Can You Beat Amazon at Their Game? 🕒 5 min read By Frank Hurtte The vultures are circling again.   Every few years, the doomsayers resurface: Amazon's eating distribution. E-commerce is the death of wholesale. Distributors are obsolete. The headlines are predictable. The advice? Equally predictable and predictably wrong.   Build your own Amazon. Hire consultants to help you compete on speed and price. Invest millions in e-commerce platforms. Match their logistics. Underprice the giants.   If you take that advice, you'll lose. And you'll waste time, money, and energy doing it. Here's why: You're competing on their battlefield instead of yours. W hat Amazon Does Better (And Always Will) Let's be honest. Amazon, Grainger, Faire, and the newer B2B marketplaces have invested billions in logistics, data, and algorithms. A mid-sized distributor can't match their speed or price. Competing on those terms is like a neighborhood bookstore trying to o...

Ho Ho Hold Up! Santa Has Advice for Distributors By Frank Hurtte Santa Claus and I go way back to when I was knee-high to a short elf. One year at the Eagles’ Club, Santa greeted my grandfather with, “Hey Red, how late were you out last night?” and that was all the confirmation my three-year-old brain needed: these two weren’t just acquaintances. They were pals . Santa always knew my name, too, and we’ve kept up the friendship ever since. According to him, I’ve made the “nice list” five times in seventy-some years, a statistic he brings up more often than I’d like. But during a rare quiet spell at the mall, the Big Guy pulled me aside and said, “Frank, distributors need to hear this.” Think of it as Santa’s masterclass in business disguised as holiday cheer. Let’s unwrap Santa’s six lessons. Lesson 1: Segment Your Customers Santa learned early that segmentation matters. Once he started dividing his audience into “naughty” and “nice,” operational efficiency skyrocketed. ...