For the Fastest Growing Retailer in the US, Old Playbooks Won't Do

JD Sports is expanding fast across the US—and their team can't afford delays. See how they're rethinking their permitting process to keep up with aggressive growth goals.

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JD Sports is one of the fastest-growing retailers in the United States. With an ambitious expansion plan spanning hundreds of new locations, the company faces a challenge familiar to every large-scale retail operator: the permitting process can’t keep up with the pace of growth.

In this episode of Permission to Build, we sit down with the team behind JD Sports’ US expansion to explore how legacy playbooks for permitting and construction are breaking down at scale. When you’re opening dozens of stores a year across different jurisdictions, each with its own code requirements, review timelines, and submission processes, the old way of doing things simply doesn’t work.

The conversation covers how JD Sports is rethinking its approach to preconstruction and permitting—moving away from spreadsheets and disconnected workflows toward a more centralized, technology-driven model. The team discusses the real cost of permitting delays: not just in dollars, but in lost revenue from stores that can’t open on time, strained landlord relationships, and internal resource bottlenecks.

Key topics include the challenge of managing multiple permit applications simultaneously, how to maintain visibility across a national portfolio, and why investing in the front end of the construction process—before shovels hit the ground—is critical for retailers operating at this scale.

Whether you’re in retail, restaurants, fitness, or any other multi-site vertical, the lessons from JD Sports’ experience are universally applicable: speed matters, but only if you can maintain quality and compliance along the way.