Molasses Spill causes Collapse of Industry Businesses

Read the Room: Why Leaders are Stuck in a Rutt

If Leaders really could read the room, they would quickly be creating a vision with their team and put steps in place to transform the model.

Please call out anything here that does not ring true. Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater comments are always welcome, but clarity on exactly why you disagree would be even better. 😊

The competition between businesses today is almost entirely a competition between leaders.

The luxury of slow decisions, cautious progress, and endless internal debate is disappearing faster than many people realize.

For years, leaders could drag decisions through meeting after meeting because most of the industry moved at roughly the same speed. Didn’t complete an initiative? That’s ok, there will be a new one coming next month. Ain’t that grand….

Molasses racing molasses.

That is about to change.

A small group of leaders will abandon their egos, become students again, study the landscape, and accept one uncomfortable fact:

Almost everything is going to change.

Most leaders say they support change. What they often mean is that they support change for everyone else.

Change the sales team.

Change the compensation plan.

Change the dealers.

Change the reps.

Change the younger employees who supposedly “don’t want to learn.”

But ask ten leaders for the top things that could improve their businesses, and see how many say:

“I could get better at what I do. I should really try to learn more about leadership and business”

I have never heard it. Ever..

That tells you where they are looking.

Outward, not inward.

I once spoke with the president of a large company who used AI every day and described it as an incredibly valuable tool.

I asked where else in the company it was being used.

Dead silence.

Why?

The tool was valuable. The results were good. Yet the knowledge had not been spread through the organization.

Someone was holding a great card but keeping it close to the vest.

Leaders often protect the knowledge that reinforces their stature. They want to remain the expert in the room, the person everyone depends on.

But leadership is not proving you know more than everyone else.

It is making everyone else better.

A strong leader would have said, “That is ridiculous. We need to get this into the hands of our team.”

Admitting the mistake would not have reduced that leader’s stature. It would have increased it.

Instead, businesses keep waiting.

There is a fly in the soup.

An elephant is blocking the path.

The timing is not perfect.

The team is not ready.

Hit a bump and all progress stops until the universe delivers perfection.

By then, someone else opened the door to inspired leadership and challenged the team to use innovation as a launching pad!

The kitchen and bath industry is approaching a structural shift. Dealer consolidation could create fewer, much larger customers. Some dealers that purchase around $1 million in cabinets today may very well be buying 5 times that by 2030.

That changes the manufacturer’s representative model.

Blanket territorial coverage will give way to strategic account leadership.

A top-tier representative may manage only ten major accounts, but those accounts could represent $20 million to $30 million in business. That person will need more than product knowledge. They will need business strategy, technology expertise, AI fluency, financial understanding, and the ability to help customers grow. Let’s not forget great people’s skills.

These will not be ordinary sales positions.

They will be business leadership positions. The consultant to the dealer and the supplier.

Manufacturers that fail to develop these people risk losing the very customers capable of carrying them into the future.

No technology can solve this by itself.

You can hand a leader the finest AI system in the world, but without curiosity, humility, urgency, and the courage to move into unfamiliar territory, it becomes another tool sitting on the shelf.

Teams do not leapfrog hesitant leaders. They find other places to work.

The leader either opens the gate, carries the team forward, and creates confidence around change, or becomes the gate.

And eventually, the business gets stuck in the molasses and slowly disappears.

Case in point. We decided Monday to cancel any future AI Rep training sessions due to the lack of interest in change.

That Rep model example is one of many conversions that businesses will need to make to stay viable.

I dropped the price of our next Elevate Group to the bones so hopefully you can enjoy fun in the sun with 10 other Dealers for a year. Not a bad time to have 20 other ears listening to what is happening in the industry.

What’s real leadership to you?  thad