After the Pandemic – Working Remotely Supply-Partner Implications Earlier, we talked about the impact of distributors and their customers working remotely and how the changes impact distributors.  In the eyes of many, the story would end here.  However, a distributor is a middleman, the entity positioned between those consuming and those creating products.  Distributors are a critical part of what could officially be called the supply chain.   A bit about the supply chain  A supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product to the final buyer.  The companies providing raw materials to supply-partners are part of their supply chain.  The distributor and supply-partners are steps in our customer’s supply chain.   If the distributor’s supply-partner experiences delivery issues and the distributor cannot deliver, the customer’s supply chain is impacted.  If the distributor m...

  After the Pandemic – Working Remotely The Customer Situation   The distributor world revolves around customer needs.   Our customer needs are an ever-evolving thing.   Knowledge-based distributors exist exclusively because of our willingness to follow, and sometimes, lead customers through their changes.   Thinking about the evolution of distributors, before the early-80s distributors all operated about the same.   Their sales efforts were mostly personality-driven and local inventory was the drawing card.     To illustrate this, allow me to journey back to the early days of my career.   The standard delivery from my factory in Milwaukee to Iowa – just over 200 miles – was five working days.   If a distributor did not have the product in stock, the customer could be out of business for a week.   This all changed when UPS and Fed-Ex entered the scene.   With local inventory out of the equation, smaller independent di...

After the Pandemic – Working Remotely First in a Series on Planning for the New Normal We have been thinking a lot about life after the Pandemic and the reality of the new normal.  One thing that keeps surfacing is working remotely.  For instance, a recent post by famed CRM provider Salesforce stated, “The 9-5 workday is dead.”  Office buildings will no longer house the thousands of workers once important to maintaining operations.  Salesforce categorized the future of their workers this way: ·          Flex : When it is safe to return to the office, employees around the globe will work flex. This means they will be in the office one to three days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations. ·          Fully Remote : For employees who do not live near an office or have roles that don’t require an office, they will work remotely full-time. ·    ...

I use Friday, March 13th, 2020 as the official start date of the COVID crisis.  Looking at the calendar, we are pushing toward the one-year mark of this little Global Pandemic.   Much has happened in our industry during this time.  For the first couple of months, we hunkered down expecting the winds of change to sweep this virus off to the side.  Optimistically, most of us felt the storm would pass by end of summer.  As the reality of the situation persisted, we carried on and survived.  Distributors found new and innovative ways to keep in touch with their customers.  Sales turned in an upward direction and businesses who were once down 30-40 percent versus pre-COVID times managed to end 2020 with a much smaller downward trend.  A few even managed to eke out a narrow margin of growth. I believe one thing fell to the wayside through all this illness and mayhem, that being full-blown product launches.    Amidst all the other struggle...

 Hey everyone, Santa here.  Remember me?  I’m the stout guy with the big beard and dapper red suit.  If you can get away from your Zoom calls and COVID concerns for just four minutes, I want to give you a seasonal update. You think you have problems, let me clue you into things at the North Pole.  Things are not great up here.   How about keeping 300 elves in social distancing mode?   Their perpetual diet of cookies leaves crumbs everywhere and every time they rummage around inside the cookie jar it makes me wince.  No hand sanitizer, no plastic gloves, just bare-handed grabs; there is no telling where Sneezy’s filthy little paws have been.  Mrs. Claus is on the warpath too.  These elves seem to be eating toilet paper.  Her snide comments about the world-wide shortage of toilet paper are anything but festive.   Top that off with tens of thousands of kids sending me handwritten cards and letters.  Exactly whe...