It’s Monday, 8:30 a.m. You’ve just gotten the green light on a rebrand and signage refresh. Timelines are tight. Capital is already spoken for in three other programs. The directive is clear: “We have to have a plan in motion by the end of the quarter.”
On paper, it’s straightforward.
Define the scope. Pick the first 100 sites. Get designs moving. Get contractors mobilized. But before anyone can draw a line or schedule a crew, the same persistent question stalls everything, “Do we actually know what’s at those 100 stores?”
That’s when the work stops being “program leadership” and turns into “digital archaeology” as our solutions engineer Jack Loukusa calls it.
Suddenly, you’re not planning a transformation anymore because you’re busy hunting down store information from various sources and systems. And that’s where many C‑store programs start losing weeks and money. Before they even begin.
If you look at your official project plans, they start with things like “Kickoff Meeting,” “Schematic Design,” “Permitting,” “Mobilization.” What’s missing is the step that everyone feels but no one has a great solution for.
Phase 0: Assemble a reliable view of the stores we’re about to touch. A single source of truth that lets us plan more effectively and avoid rework down the road.
That usually means tracking down the “latest” floor plans and site plans, digging up old ADA audits and punch lists, and calling vendors to see if they still have survey files from a program two years ago.
And usually you’re checking three or four different systems - SharePoint, a CMMS, someone’s personal drive - to piece it all together.
“Our clients are often frustrated because they’ve already paid to capture most of this data - sometimes more than once. It’s just trapped in systems that don’t talk to each other,” says Tia Kachman, COO at Immersion Data Solutions.
The information exists, it’s just:
So every new program starts with rebuilding the view of the stores from scratch. No one plans for that work. But everybody ends up doing it.
Capture Once. Reuse Everywhere.
From a distance, it’s easy to chalk all this up to “the cost of doing business.” But if you follow the hours and invoices, a pattern shows up.
The hidden costs of “hunting for store info” tend to fall into four buckets:
Directors, program managers, coordinators, and analysts all burn hours to find, compare, and sanity‑check drawings, photos, and reports.
None of that time is visible on a contractor invoice, but it’s very real, and it’s coming out of your team’s capacity to run more programs.
These are the “verification” or “scope confirmation” trips that exist primarily because no one can trust what’s on file or you realized you missed something on your previous visits.
If you add just one extra visit per store, at a conservative fully-loaded cost of, say, $3,000, a 100‑store program is suddenly carrying $300,000 in field costs before any real work starts.
Crews arrive and discover that the curb ramp is steeper than the drawing shows, or the canopy fascia is in worse shape than the last photo suggested.
That turns into change orders, redesign cycles, and sometimes re‑sequencing the program, leading to project delays and missed opportunity.
That high-visibility corner site you wanted live before summer travel season misses its store launch. That underperforming store stays off-brand, allowing customer experience to decline even further while the competitors down the road modernize.
While teams are rebuilding the picture of the stores, projects sit in “approved but not moving” status.
If your 100‑store program loses even 3 to 4 weeks at the front end, that’s a month when those refreshed stores aren’t generating the uplift your leadership is counting on - at a time when shoppers have more C-store options than ever.
You don’t need a detailed financial model to see the shape of the problem. A handful of conservative assumptions are enough to know you’re likely burning six or even seven figures a year across all programs - just to get back to find and gather what already exists.
When these delays and overruns show up, the first instinct is often to look at processes and people.
“We need stricter kickoff checklists.”
“We should standardize how we brief our vendors.”
“We need to hold our partners more accountable for documentation.”
Those are all reasonable levers. But they’re pointed at the wrong layer. You can have excellent project managers, tight Gantt charts, and disciplined vendors and still lose weeks hunting for store information if the underlying data is:
Fragmented across departments and systems
Stored in formats that aren’t easily searchable or comparable
Tied to individual projects instead of to the store itself
In other words, your projects aren’t starting slow because your teams are sloppy. They’re starting slow because every program has to rebuild the starting line. Until there’s a living, trusted view of each store that everyone can tap into, “Phase 0: hunt, reconstruct, verify” will keep repeating.
It’s tempting to treat this as a one‑off annoyance: “Yeah, that ADA/signage program was rough. Next time we’ll start earlier.”
But if you look at your annual plan, how many multi‑store initiatives do you run in a typical year?
Each of those programs needs a clear, current view of the same stores. Each one triggers its own round of digital archeology.
A director of Facilities feels it in calendar time.
“Why does every program feel like we’re starting from zero?”
Finance and the C‑suite feel it in dollars and opportunity cost. Capital that could go to new formats or growth instead gets burned on repeat site work and avoidable delay. This isn’t just a scheduling nuisance. It’s a structural drag on your ability to change the portfolio at the pace the business is asking for.
Before you jump to tools or vendors, it’s worth asking a simpler question:
What would change if you could trust your property data at the portfolio level?
Imagine your next 100‑store program and ask, “What if, before the first kickoff meeting, we could pull up a current view of all 100 sites - plans, ADA, signage, scans, existing conditions - in one place?
What if you could filter those 100 stores by “has non‑compliant ramps and legacy signage” without opening 100 separate files?
What if every team - Design, Construction, Facilities, Brand - was looking at the same source of truth, instead of their own version?
How would that change how confidently you commit to a start date and a completion date when you’re in front of your boss?
The point isn’t that you should never set foot on site again. It’s that the default shouldn’t be, “We have to send someone out just to know where we’re starting.”
If any of this feels familiar, the most useful next step isn’t to go buy another project management system.
It’s to put a rough but honest number on what “Phase 0: hunting for store info” is costing you today.
Look at your store count, typical projects per year, average site visit cost, and a realistic estimate of delay days. From there, you can start to see where your have extra site visits driven by data gaps or program delays caused by hunting, reconciling, and re‑capturing store information.
From there, you can start a very different kind of discussion about your data foundation and projects.
But it starts with seeing the problem for what it really is.
Not a people problem. Not a project plan problem.
A store data problem.
Curious about what this looks like in practice? See how one convenience store brand saved millions of dollars on a refresh by unifying its data in this C-store case study.