Nine Drivers of Upside Leverage & Exponential Business Growth - Driver #6

YOUR DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS

You have a number of unrecognized distribution channels you don’t fully maximize and there’s enormous leverage in them.

For example, let’s say that you distribute your product through five hundred retailers. Well, that is a distribution outlet for all kinds of other products. If you’ve got great relationships with the buyers but you’ve only got three products to sell, you can turn the distribution channel into the great asset. If you’ve got great rapport and a great amount of trust with the buyers or the owners of each store you could do deals to get the rights to dozens of other related products that would work well with those stores or retailers or branches or distributors.

You could put these new products through your distribution network and make more money on selling other people’s products or services than you do on selling your own. I did that one time.

We had a company that had two products in the athletic clothing field. They were doing about $2 million and making half a million in profit. They came to me because their products were starting to slow down. They wanted me to give them a breakthrough idea. I looked at their business and I saw that their real assets weren’t their two products. They had accounts with 5,000 retailers. Amongst them all were Nordstrom’s, K-Mart, Target, JC Penney and Parkway and Hosiery. I showed them that all they had to do was secure the rights to other people’s athletic products -- then give those people a royalty for their clothes design, start having those products manufactured for my client, put their licensed products through the same distribution pipeline and they’d make ten times as much selling these other products through their distribution channel as they did from their main products. They did it and I was right. They made a fortune.

Your distribution channels could also be the catalogs you deliver, the people or companies you distribute through, the mailing lists that you use, the list that you frequently rent and mail that know your name, etc., because you could lend your name or your endorsement or your signature to an offer. Your distribution channel can be the seminars that you attend or that you distribute and exhibit at. It can be all the members on the Internet that link to you.

There are so many areas of distribution that you have unknowingly created that you don’t really think about. It could be working deals with your suppliers. That’s another distribution channel. It could be working deals with your client’s clients. It’s figuring out where your best leverage lies and maximizing it.