You are Vicente Aliaga-Cervera, 51, CEO of Óptica Turia, a chain of optical stores your family built across the Comunitat Valenciana and Murcia. The business is healthy enough to survive and too undifferentiated to win. You want to redraw the value curve. The board meets in three weeks.
The situation
Óptica Turia runs 38 stores and turns over €46M. The optical-retail market in Spain is a crowded one: every chain competes on the same handful of things — the breadth of the designer-brand frame range, a footprint of prime high-street stores, heavy advertising and 2-for-1 promotions, and a slow, opaquely-priced service where the customer waits a week for glasses and never quite knows the final bill. Óptica Turia does all of it — slightly worse than the chains five times its size, and slightly more expensively than the online players. It is stuck in the middle.
You do not want to compete harder on those factors. You want to compete on a different set of them. Three repositionings are on the table: out-compete the big chains on their own curve; redraw the curve into a fast, transparent, focused service; or move the chain up-market into a premium boutique experience. The board's instinct is to "fight harder." You think fighting harder on the wrong curve is how the chain got stuck.