Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees

The podcast retail executives need to hear but rarely do.Hosted by CATO Creative's retail consultant Bekki Cait, and veteran store leader Matt Copeland, each episode brings you the unfiltered truth about what's really happening in your stores. Through candid conversations, they bridge the growing disconnect between corporate offices and frontlines—revealing why your best initiatives fail, what your teams actually need, and how to transform frustration into results.This is your unvarnished window into the realities that engagement surveys and sanitized store visits never show you.

Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees is a business podcast hosted by CATO Creative, with 38 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

CATO Creative hosts Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees, a business show with 38 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #13

  Stop Waiting for Retail to Change Before You Change Your Life With Sam Foster

  Sep 24, 20261h 4mS2

  Retail has problems. Staffing, workload, culture, expectations — organizations absolutely have a responsibility to make things better. But what happens when you spend years waiting for the job to change before you let yourself have a life? In this episode, Bekki and Matt are joined by Samantha Foster, founder of Aligned Systems Co. and a retail leader with 25 years of frontline experience, to talk about the part of the retail experience employees may actually have more power over than they think. Sam shares how she stopped waiting for better circumstances and started changing the things she could control — from her finances and health to the boundaries she set around work. Together, they unpack the invisible badge of honour around overwork in retail, why leaders often follow expectations nobody actually gave them, and how self-imposed hustle can turn into exhaustion and resentment. They also explore a bigger question: what might change in retail if more store leaders stopped making impossible expectations possible? In this episode: Why retail leaders can’t wait for someone else to give them permission to have a life The difference between organizational problems and the pressure we put on ourselves How retail’s “grind” culture gets passed from leader to leader Why boundaries can feel dangerous even when nobody is actually stopping you from setting them How overworking can create resentment toward the business Why taking care of yourself can make you a better leader for your team The connection between boundaries, autonomy and sustainable retail careers Why organizations should measure how employees actually feel — not just the wellbeing programs they offer What could happen if enough store leaders collectively stopped absorbing unrealistic expectations About Sam Foster Samantha Foster is the founder of Aligned Systems Co., where she helps retail leaders build the personal systems, boundaries and skills that allow them to succeed at work without losing the rest of their lives in the process. Connect with Sam on LinkedIn or learn more at alignedsystems.co. Connect Sam Foster: LinkedIn | alignedsystems.co Bekki Cait: LinkedIn

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees

  Our First Ever Episode: Has Anything Changed?

  Sep 10, 202649 min

  More than a year ago, we started this podcast with one big question: why is the disconnect between corporate and store teams so hard to fix? So this week, we’re going back to the beginning. In our very first episode, Matt and I unpacked the day-to-day realities behind the corporate–store divide: initiatives landing in stores as though there’s unlimited time to absorb them, too many competing priorities and communication channels, metrics that can work against the mission, rigid standards that undermine good judgment, and the lack of trust that keeps corporate leaders from seeing what’s actually happening in stores. Listening back now is interesting because so much of what we’ve explored over the past year was already sitting inside this conversation. The engagement survey. Corporate visits. Store manager overload. Communication. Empowerment. Psychological safety. The pressure to make stores look fine instead of making it safe to say when they aren’t. We’ve spent a year pulling those threads apart, challenging some of our own thinking, and getting much more specific about what it actually takes to close the gap. But the central idea still holds: Corporate and stores usually want the same thing — successful stores and happy customers. The systems between them are what keep getting in the way. Whether you’ve been listening since the beginning or found us somewhere along the way, this felt like a good moment to revisit where the conversation started — and hear it again with everything we know now.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #11

  Inside an Executive Store Visit

  Aug 27, 202659 minS2

  This week, Bekki asks Matt to walk through an executive store visit from start to finish: the first rumours that someone is coming, the weeks of preparation, what “visit ready” actually means, what happens when executives walk through the door, and the strange phone-tree that follows them from store to store. Matt explains why a well-run store and a visit-ready store aren't necessarily the same thing, how store leaders learn to manage the visit itself, and why he uses that rare face time to teach executives what they don't know about his store, his market and what the business actually needs. They also get into the bigger question underneath all of it: if these conversations can be genuinely useful, why does the store have to put on such a performance just to be heard?

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #10

  Who's Allowed To Have A Voice In Retail?

  Aug 13, 20261 hourS2

  What happens when someone without a traditional retail background starts questioning the way the industry works? In this episode, Matt turns the questions on Bekki after a retail veteran warns that she should “be careful” about challenging industry professionals. They talk about who gets credibility in retail, why outside perspectives can be uncomfortable, Bekki’s path from employer branding into retail employee experience, and why curiosity—not walking in with all the answers—is central to her work. They also get into the risks of challenging the status quo, why companies sometimes design around leadership instead of employees, and whether retail needs more voices willing to ask questions that challenge the status quo...00:00 Netflix Doc Cold Open 00:20 DM Criticism and Credentials 02:30 Invisible Army and Gatekeeping 05:51 What She Actually Does09:06 Born to Challenge Status Quo 11:10 Why She Cares So Much 13:58 Employer Branding to Engagement 19:34 Behind the Curtain Lessons 22:40 Caring Beyond Your Lane 25:40 The Moment It Clicked 28:40 Curiosity That Changed Everything 30:07 Designing for Egos 31:35 Curiosity as a Skill 34:29 Why Keep Speaking Up 37:51 Care as the Real Motive 42:33 Skin in the Game 45:06 Truth Telling Consultants 48:03 Why Cato Exists 51:29 Cato Name Origin 54:06 New Voices in Retail 57:40 Closing Reflections

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #8

  Balancing Structure & Soul In Cannabis Retail - Guest Lakeisha Parker

  Jul 30, 202646 minS2

  We talk to Lakeisha "Keisha" Parker, a cannabis advocate and longtime retail leader whose writing frames cannabis as a teacher and the industry as a tug-of-war between profit and purpose. We discuss how cannabis retail overlaps with traditional retail but is complicated by regulation and stigma. Keisha describes burnout, frequent acquisitions, the cost and delays of cannabis hiring/badging, and the widening corporate-store gap in MSOs, urging executives to visit stores, listen beyond KPIs, invest in training, and preserve the “soul” before cannabis retail becomes as impersonal as the DMV.00:00 Journey Into the Green 00:44 Meet Keisha Parker 01:31 Retail Meets Regulation 02:55 From Medical to Adult Use 04:09 Personal Retail Stories 06:21 RMV vs Human Experience 09:15 Stigma and Store Differentiation 12:59 Retail Mechanics and Flow 17:18 Training Empathy Soft Skills 22:14 Burnout and Acquisitions 24:41 Corporate Hiring and Investment 31:16 Executive Disconnect Speed Round 42:14 Be Approachable in Stores 44:39 Wrap Up and Contact Info

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.