What makes a distributor say yes, and what keeps them selling your brand after the first order. Lessons from building a dealer network from zero.

Who should own the goods, the customer and the margin? How to choose between a Canadian importer, a distributor and an agent.

What to decide before your first shipment to Canada: who imports, which partner, how to handle exclusivity and pricing, and what to measure in year one.

The fastest revenue I have ever found did not come from a new customer. It came from a reporting system, which is close to the least interesting sentence I could write, so let me be specific about what actually happened. I joined Motosel Industrial Group in Canada as a contract CMO. Industrial lubricants and related products, around $20M in annual revenue, real customers, real products, and no reliable way for the business to see itself. Everyone had an opinion about which li

When a market turns price-sensitive, the first instinct is almost always to cut the price. It feels responsive. It looks decisive in a meeting. In my experience it is the most expensive habit a distribution business can pick up, because a discount behaves differently from a promotion. Customers remember the lower number, and so do your competitors. I learned the alternative in the tyre business, in the Middle East, in a company I owned and ran myself. We started in OTR, the t

The decision to enter a market is usually made on the wrong evidence. Market size, growth rate, a competitor's presence. All real, none decisive. I have entered and built more than 24 market areas across the Middle East, Europe and North America, and the failures I have watched, including a few of my own early ones, were almost all decided before the first shipment left the warehouse. Three questions have done more for me than any market report. First: who owns the customer r

Anyone can open a dealer. The first order is usually a favour: a container taken on goodwill, a shelf given to see what happens. The business is built on the second order, and the second order is never a favour. It is a decision, made by someone who now knows exactly what your brand did for them over ninety days. I learned this building a dealer and service network from zero to more than 350 locations over ten years at Valtra. In the early years I counted signings. Signings a