The Corner Store vs The Wholesaler
This is about more than just local grocers and suppliers.
The people at the corner store know you. They’ve seen you at your best and your worst. They know you enjoy that one weird drink flavor that no one else buys, and often ask what you’re getting up to.
They know your breakfast order. And they make a joke when you change it up from your usual.
You don’t get that type of attention from the wholesaler.
The wholesaler spends their time analyzing margins. Forecasting fulfillment and renegotiating contracts. Our delivery utilization is below the norm, they say in long internal email chains.
There are 8 people CC’d on your emails with their team. Your recent call with the wholesaler had even fewer people engaged than the last one. A video call filled with the gray squares of disabled laptop cameras and disabled microphones.
Your usual restock is one of dozens, even hundreds that they have lined up this week.
This is not a story about local grocers and suppliers.
This is a story about consulting.
Consulting firms are either the corner store or they are the wholesaler. They cannot be both, at least not at the same time.
I run what I consider to be a corner store. I am hired to solve problems for specific teams. Those problems happen to be related to systems processing and producing data. I provide a specialty set of services and tailor those services to the company’s needs.
Its current setup will not scale to tens of millions in revenue. And that is ok. It’s not intended to right now.
But a wholesaler would not be ok with this.
The wholesaler is a necessary force. They operate at a scale that some businesses require. But many do not.
You could argue that most do not.
Even those with some venture funding in the bank often don’t need wholesalers. They need corner stores.
They need someone to solve their problems. To anticipate what comes next. To actually care about the outcomes.
You lose that level of detail when dealing with wholesalers.
I inherited a project built by a wholesaler a few years back. It had cost the business somewhere around $300k over the course of the build. It followed the well-established formula for what “should work”.
But it didn’t solve the problems we faced well enough. It was cumbersome. Fragile. And obviously expensive.
The business didn’t need a wholesaler. They needed a corner store.
They just didn’t realize it.