Here’s a stat that always gets me.
Australia is about 4,000 kilometres from one side to the other. It takes five to six days to drive it. And yet 85% of the population, around 26 million people, live within 50 kilometres of the coast.
That leaves roughly three to three and a half million people spread across the rest of the country.
Not many people. A lot of land. And for any business running stores in those regional and outback areas, a serious blind spot.
Here’s the reality. The further a store is from head office, the harder it is to know what’s actually going on inside it. You’re not dropping in regularly. You’re not walking the floor. You’re relying on a regional manager to tell you what’s happening.
And regional managers don’t always tell you the full story.
Not always deliberately. But the picture that filters back to you has already been shaped by the time it lands on your desk. Things get left out. Problems get smoothed over. What you hear and what’s actually happening on the ground can be two very different things.
This isn’t unique to regional Australia, but distance makes it worse. The stores closest to head office tend to get the most attention, the most visits, the most scrutiny. The ones sitting hours away from the nearest capital city? They operate with a lot more autonomy than you probably realise.
And autonomy without accountability is where standards start to slip.
If you’ve got stores spread across regional areas and you’re making decisions about training, operations, or performance based on what your managers are reporting back, it’s worth asking yourself a simple question.
When did someone last actually experience one of those stores the way a customer does?
Not a scheduled visit. Not a call with the manager. A real, unannounced look at what’s happening on the floor.
Because until you do that, you’re working off a version of events that someone else has already edited for you.
And out there, far from the coast and far from head office, that version can be very different from the truth.