(Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from a speech given by Robert Vick at ASA's Vendor Member Div. (VMD) breakfast meeting, held Sept. 29 in conjunction with the annual ASA conven-tion and ISH North America trade show.)

Since this is the VMD breakfast, I will talk from the manufacturer/supplier point of view, even though there are wholesalers in the audience. And since there has become such a blur between the definition of a manufacturer and a supplier, I may occasionally refer to the term “manupplier” to represent them both.

I was asked to be the moderator because it was important to have someone who has been in our industry long enough to remember how the traditional relationship between manufacturers and wholesalers used to be. I accepted because I figured that there wouldn't be too many in the audience that could remember whether what I said was right or wrong.

What The Relationship Used To Be Like

In those days, as I was learning about the industry, I perceived the manufacturer's relationship with the wholesaler to be one of a win-win relationship.

Generally, those manufacturers that sold through distribution aligned themselves with one or two wholesalers in a trading area. In exchange, the wholesaler didn't carry competing lines. If my wholesaler got the order, then I got the order. Also, there wasn't much foreign competition, and if my price was out of line with a competitor it was never out more than five percent, not the 40 or 50 percent that you see today.

The breadth of most product lines being offered by manufacturers seemed narrow by today's standards, but it filled the contractor's needs. Consequently, most manufacturers could supply to the wholesaler everything that was required in a product category. So there wasn't any need for wholesalers to have overlapping suppliers, either from a pricing or product line standpoint.

As a manufacturer's salesman, I would spend my days making sales calls with the wholesaler's salesman. All information that we gathered was shared information because we were true partners in our business model.

The wholesalers' line card usually listed a product category, and then one manufacturer's name under that category. That manufacturer's name was all that you needed to say. If the category was valves, then all that was listed under the valve category was just a single manufacturer's name.

Remember that even back then, many manufacturers had already been in business nearly 100 years, and their names and their products were well-known throughout the industry.

Business back then appeared simple, and there was a sense of shared prosperity between manufacturers and wholesalers.

But what I didn't realize at the time was that a lot of what I saw happening was happening out of economic necessity - not necessarily from a desired business partnership.

Manufacturers Ruled

Wholesalers needed the manufacturer. Not only did they need him for his products, but more importantly, for brand name identity. They needed his brand identity in order to get the recognition and credibility that they desired in the marketplace. You had to have the “right” lines in order to be seen as a real player by potential customers.

In exchange for the manufacturer's product and brand identity, the wholesalers provided the manufacturer with greater profits by assuming much of the marketing cost - the cost of selling the product, inventorying, shipping and collections, etc.

The wholesaler's purpose, as seen by the manufacturer, was to play a cost-transfer role, thus allowing the manufacturer to improve his profits.

Because of this mutual economic need, the wholesalers developed their closest relationships with their upstream suppliers, not their downstream customers. Manufacturers enjoyed this relationship and the resulting position of power that it brought with it. And they used this power to establish the rules of the game.

Power Shifted To Wholesalers

When I first started doing the research for this talk, I met with six wholesalers to see how our industry could get back to the old-fashioned win-win relationships that I had remembered. I thought that I would be embraced and overrun with their suggestions.

I can't tell you how shocked I was when each wholesaler at the meeting said that they had no intention of ever going back to what they saw as “my good old days.” The good old days were only good from the manufacturer's point of view. They said that the business model for manufacturers and the one for wholesalers was entirely different, and that manufacturers still don't understand the wholesaler's side of the equation.

I suddenly realized that the perfect partnership that I remembered was not shared by everyone. In the minds of these six wholesalers, the floodgates of change had opened and there was no going back.

Wholesalers today are finding themselves empowered and independent of the traditional manufacturer's dominance. And this empowerment is the result of years of change that has taken place one baby step at a time.

As I began to compile a list of changes that would have influenced the shift of power to the wholesaler, the list literally became endless. But without question, there were some changes that stood out more than others, beginning with: