---
title: "Dealers Trapped in Place!"
description: "The more outstanding peers you see, the easier it is to locate your coordinates, judge your current position, and know where you might go in the future. Over the past year, we visited many dealers, some extremely successful, but most are struggling, trapped in place—unsure of their position and next steps. The key to change is learning from peers, which provides a reference system to understand where you are and where to go."
author: "任文青Andy"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2023-05-29"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/MvDl1mKrMTDU-UegbaAyCg"
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---

# Dealers Trapped in Place!

> The more outstanding peers you see, the easier it is to locate your coordinates, judge your current position, and know where you might go in the future. Over the past year, we visited many dealers, some extremely successful, but most are struggling, trapped in place—unsure of their position and next steps. The key to change is learning from peers, which provides a reference system to understand where you are and where to go.

**Introduction:** The more outstanding peers you see, the easier it is to locate your coordinates, judge your current position, and know where you might go in the future.

Over the past year, we visited many dealers, including some extremely successful large operators, but for the vast majority, the overall business situation is not good. Upstream suppliers push inventory aggressively, downstream customers delay payments, and the brands they represent change frequently. They might do tens of millions in annual business, but at year-end, profits are minimal. They want to improve but find it hard even to maintain the status quo; they want to transform but have no idea where to start. In one sentence, these dealers are **trapped in place—not knowing where they are or where to go next.** Some have given up, but most still want to change. The question is: how? In a previous article, I posed this question: In the next five years, which type of dealer will win? My answer was simple: **A dealer's future success depends on the boss's depth, height, and force!** Depth means deep thinking. Dealer bosses must rely on business rationality rather than emotion and primitive business intuition, making decisions based on logic and causality. Height refers to whether you can rise above the present, see industry trends from a higher level, view the present from the future, adjust current operations, and plan for future business. Force is about leveraging team leverage to seize business opportunities, with the core being designing mechanisms that align rights, responsibilities, and benefits, and cultivating and attracting talent. A friend bluntly told me that such a summary, while simple and clear, offers little practical guidance for dealer bosses because they still don't know what to do! Is there a simple, direct, and immediately actionable way? After careful thought, I believe there is: **the answer is learning, specifically learning from peers!**

I believe the value of learning from peers is underestimated by many. Business is practice, and the experience of industry practitioners is knowledge. Since you are peers, businesses are interconnected. **The problems you rack your brains over may already have good solutions from others.** Learning from experience and knowledge is a key value of peer learning. But it doesn't stop there. For many dealer bosses today, peer learning has an even more significant meaning: **finding your own reference system.** What does that mean?

Let me share a personal experience. In 1998, I took the high school entrance exam and ranked first in my town. That year, I entered a provincial key high school, the only student from my town admitted. Once in high school, I realized there are always better people. Although I was first in my town, I ranked 19th in my class—compared citywide, my scores were nothing special. In the first semester of freshman year, my grades were roughly the same as my entrance ranking. So I observed the top students, especially the first and second, to see what they did better than me. With a reference, I knew where to focus, and my grades quickly improved. Throughout high school, my grades were stable, basically in the top two of my class. In 2001, I took the college entrance exam, and a similar situation occurred. My classmates came from nearly 20 provinces, and most had higher admission score lines than my province, so I was again a laggard. But just like in high school, once I had benchmarks and references, I quickly caught up, and during university, my grades remained at the top of my class. Why am I telling you this? Not to show how good my studies were, but to share a principle: **In this world, we determine our position through reference systems.**

Why is peer learning important? Because it provides you with a reference system. I have a metaphor: each of us lives in a jungle, seeing only about 1 kilometer around us. We have no idea where we are or where to go. What to do? Find reference points: the sun, big trees, mountain peaks. In reality, **those who do much better than you are your references. With them, you know how well you're doing, where you stand, and where you can go next.** You might say this applies to individuals, but does it apply to dealer bosses' businesses? Yes.

