The New 80/20 Rule for Winning as a Small Promotional Product Distributor

In the promotional products industry, there are thousands of small businesses – and small distributors are growing. According to PPAI, the industry’s largest trade association, in 2022, small businesses grew faster than their large business counterparts, and small distributors now comprise nearly 50% of the industry’s $25+ billion in revenue. If you are a team of one, two, or three, this article’s for you. And if you’re not, you still might learn something from the secret of creating more time: thievery. 

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Which hat are you wearing at this very moment?

• Cowboy hat? Roping 5 projects at a time and wrangling stray orders?

• Fire helmet? Dousing flames from a project on fire? 

• Referee cap? Problem resolving between client, supplier, UPS/Fed Ex?

The smaller your team, the more hats you wear. On any given day, you function in multiple roles. Whether your small distributorship is simply you as a solopreneur, or whether you have a team of two or three, you are do-er of all: marketing, sales, accounting, production … whatever it takes to keep the business humming. 

So, the million-dollar question for a small business that struggles with doing everything everywhere all at once is: How to squeeze more time from your day for the things that matter most?

Because we’ve had the unique opportunity to work with distributors of all sizes (from start-ups under $1MM to enterprises pushing $100MM, over 750+ distributors who power over $1.5 billion in sales) we’re fortunate to have noticed the most significant trait in a successful promotional products distributorship: focus. 

Not focus as in “creating a less distracted life with fewer interruptions,” but focus as in where you put your focus.

Because where we spend our time the most is where we will develop our expertise. 

What’s your expertise?

Growth Disclaimer: Not everyone wants to grow to $20MM+ in sales. Maybe you hate the idea of running a 50-person business and all the challenges that come with it. Maybe you like where you’re at, and you enjoy running a small, profitable distributorship; there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a damn noble goal. Being a small distributor is not a problem to fix; being small is a choice. As Seth Godin said, “bigger isn’t the goal, better is.” But even those who don’t want to leap from $2MM to $10MM still want the one thing that everyone craves: not to be burdened by soul-sucking work and to focus on work that matters.

Right now, where you spend your time likely looks like this: 

Most of your time is spent wrangling projects. Finding items, checking inventory, creating quotes, checking on proofs, sending proofs, calculating freight, asking for tracking, sending tracking, updating clients, hounding suppliers … the 30 or 40 steps it takes to get a single order across the finish line (yes, sometimes 30 or 40 steps, here’s a breakdown of what can happen on any order on any day).

Right now, you’re largely in reactive sales mode: You receive a project request from one of your clients who loves you, and you’re on the treadmill of sourcing, quoting, and wrangling. Nothing wrong with this, except that it robs all your creative energy and consumes all of your day. You are a reactive seller.

Reactive selling is reacting to the sales orders in play. You’re so busy solving for the sales you have, you have no room to take on more. And maybe you don’t want more, that might be okay. But what’s frustrating is that, because of this treadmill of reactive selling, you’re becoming a professional order handler, not a professional agency. Where you’re spending your time is buried in process. You are becoming an expert in admin tasks, and you know that your time, your smarts, and your creativity are far more valuable than that. You want to change this equation, but how?

How to Change? Forget About Goal-Setting

James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, writes about the #1 mistake we make when it comes to making change happen, particularly around goal-setting. We think we can just set a big hairy audacious goal and WILL ourselves to complete it. We can’t. Because a goal is not a lever, it’s an outcome.

“If you want better results, forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.” Clear famously wrote that we do not rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems.

Goals are outcomes; systems are processes. So the secret to advancing your goals is to change your process. Or build processes that steadily move you in the right direction. To change your system successfully, one secret is to become a professional thief — at stealing time. 

3 Secrets to Making Change

1. Steal Time – You can’t manufacture time, and you can’t save time (like saving money in a jar) you have no time to save. You must steal time from somewhere else. You must nick it from one of the eight buckets (hours) in your day, those eight buckets hold all the time you have. Sometimes, time management becomes a nebulous term that’s hard to define, but “time thievery,” that’s something we all understand. 

2. But from where? Less deserving tasks. From the tasks that are burdensome, to tasks that are more deserving of your skill. Are you worth the work you’re doing? Are you underselling yourself by working on tasks beneath your skill level? AI is on the horizon for a reason: We crave systems that will automate the uncreative, tedious work for us.

3. Process change: Forget goals, forget working harder, to really make an impact in your day, it’s time for a process change. As James Clear pointed out, you can’t will yourself to work better/harder/faster, you must change how you work. 

You didn’t get into the business to become an order-processing expert, yet here we are.

"It is not that we have so little time, but that we lose so much of it” and in the promotional products industry, we lose it to the wrong things.

Your future success –whether you define success by growth or simply by creating more joy in your work— will come from which process you change and where you put your focus — today.

Our goal is to help you move from spending 70% of your time on order processing to 80% of your time working with clients and working on your business (not in your business).

In short: the fun, rewarding, and skillful work you are best at:

In Seth Godin’s new manifesto about work (Song of Significance; listen to our interview with Seth about it here), he writes, “Real value is no longer created by traditional measures of productivity. It’s created by personal interactions, innovation, creative solutions, resilience, and the power of speed.” 

When you first got into the branded merch business, you thought it looked like a fun business to be in, and you imagined creating cool campaigns for awesome clients. But Instead, what you’ve become is a professional order taker and order handler. Order takers spend most of their time on reactive tasks. Order makers get better at the merch business by spending more time with clients. Order takers spend all their time REacting, order makers spend all their time PROacting. 

Remember: Where we spend our time is where we will develop our expertise. 

Order management: That’s our expertise. Let commonsku do that heavy, tiresome activity (we’ve made it simple).

You focus on the proactive stuff: creating cool projects for clients. Working with new prospects. Marketing your business. Fine-tuning your expertise. Do less of the trivial stuff and more of the important.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about spending your time, it’s about investing time, i.e., your creative energy, toward work that’s worthy of you … the new 80/20 rule: