reflecting a broad range of senior management roles, Larry’s experience has focused on both domestic and international responsibilities for consumer products and retail organizations ranging from Procter & Gamble to CVS to Meijer.
In many of Larry’s positions, he has been called upon to drive profitable growth while substantially revamping business systems, go-to-market and strategic supply side functions. Because of his well-grounded market-driven orientation, Larry has also consistently built value into core brand operations as well as building new sources of revenue ranging from acquisition, to joint venture to e-commerce.
More recently, Larry has been actively engaged as CEO in managing turnarounds for private equity owned firms including Duckwall-ALCO and Levitz Furniture. For Duckwall, he engineered a successful turnaround of this $500M business creating a transformational plan to upgrade overall performance of this general merchandise company.
Larry was also a leading retail executive as President at Meijer and Executive Vice President at CVS.
While at Meijer, he initiated the “higher standards and lower prices” strategy as a Walmart defense. He designed and implemented a new store format that delivered destination Health and Beauty, Electronics, Apparel, Home, Seasonal, pet and Baby zones. This new store format rolled out across the chain and reduced development costs by 40% while delivering improved sales, margin and profitability. He also introduced “Profit Logics” to better manage mark downs, and led major overhaul of merchandising systems and processes to enhance business performance and profitability.
For CVS, Larry led corporate development and successfully implemented initiatives including entering the Internet business by negotiating the purchase of a pure-play company, saving the considerable costs of an internal start-up and gaining a six month lead on competition. He also engineered Internet alliances with Merck-Medco, the largest pharmacy benefit management company, WebMD, the leader in health information, and Kodak/AOL, for photo uploading capability. Larry also led a new store layout strategy that introduced a beauty center at the store entrance, expanded the food/beverage and photo areas, added a new baby section. Critically, he was instrumental in developing and launching the highly acclaimed CVS drug store loyalty program.
Larry holds a BS in Administrative Science from Yale University.
