Mr Karabus recognised in 1990 that there was a void in the retail consulting industry for a practical, down to earth consulting firm focused exclusively on retail. As a result, he launched Karabus Management in 1990 to serve retailers in Canada. In 2001, he expanded the firm to serve US retailers and spent the next 8 years building the firm into one of North America’s leading retail consulting firms, with 75% of its revenue and staff being resident in the United States. He sold the firm to an international accounting and consulting firm in 2008 and then served as the Firm’s Retail Consulting Leader until December 2011.
Prior to launching Karabus Management, he spent 8 years auditing and advising retailers at Arthur Andersen, during which time he learned the fundamentals of Retailer Profit & Loss statements and the key levers of retailer value creation.
Mr Karabus spent 2012 planning the creation of a specialist boutique retail consulting firm that would provide retailers with a more effective results-driven and thought-leadership based alternative than the Global Consulting Firms.
In January 2013, Mr Karabus, CEO, together with Farla Efros, President, launched HRC Retail Advisory ( www.hrcadvisory.com ) , a boutique strategic retail advisory firm, based in Northbrook. Illinois.
Over the following 12 months, Mr Karabus and Ms Efros were joined by most of the former senior team from Karabus Management and by a number of senior advisors from SD Retail (successor firm to Senn-Delaney Retail Consultants). Since 2014, Karabus and Efros built an industry-leading team of specialist, experienced retail advisors that has formed the nucleus of HRC Retail Advisory, one of North America’s leading Operational and Strategic Advisors to Retailers as they navigate the disruptive retail environment.
Antony has a true passion for retail and has an intuitive sense of the key transformational changes that are needed for each retailer, whether strategic, organizational or process in order to “move the needle” on the creation of improved financial performance and shareholder value.
Mr Karabus has been a trusted advisor to retailers on strategic and financial performance issues for almost 25 years now. His work has played a pivotal role in helping dozens of chain retailers to create significant shareholder value during this time. He has worked with numerous well- known retail chains
Since 2011, Karabus has conducted extensive annual surveys of leading Retail CFO’s and CEO’s to determine key CFO priorities and areas of value creation and the key “game changers” for getting retail back into profitable growth.
He also conceived of, developed and executed the first comprehensive P&L Benchmark Retail Study in North America, which is in high demand by the CFO’s of more than 100 major retail chains.
He is widely known for being comfortable in “taking a strong point of view”. As a result of the above, he has frequently been asked to present on key retail issues at the leading industry forums of National Retail Federation, World Retail Congress, Retail Council of Canada and the Fashion Institute of Technology. He has been very widely published and quoted as a thought leader on key retail issues in numerous prestigious national and trade publications, including Women’s Wear Daily, The Globe& Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, New York Times and Stores Magazine, among others.
Mr Karabus is a Chartered Accountant and a graduate of the University Of Cape Town, South Africa where he was awarded the Gold Medal for being the Top student in the Faculty of Commerce in 1981. In 2004, he established the Global Retail Network of over 700 retail Presidents and CEOs for the Young Presidents Organization, serving as the Retail Network’s Inaugural Chairman.
