Why the best site is the right benchmark
Industry averages are somebody else’s business. Your best site is proof of what is achievable with your brand, your prices, your suppliers and your kind of staff. If one location can do it, the ceiling is not the market.
That is also why this calculation tends to land harder than a generic benchmark: nobody can argue that the number is unrealistic when one of their own sites is already hitting it.
Not all of the gap is execution, and pretending otherwise loses you the room
A site on a quieter street with a smaller catchment will never match the flagship, and claiming otherwise is how operations teams lose credibility with the people who run the sites. That is what the execution share input is for.
Be honest with it. Fifty percent is a reasonable opening assumption for most portfolios: half the gap is location, format and catchment, half is how well the place is run. If you have like-for-like sites with very different numbers, push it higher.
Fix three sites, not all of them
The upside is concentrated. Sorting the bottom three sites usually captures most of the available gain, and it is a job an area manager can actually hold in their head.
Once those three move, the same fixes are already written down and the next three cost far less to bring up.