Chapter 19: Faring Well in the New Age of IT Distribution

And so, dear readers and friends, we’ve reached the end of this particular journey together. Looking back, it’s immediately apparent that something tricky happened somewhere along the way. Step by step, little by little, we experienced a major paradigm shift, and we’ll never been the same.

It was a shift away from the notion that we’re in the IT distribution business – and toward the notion that we’re in the problem-solving business. From becoming an entangled consultant to using our brains to the Bass-O-Matic to asking questions and on back through resources, expertise, services and specialization, everything we focused on was about solving real business problems – for ourselves, for our upstream partners and for our customers.

This insight led us to the epiphany that all business problems can be boiled down to three words: better, faster, cheaper. We knew we’d have to get really good at helping our customers do business with higher quality (better), in less time (faster) and for lower cost (cheaper) if we wanted to survive the journey.

In order to lead our customers to the promised land of better-faster-cheaper, we knew we’d have to get smart and distinguish ourselves from the competition, and we knew we had to get comfortable with usingdata to diagnose and solve problems. Here, we were assisted by an able guide, Vilfredo Pareto, who showed us a simple way to zero in on the true causes of problems – and also helped me keep my shoes tied and get to work on time. What a guy!

Ultimately, however, we knew that data alone wouldn’t ensure our success. After all, in the end, work gets done by humans. Without humans, there is no RESS. They are our resources, and in them lies the expertise that helps us deliver services and specialize. To get the most out of those humans, we decided that we’d commit to communicating with them one-on-one – regularly, frequently and openly.

And here we are, at the end of it all, seeing the world of IT distribution – the world of business, in fact – through a very different lens. It’s a big change, and at this point, some of it is purely intellectual. It will take discipline, practice and patience to make it part of our lives. But we know it will pay off.

Change is not easy. When the landscape shifts – even when we’re the ones creating the change – it pushes buttons in our primitive brains that scare us, even when we know it’s going to be good for us.

And that’s why – as we leave this particular journey behind us – we’re looking forward to starting a new one soon. This one will be all about change – conceiving it, getting support for it and leading it. Borrowing ideas from one of the most successful companies in the world, we’ll explore some different ways to think about and DO change.

And there will probably be more fishing!

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 18: From Yoda to You: A Look Back

Look at you! You must be exhausted! After all, you’ve come all this way on this long, exciting journey. Want some water? How about a sandwich? Catch your breath. Don’t worry. I’ll do all the talking.

This whole adventure has been about adding value – for your customers and for your strategic partners, like Avnet. It’s been about winning customers, not just deals – and keeping them.

In a way, it seems like just yesterday that we were in the Dagobah swamp with Yoda, promising to DO, not just try. And what, exactly, will we do? Well, we’ll do what it takes to stand out from the pack of box movers, to put “value added” back in front of “reseller,” to entangle ourselves with our customers – in a platonic way, of course.

Once we left Dagobah, we found ourselves in the mountains, gazing on the RESS peaks: Resources, Expertise, Services and Specialization. In the shadows of those verdant hills, we maximized the application of our resources, leveraged our expertise, sharpened up our service offerings and contemplated the virtues of specialization.

But we didn’t RESS long. To find our way out of those mountains, we had to use algebra. The timeless and invaluable equation – “Q x A = E” – was our salvation. Once we understood that our customers’ acceptance of a solution was just as important as the solution’s bells and whistles, we knew we had to start asking questions to truly understand our customers’ toughest business problems. When we weren’t sure whatquestions to ask, we went fishing.

We got so good at asking questions, that we had to use the Bass-O-Matic ’76 to help us prioritize our customers’ problems and decide which ones we would NOT try to fix.

At that point, we realized that our brains were the powerful products in our inventory, and that we could use the skills of asking questions and prioritizing to become consultants and trusted advisors to our customers. We knew that the dreaded “C” word was the key to selling beyond the sale and adding value that would entangle our business with our customers’ for mutual benefit.

Oh. I see you’re still tired from this amazing junket. I’ll pause for now and let you get some RESS – er, REST. Next week, we’ll continue our look back and start planning our next grand adventure. Until them, an Epsom salt bath is just what those sore feet require.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant