Mighty Community Markets receives national award for Cooperative Innovation & Achievement.
2026 ENROLLMENT NOW OPEN!
Are you ready to take your grocery store to the next level?
The Mighty Community Markets 2026 Grocery Bootcamp is now open for enrollment! This 6-week remote training program, led by nationally recognized consultant Jeanie Wells, provides grocery leaders like you with the essential tools to grow sales, understand financial metrics, and confidently make planning decisions.
With over 25 years in retail operations and leadership development, Jeanie has helped countless independent and cooperatively owned stores compete, thrive, and make a lasting impact in their communities.
Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp gives cooperatively owned and independently owned grocery stores the tools and resources they need to thrive.
Small and independent grocery stores do not have built-in training programs like large chain stores, so they are often isolated trying to run a very complex business. Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp provides a pathway to development and training needed to help smaller stores meet the community’s needs.
Re-launching March 5th, 2026, this 6-week remote training program is designed to give leaders like you, the essentials needed to grow sales, understand financial metrics, confidently make planning decisions, and make sense of competition and differentiation no matter where you are or who you serve.
You’re more than a grocery store. You’re a vital community resource.
Already registered? Access the course contents here!
Who is
Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp for?
If you’re new to the grocery store world or looking to expand your business knowledge, here is your perfect resource. This course has made me a mini expert in terminology, psychology, and functionality running grocery store. I felt a bit overwhelmed trying to understanding how grocery stores function, so I am thankful for this resource!
—Jermeria Skillom, Partnership for a Healthier America, MS Delta Healthy Corner Store Initiative.
Orientation to the Grocery Industry
Understanding Financial Metrics
We will review the purpose of the different financial statements all grocers use to operate their stores and will do a deep dive into the income statement and essential financial benchmarks so that all attendees increase their understanding of their own store’s financial conditions and priorities.
Mastering the Big 4
Introduction to Price Image and Price Strategy
Explore the Art and Science of customer price perception. We’ll look at basic tools and data that can be used to shape customer perception. There are also many basic visual cues used in the store to shape perception which we will critique together.
Fundamental Merchandising Principles
Learn how to successfully employ merchandising principles that are essential for growing sales. There are many tried and true tactics that large grocers use. We will walk through the most important ones and review the merchandising guide resource so that all students can confidently start using some of these techniques to grow sales right away.
Bring it all Together: Planning & Strategy
What are some of the essentials to business planning, budgeting and multi-year strategic plans? We’ll harvest plans from your completed workbook sections and identify top priorities for your specific store and community.
Stores Under $1M Annually
- Additional attendees for only $500 each
- Scholarship funds may be available, email us at events@columinate.coop to inquire
- Special offer to encourage skills-building for even the mightiest little community market.
Stores Over $1M Annually
- Additional attendees for only $750 each
- Full access to the Grocery Bootcamp Live Trainings
- Assignments and discussion in our online education space
- Documents, workbooks and cheatsheets that you can take and use in your stores.
What is Included in
Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp?
I loved the way that Jeanie presented the material. Even the financial statements offered new ways of understanding them. I particularly enjoyed the pricing strategy and merchandising classes and can’t wait to work with my staff to implement what I’ve learned. Thank you for everything!
—Gina, Belfast Community Co-op
Refunds and Cancellations
Course
Schedule
Live, online classes take place on Thursdays. Sessions run for 90 minutes and begin at
- 4:00 pm Eastern Time
- 3:00 pm Central Time
- 2:00 pm Mountain Time
- 1:00 pm Pacific Time
Dates for this series:
- Thursday March 5th
- Thursday March 12th
- Thursday March 19th
- Thursday March 26th
- Thursday April 2nd
- Thursday April 9th
“A great introduction to what you need to know to make your store stronger, more competitive and financially resilient.”
—Previous Participant
About Your Facilitator
Mighty Community Markets Grocery Bootcamp is presented by Jeanie Wells, a nationally recognized consultant and former general manager.
- 25+ years in retail operations & leadership development
- Served as GM/CEO of fast growing retail grocery for more than 10 years
- National leadership and development consultant for the past 10 years.
- Co-developed on-going national workshop on building strong board and general manager relationships
- Leads a team of executive coaches to help mentor and develop our nation’s food cooperative leaders
- Nationally recognized as leader in support for small community markets
FAQs
The driving goal of this class is to offer specific study in some essential areas of strong grocery retail operations. Coming up through various positions at a food co-op to become GM myself, I was painfully aware of how there is not really any “grocery school” to teach people what they should know and I was left to try to figure things out on my own. Chain grocery stores are good at this but as independent and autonomous grocery stores, we generally don’t have great ways to do this. But also, everyone is so busy that it is hard to think about any training that is too time-consuming.
This program represents that balance – the need to move through some key content but also make it doable so that managers can focus on their work at the store too. There are 6 classes. One class each week, check the event dates for exact scheduling. The classes are each built around a key area of operations.
Yes, a little bit. After each class, the attendees will have homework. It will not be a huge burden – likely only an hour or so between classes. The goal of the homework in their workbooks is to take that class’s topic and bring it into their real jobs, real stores and do some work around analyzing their store or their department’s performance in each of the key areas we cover. So they will do the assessment and homework on their own store or department themselves using what we cover in class. I think this hands on part is essential! It will move fairly fast and each one of these topics could be it’s own 6-part series but this class is designed to be compact, covering a lot of ground and giving them hands-on work to try.
Class 1: Orientation to the grocery industry business
We dive into trends, headwinds, and emerging needs for all independent grocery stores. This class will also begin walking through financial models of how operating statements reflect the core business and product mix etc. There are some who are enrolled that are all natural organic, others are a mix, and a few that are majority conventional, so we will look at how each is a little different and what each model needs.
Class 2: Deeper dive into financial statements – the profit and loss statement especially
We will walk through how components of a P & L work: top line, expenses we control, those that are harder to change and how we measure bottom line contribution.
Class 3: Financial metrics “The calculator class”
In this class, everyone brings their calculator and we work through the big 4 calculations, (Sales growth, margin, (applied and achieved), labor, (as % and SPLH) and inventory turns. We will practice in class on hypothetical scenarios. Everyone is going to be able to do these by themselves before we leave that day’s session! I find that so often we have people who maybe have even worked there a long time who may have some gaps in these core calculations but are sometimes too embarrassed to ask for help. This class is an easy no-shame way for everyone, brand new or multi-year veteran, to get super comfortable with how to calculate things. And they get a cheat sheet they can hang on the wall behind their desk for quick reference from now on!
Class 4: Intro to Price Strategy and Managing Price Perception
The “art and science” of building positive price perception. “Art” meaning all the visual cues that shape shoppers’ perceptions and the “science” part, meaning all the data and tools needed to shape the perception you want. This has never been more important than at this moment with the food inflation and price changes we are currently having to manage at the store level.
Class 5: Fundamentals of visual merchandising
How merchandising works in the customers’ mind, building and maintaining promotional and routine displays that emphasize your values, adhere to tried-and-true essential merchandising principles that help grow your sales!
Class 6: Bringing it all together in an action plan.
This final class we will harvest what various priorities they have uncovered in the monthly work and begin laying out their action plans. Naturally everyone will have different fiscal years and different planning cycles but the goal of this work is to help them see that no matter where they are at, they can begin to improve operations and improve their performance for the coming months/years.
Each MCM attendee will have:
- A workbook they will use throughout the 6 classes.
- When we get to class 5, they will also get my Merchandising Guide as well, which lays out the principles one by one,
- A 1-pager financial “cheat sheet” with the essential calculations so they can keep it on the wall by their desk
- And, at the end, each attendee who completes the course will also get a certificate of completion.
- Access to the recordings and other supplemental resources that may arise, through an easy-to-access MCM Resource Page. The links to recordings are available for a month past the end of classes so that each attendee can go back and listen to previous sessions if desired.
The live classes are 90 minutes. The typical format is me presenting info and then discussion or Q and A at the end. Sometimes we may break into small groups but generally we stay all together as one group. Because it is impossible to find a time for everyone to make the live class, each class is also recorded and those recordings are sent out the next day along with any other resources that may have come up. I had some students last time that told me right at the start that there was no way that they could ever make the class time work and they did the entire class using recordings. I got high marks and great emails from them just like the people who did the live class. So if there are concerns about making the live class each time, they can always go back and listen to the recordings. It seemed to work great for people’s busy schedules.
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