The National Association of Wholesalers (NAW) publishes a daily email called SmartBrief.  It goes out to over 100,000 leaders in every “line of trade” in the distributor landscape – this is the biggest circulation of any publication electronic or otherwise.  Because our work is laser-focused on a very narrow group of Knowledge-based distributors, they rarely see our work.  As a matter of fact, in the course of 16 years of writing about our kind of distribution, we have only been recognized by NAW’s SmartBrief a handful of times.  Here is the article as posted in Industrial Supply Magazine and featured by SmartBrief.  For those needing to copy and paste, here's the link.  https://industrialsupplymagazine.com/pages/Print-edition---SepOct21_Hurtte.php Frank Hurtte, Founding Partner of River Heights Consulting, has been featured in dozens of national and regional trade magazines.  His easy-going demeanor and “Iowa-speak” make him a relatable favorite as a...

Last week Industrial Distribution Magazine’s Jack Keough put out a recap the Alan Beaulieu economic report as delivered to the National Association of WholesaleDistributor (NAW) Executive Summit.  I was immediately attracted to the article for three reasons.   First, Alan and his team at ITR Economics actually tracks indicators tied to our industry; we’re not talking pie in the sky stuff political puffery (as seen on TV.)  They have no political axe to grind.  For instance, they continue to make the point, the winning President has almost zero impact on the economy for the first 18 months they are in office. Alan and ITR Economics are accurate.  I have been following them for something like twenty years.  During that time, they have accurately predicted the ups and downs of our industry with the greatest of ease.  Further, they called the “Great Recession” of 2008 to within 30 days and very accurately predicted a number of other ups and...

Lately the role of the distributor CFO has been on my mind. I see a need for the fundamental role of the CFO to change from staff accounting and backward-focused record keeping to something more powerful. For one thing, the importance of forward looking analytics grows in importance. Caught off-guard by the last recession, many distributors faced financial stress from systems not geared for a 20-30 percent drop in business. Aside from internal analytics, I see need for customer interaction from the financial side of the business. As an example, many of the services distributors provide create massive financial gains for their customers. Few current customer contacts understand the monetary impact of our services. Distributor CFOs must work hand in glove with their counterparts at the customer to lead the charge in establishing reliable financial metrics. I call the position the Attack CFO. I have a couple of articles scheduled to be published on the topic in trade publication...

Getting There First and Don’t Be a Problem Solver Special Note: While this method solves the problem, it requires little skill or forward thinking. This story takes 3 minutes to read. If you are in a time crunch, skip the story and jump to the moral of the story. A few years ago we studied the Mechatronics Industry, which is the marriage of mechanical systems (gears, belts, electric motors and hydraulics) and electronic systems (computers, PLC’s, sensors and digital screens). Along the way, our work discovered mechanical distributors were almost always the first to learn of customer projects. Why? Customers designed mechanical portions of their system ahead of the electronic portion. In all but a few situations, the mechanics were engineered 60-90 days ahead of electronic controls. We believed this gave the person selling both the mechanical components and electronic controls a competitive advantage over a “controls only” seller. Knowing about and working on solut...