by Mike Biwer, Cavallo CEO
A shift to order-level visibility and process discipline can help distributors eliminate margin leaks and regain control of performance.
Ask a distributor to describe their day-to-day, and there’s an excellent chance that they’ll use the term “fighting fires.” It makes sense that this term has become so popular – the work sounds urgent and important, even heroic.
And when you put a fire out, it delivers a psychological high. You feel accomplished and valued, and reacting means you’re thinking less and doing more.
But the “doing more” part is problematic. In an $11 trillion industry where 200,000 companies make less than a nickel of profit before taxes, constant busyness is bad for business. When leaders spend their time putting out operational fires, they’re not fixing the systems that start them — and that’s where real profit lives.
Consider what happens with literal fires: even if the firefighters get there right away and manage to preserve the structure, there’s still going to be dama…