When interviewing outstanding dealers, I often ask: What prompted you to make such changes? The answers are basically the same: a love of learning. Last month, I visited a dealer who followed New Distribution's e-commerce study tour in 2018. **She said that opportunity allowed her to see the practices of outstanding peers, broadened her horizons, and she consciously re-examined and understood her business, adjusting and changing.** In recent years, her business has grown continuously, from less than 30 million to over 100 million in a third- or fourth-tier prefecture-level city. In fact, many dealers have grown and thrived by learning with New Distribution, understanding new models, meeting peer experts, seeing more possibilities, and knowing where to improve. **The more outstanding peers you see, the easier it is to locate your coordinates, judge your current position, and know where you might go in the future.** We often say that the boss's cognition determines the company's ceiling. **So-called cognition is actually knowing where you are now and where you can go.** Where does cognition come from? **Cognition first comes from changing your information environment.** A person's information environment consists of the information they receive, the people they meet, and the circles they can deeply communicate with. If you interact with the same people daily and receive homogeneous information, it's hard to see the outside world, and your thinking is hard to open—**you have no idea that the problems you ponder have already been solved by others; the models you just heard about may already be thriving among your peers!** In the past few years, we've seen a few dealers do better and better, while most just repeat at a low level, trapped in place, and some have even gone under. This is not surprising; outstanding dealers are always a minority. Because cognition follows a power-law distribution. What does that mean? In any population, the very smart and the very dumb are extremely rare; the vast majority are in the middle, all similar—**IQ follows a normal distribution.** Cognition, however, is different; it comes more from后天 training. Those with high cognition are a minority; most people's cognition is at a low or medium level—**cognition follows a power-law distribution.** So in any field, experts are always a minority. This is a universal law. Since experts are a minority, and the vast majority of dealer bosses urgently need to change their information environment, we have been thinking: **Can we bring together industry experts to form a communication circle where everyone learns from each other and improves together, and also allow those dealer bosses who want to change but don't know where to start to progress together?** This is also a demand expressed by many dealer bosses when we visit them.

Over the past six months, we have been planning a dealer membership club. We hope to **leverage New Distribution's ability to connect and distill, gather experts among dealer bosses scattered across the country, and provide the latest business opportunities and dividends, excellent cases of business growth, and effective cost-reduction guides to the vast number of dealer friends.** But it's not just that. As industry observers, New Distribution has been reporting on outstanding dealer cases and also observing industry trends. Over the past 30 years, in China's FMCG channel value chain, dealers have been severely disadvantaged:

**1. Survival squeeze** — squeezed by both upstream brands and downstream terminals, their living space is continuously compressed.
**2. Value deficiency** — they contribute to brand sales but cannot share the high premium that brand development brings to manufacturers.
**3. Passive choices** — regional divisions, agency cancellations, no market control, only waiting to be chosen.
**4. Thin profits** — limited gross margins, high costs, not making money or even on the edge of losses.

Dealer bosses must feel these problems deeply. Of course, in the past few years, we have also seen **more and more outstanding dealers rising, starting to take the initiative in market competition and games.** The role of dealers has changed! Capable dealers have transformed from "salary-earning" brand outsource teams to enterprises that serve customers well and monetize scarce resources into "profits." They are beginning to grasp their own destiny and will eventually lead the transformation of the distribution industry. **How do these outstanding peers think? What do they do? What transformations have they experienced, and what judgments and plans do they have for the future? Their perspectives and thinking are truly worth learning from for the vast number of dealer bosses.** The New Distribution Dealer Membership Club brings together 500 outstanding dealer bosses from across the country to create a community for the evolution of dealer bosses' businesses. Membership recruitment has started, and it will officially launch in June 2023. If your business is facing challenges and you've been going in circles, welcome to join the Dealer Membership Club. **Seize the opportunity, reduce costs, and increase growth. Here, you can find suitable learning targets and path references!** If you are doing exceptionally well in your region and have insights into management, we welcome you even more. **Walk with experts, learn from each other, and progress together to become future leaders in the FMCG distribution industry!**


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