EBITDA and ROIC Are Not Substitutes: Why Single-Test Viability Kills Distributor Businesses
Imagine a distributor who generates USD 2 million in EBITDA on a capital base of USD 100 million. They pay their staff, cover their overhead, and show an...
Read essay →ROIC, Not Gross Margin: The Only Honest Measure of Distributor Viability
Every FMCG commercial team has a spreadsheet that ranks their distributors by gross margin. It usually has three colours. Green distributors are kept. Amber...
Read essay →The Joint Business Plan Has Been a Document for 30 Years. That's the Problem.
No industry standard JBP scorecard exists. 27% of CPG companies get no real-time insight into distributor compliance. Here is what happens when the JBP becomes a live database reco
Read essay →The Joint Business Plan Has Been a Document for 30 Years. That's the Problem.
In every FMCG company selling through distributors, there is a ritual. It happens once a year, sometimes twice. The commercial team from the brand side and the...
Read essay →The Real Distributor Conversation Isn't About Margins - It's About Working Capital
The Real Distributor Conversation Isn't About Margins - It's About Working Capital
Read essay →The Receivables Trap: Why Challenger Distributors Go Broke on Paper-Profitable Businesses
Every distributor P&L model I've ever seen has a line called 'working capital' that the builder treats as a manageable cost of doing business. They calculate...
Read essay →The Tenant's Superpower: DSR Incentives That Bypass the Distributor's Priority Filter
Every FMCG brand has experienced the following pattern. A new SKU is launched with a clear commercial strategy - premium positioning, specific target outlets,...
Read essay →Channel × Product Is a Strategic Diagnostic, Not Just a Formula Input
Channel × Product Is a Strategic Diagnostic, Not Just a Formula Input
Read essay →Dimension 4 Is Contextual: Why Principal Respect Can't Be a Binary Gate for Challenger Brands
Any framework for assessing distributor quality eventually includes a dimension that captures, in some form, the distributor's respect for the principal...
Read essay →E-Commerce Cannibalisation Needs a First-Class Variable, Not a Footnote
E-Commerce Cannibalisation Needs a First-Class Variable, Not a Footnote
Read essay →eCommerce Isn't Killing Your Distributor. Misattribution Is.
The CFO of a mid-sized FMCG brand in Southeast Asia opens a deck on a Thursday morning. The deck shows that traditional trade volumes for their flagship SKU...
Read essay →Incumbency Bias Is an Architecture Problem: The Case for Sealed-Track Strategy Work
When a strategy team is asked to design the ideal territory structure for a market, and the same team has spent the previous three weeks auditing the...
Read essay →The Shared Infrastructure Model: Rethinking Distribution Economics for Marginal Territories
Every regional distribution strategy eventually encounters the territory that doesn't work. The market isn't big enough to support a dedicated distributor at...
Read essay →Why Strategy Disappears Between the Boardroom and the Shelf
A global marketing team designs a perfect promotion. By the time it reaches the DSR on the street, it is unrecognisable. This is not an execution problem — it is an information arc
Read essay →Why Strategy Disappears Between the Boardroom and the Shelf
A global marketing team in Singapore spends four months designing a Q2 promotion for a premium lubricant SKU. It has a clear consumer insight, a positioning...
Read essay →Bottom-Up R3, Not Top-Down - Why Aspiration Can't Be a Percentage
Bottom-Up R3, Not Top-Down - Why Aspiration Can't Be a Percentage
Read essay →Fault Attribution: The Missing Commercial Capability
Here is a conversation that happens in every Regional MD's office at least once a quarter. RMD: Indonesia missed target again. What's going on? Commercial...
Read essay →The DSR Is the Point Where Strategy Disappears. It Doesn't Have to Be.
A new DSR with the right tools is more effective on day one than a veteran without them. That difference compounds across hundreds of DSRs in a distributor network.
Read essay →The DSR Is the Point Where Strategy Disappears. It Doesn't Have to Be.
A Distributor Sales Rep in Jakarta starts their morning at 7:30am. They have a printed list of 14 outlets to visit today, in an order roughly determined by...
Read essay →Two States, Not One - Delivered vs Closed
Two States, Not One - Delivered vs Closed
Read essay →Ways of Working Documents Are Secretly Sales Assets
Ways of Working Documents Are Secretly Sales Assets
Read essay →Co-Build: Why AI Alone and Clients Alone Both Produce Garbage
There are two failure modes that dominate commercial analytics, and both are so common that most organizations consider them the normal state of things. The...
Read essay →Confidence Badges Turn Assumptions into Conversations
Confidence Badges Turn Assumptions into Conversations
Read essay →Confidence Tiers as a Commercial Discipline
Most analytics platforms have a fundamental honesty problem, and it has nothing to do with accuracy of the underlying data. It has to do with the visual...
Read essay →Stop Asking Claude to Evaluate Your Product - Put a Real Person Through It
Stop Asking Claude to Evaluate Your Product - Put a Real Person Through It
Read essay →The Audit Log Is the Product, Not the Paper Trail
The Audit Log Is the Product, Not the Paper Trail
Read essay →The Performance Signature Engine: Why Reading Four Gaps Simultaneously Changes the Conversation
Every distributor review meeting in FMCG starts the same way. The Sales Manager opens the pack. Revenue is down 12%. The room exhales. The distributor's...
Read essay →Translation Loss: Why Solo Founders Building With AI Can Out-Execute Traditional Teams
The received wisdom about founder-led technical builds is that they break down past a certain threshold of complexity. A solo founder can prototype an MVP....
Read essay →Client-Neutral SaaS and the Invisible Moat of Canonical Mapping
The most valuable architectural decision in a multi-tenant SaaS platform is often invisible to the end user, rarely discussed in product marketing, and almost...
Read essay →Consulting Discipline Beats AI Velocity
Consulting Discipline Beats AI Velocity
Read essay →Cross-Tenant Access Is a Real Schema Problem, Not a UX Bug
Cross-Tenant Access Is a Real Schema Problem, Not a UX Bug
Read essay →Territories Are Not the Unit of Analysis - Scenarios Are
Territories Are Not the Unit of Analysis - Scenarios Are
Read essay →The Client View Is the Same Screen - Just Rendered Differently
The Client View Is the Same Screen - Just Rendered Differently
Read essay →The Closed Loop: Why Architecture Beats Features in Commercial Operating Systems
There is a moment in every enterprise software evaluation where the buyer asks the vendor a comparison question. 'How is your product different from Salesforce...
Read essay →The Diagnosis Becomes the Configuration
Every major consulting firm has a filing cabinet full of route-to-market recommendations that were adopted on paper and never implemented in the field. Some of...
Read essay →The Real Moat Isn't Code - It's the Data Network Effect
The Real Moat Isn't Code - It's the Data Network Effect
Read essay →The SKU Channel Fit Score Started as a Weighted Average and Became a Portfolio Question
The SKU Channel Fit Score Started as a Weighted Average and Became a Portfolio Question
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