At commonsku, we’re lucky to be in a unique position. After years of working with many of the brightest promo minds in the industry, we’ve discovered a few common threads that run through the most vibrant companies. Secrets, vital to what it takes to scale a successful distributorship, to take it from $1 million to $5 million, from $10 million to $20 million, from $20 million to $50 million.
In this series on “Scaling a Multi-Million Dollar Distributorship,” we identified four essential ingredients missing from your growth plan, then we started to break each ingredient down, beginning with strategy: The Promotional Product Industry's 2.0 Problem.
Today, we’re discovering the essential distinction you need to create a solid leadership team that can scale your business.
But before we get to that distinction, we must first deal with … your feline ways.
From countless conversations with clients, over a few hundred interviews, and through hosting multiple events featuring stories from industry pros, we’ve found one trait you must possess to be successful in this business.
But the shocker is, this same trait is also the quiet killer of your most ambitious efforts: Curiosity.
Curiosity is the single most valuable trait for a successful promotional product professional (with adaptability being a very close second). But we’re not talking about your garden-variety curious, the kind that gets easily distracted by IG.
We’re talking the deep-in-the-weeds variety that loves to get lost in new things. The squirrel-brain variety that loves to go to the shows to see new product, learn about decorating processes, meet a new client or discover a new supplier partner.
It’s this same insatiable curiosity that reveals itself —right now— in the multitude of tabs open on your browser window. It’s why you’re currently juggling a dozen projects for a half dozen clients and also maybe why you’re sipping your lunch through a straw: you just can’t break away from it.
Curiosity is why so many of us play this game. It’s the infinite variety, the constant learning, the myriad options that rivet us to a career we love. It’s why they say you never can leave promo: once you’re in, the dazzling array of alternatives mesmerizes you. Spellbound, you can never leave.
So, safe to say, curiosity is a magnetizing superpower in this business. Without it, you wouldn’t stay or survive.
But the shocker is: this same trait that enables you to find new ideas, manage multiple clients, projects, and suppliers, is also the quiet killer of your most ambitious effort to scale your business.
Bear with us one moment, but In Buddhism, there’s a principle called Klesha. Hang tight, it’s less woo-woo than you think, in fact, it’s so hardline practical, it’s kinda mind-blowing.
Klesha is the idea of opposite energies.
Klesha’s are the breeding ground for our natural tendencies that give rise to action (and thus create consequences). A klesha is the negative side of a positive trait and can often be our biggest obstacle to growth.
If curiosity is the primary ingredient for success in this business, its mirror opposite trait (it’s klesha, if you will) is distractedness.
And we don’t mean the mild, run-of-the-mill sort of distractedness that makes you reach for a TikTok hit, we mean the kind of distractedness that keeps you blindly “busy,” without advancing your goals. The kind of distractedness that makes you hustle all week and wonder on Friday what the hell you even accomplished (much less whether it advanced your mission).
This form of distractedness doesn’t prevent you from working (you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t passionate about hard work), this type of distraction is worse because it prevents you from working on the right parts of your business.
And here’s the mind-blowing secret: Distractedness is not your enemy. In fact, if curiosity and distractedness are two sides of the same coin, you can’t entirely destroy distractedness, or you would kill creativity.
The klesha energy (curiosity/distractedness) is a limitless source of your creative power, like an electric current, it’s not something you want to obliterate, it’s something you want to channel.
So, how to channel this energy into the right goals that advance the business forward?
We have been trying to answer this question: Why do some smart, creative people in the promo business grow at outsized rates of 20%, 30% (or more), while others grow marginally? Or, another type of growth: Why are some industry people happy in their work while others are miserable?
A key answer (and a pathway to channeling endless distraction) is learning where you should put your focus of curiosity based on the unique strengths you bring to your business.
In virtually every successful distributor business, we’ve noticed that there are two primary roles essential for scaling. Many of the most successful teams have leaders who fit each of these roles or team members who fit these roles. Gino Wickman calls these roles the Integrator and the Visionary. In Wickman’s book Rocket Fuel, (The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want From Your Business), he writes that successful businesses are led by two types:
The Integrator: One who harmoniously unites the major functions of a business, keeps the trains running on time, one who creates focus, accountability, and alignment. The integrator loves people, process, systems, priorities, strategy, organizational clarity. They love figuring out the complexity of the day-to-day. Who are they? The steady force.
The Visionary: One who creates clear ideas about the future of the business, who possesses unusual foresight, a powerful imagination that seizes market opportunities, dreams big. They are a continuous source of new ideas, and they notice problems in the world and find ways to solve them. The never-ending visionary.
Example?
On our marketing team, Mark Graham, Chief Brand Officer, is our visionary; Kate Masewich, VP of Marketing, is our Integrator. It’s because they both clearly understand their roles that we have been able to scale our content, events, and marketing efforts with a very small team, superceding (at times) even our own expectations. They’d both admit it’s not always perfect, but because they are operating in their strengths, they are advancing the business at a pace beyond which each could have done on their own, and moreover, doing so with far less friction. And not because there are two of them, but because there are two of them operating in opposite strengths. Not merely different strengths, opposite strengths.
We’ve seen this play out in many other distributorships as well. At skucon in Las Vegas, the Imprint Engine co-founders talked about their opposite roles as Integrators and Visionaries. Stephanie Leader at skucon 2022 also talked about the impact of Wickman’s principles of Traction on their growth in a session “How to Create a Strategy for Epic Growth,” and in a recent skucast, episode, Tom Rauen said that when he finally understood the difference in these roles, his businesses skyrocketed:
This simple differentiation is a critical key to understanding why some distributors grow while others languish, or why some are absolutely frustrated by their work and others are liberated.
Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, put it this way, “You have to figure out what you’re genetically encoded to do.” And if you are genetically encoded to be an integrator but you are trying to build your business as both an integrator and a visionary, you will be driven to distraction in so many ways that you’ll find yourself burned-out and demoralized.
“The combination of your talents and passions combined with your leadership creates something unique that no other company has, and that something is your core focus.” (Wickman).
Core Focus = Conative Strength
Understanding and creating the Integrator/Visionary roles in your business gives your leadership team FOCUS. It allows each person (or each team member) to center on the right priorities and objectives that fit within their role to execute a grand vision.
And back to curiosity/distractedness: If defining roles is part of the solution, and focus is the channel, then the energy (or power) that drives you, the energy that flows through you, is still your insatiable curiosity. But now, you are able to channel that curiosity towards activities that line up with your conative strengths.
What’s a conative strength? A conative strength is the instinctive way you take action when you strive (Kolbe).
If the integrator knows her role, and the visionary knows her role, when curiosity seizes them or distractedness hits, they can either swat away the distractedness or embrace the curious idea, depending on whether it fits their role and their mission moving forward.
But most importantly, because they understand their conative strength —the instinctive way they take action— they can put that curiosity or distraction to use, like a force. In Star Wars, the force grants Jedis powerful abilities but it also directs their actions. Rather than fighting distraction or being distracted by everything, integrators and visionaries can channel the ideas that come, based on their role. It’s a Jedi way of using the force of curiosity/distraction that channels everything toward your personal mission.
Focus, through your conative strength, creates propulsive energy at scale and promotes harmony in teams. It’s more than concentration, it’s targeting your unique talent, energy, and skill on the right things that move the business forward.
It’s Luke Skywalker, Rey Skywalker, Obi-Wan-sized force.
Most of us want to grow, whether that’s growing the top line, boosting the bottom line, or simply growing in our enjoyment of running our business. But without clearly defined roles of focus, our scaling efforts will be thwarted by every conceivable distraction, and our vision for a better life will always remain simply that, a vision.
And as Wickman put it: Vision without execution is hallucination (more on this in the next installment in our series).