331. More People. More Software. Why the Same Decisions Keep Coming Back.

0:00Dan Lohman:More people, more software, why the same decisions keep coming back. Most growing brands are being sold on some version of the easy button. Hire the right person, buy the right software, add a dashboard, plug in AI, automate the reports, push a button and the business will become easier to run. I understand the appeal. Founders are caring too much. They are managing retailers, brokers, distributors, investors, inventory, promotions, cash deductions, and a team that needs answers. A push-button solution sounds like relief. The problem is not that software, AI, dashboards, or talented people cannot help.

0:38Dan Lohman:They absolutely can. The problem is that a tool can only support the process underneath it. If the question is unclear, ownership is fuzzy, or the report is missing important context, the easy button does not remove the confusion. It makes the confusion much faster, and that's where things get expensive fast. Today I want to show you why the same decisions keep returning after you add more people, more reports, and more technology. More importantly, I want to show you how to build the capability underneath those tools so your team can make better decisions even when you're not in the room. Hi, I'm Dale Nolman, founder of RetailSolve.

1:18Dan Lohman:This is the Bulletproof Your CPG Brand podcast. Now, let's roll up our sleeves and get started. The founder becomes the original operating system. Most founders begin as the company's original operating system. You know why the product exists. You understand the shopper, the retailer relationships, the history behind the decisions, and the reason why one exception matters while another one does not. In the beginning, that is an advantage. You can make decisions quickly because most of the important context already lives in your head. Then the business grows. More people join the team, more retailers carry the product, more reports appear, brokers, distributors, promotions, systems, and outside partners become involved.

2:00Dan Lohman:But the judgment that helped you make good decisions does not automatically move into the business with them. The team may bring you the information, but they still wait for you to interpret it. Should we support the promotion? Which retailer deserves more attention? Is the broker doing enough? Why did sales increase but cash got tighter? Is the problem pricing, distribution, inventory, execution, shopper demand, or the report itself? The company has more resources, yet the same questions keep finding their way back to the founder. That does not automatically mean that you have a weak team. It may mean that the company never clearly defined how those decisions should be made.

2:39The founder was never supposed to stay as the company's operating system.

2:43Dan Lohman:The missing layer between the people and the tools. When the workload becomes too heavy, hiring someone feels like the logical answer. Sometimes it is. But hiring around an unclear decision process can make the problem expensive without making it clearer. The new employee arrives with experience from another company, another category, and another operating model. They begin using definitions and practices that work there. Meanwhile, the existing team has its own definitions. Sales use the business through revenue and distribution. Finance use it through margin and cash. Operation sees inventory and service levels.

3:22Marketing sees awareness and sharper engagement. The retailer is thinking about category productivity. Everyone may be working hard and making reasonable recommendations from the seat they occupy. The problem is that a decision can make sense from one department's point of view and still

3:38Dan Lohman:weaken the larger business. Sales can win more doors while operations struggles to service them. Marketing can create trial while finance absorbs the discount. A broker can close distribution gaps while the wrong product goes into the wrong stores. A deduction team can recover money without fixing the process that caused a deduction. A dashboard can show that one metric improved while the overall business became less profitable. That is the missing layer. The business still needs a way to connect people, information, and tools around the decision it actually is trying to make. I call that commercial decision capability, when visible growth hides a weakening foundation.

4:20Dan Lohman:I learned this inside a fast-growing CPG business. We had built a creative retail strategy that was working. Retailers were adopting it. Sales were growing quickly. New products were creating excitement and giving the sales team a fresh story. From the outside, the business looked strong. At the same time, I started noticing smaller challenger brands gaining traction. They were easy to dismiss at first, but they were winning space and becoming more relevant. I was also seeing something more troubling inside a core business. Important energy bar products had once been widely distributed were quietly falling off retailer shelves.

4:58Dan Lohman:Imagine a retailer with 100 stores. An item that once was available in all 100 stores may now be only available in 60. There is no dramatic announcement. Nobody officially discontinued the product across the chain. Their brand was simply losing ground, one store at a time. The reports existed, the warning signs existed, but those signals did not fit the story the organization was celebrating. New item authorizations were visible. Innovation wins were visible. The sales team was rewarded for growing distribution. Protecting the existing business was quieter. Stewardship did not create the same excitement as placing a new product on the shelf, even when protecting the core business was more valuable.

5:41Dan Lohman:That is how healthy brands get into trouble. They chase the visible growth while the foundation underneath it starts to weaken. I eventually built a tool that highlighted the impact of the challenger brands taking space from us. It identified the distribution gaps by retailer and by item. More importantly, it quantified in dollars what those gaps were worth. The tool did not simply say, we are losing distribution. It showed where the losses were happening, which products mattered most, how large the opportunity was, where the team should focus first, and it placed a dollar value on each opportunity.

6:17Dan Lohman:That changed the conversation. Sales could see it. Leadership could see it. The brand team could see it. The opportunity had a value, an owner, and a clear next action. The spreadsheet was not the product. The decision was. The decision tool became valuable because the organization can finally see the same problem from the same picture and act before more ground was lost. The tool even measured the team's progress in closing those gaps in units, TDPs, and dollars. That mattered because it changed the incentive structure and their team was rewarded for their accomplishments. That was not an easy button.

6:53It was a tool supporting a clearly defined decision. Software is not the enemy. I want to be very clear about this. I am not anti-software. I am not anti-AI. I'm not against dashboards, automation, or outside expertise. The right technology can save hours. It can preserve institutional knowledge, standardized and streamline reporting, make exceptions easier to see, and help stronger operating system become easier to repeat. It can be the starting point for any analysis. AI can help teams analyze information, identify patterns, ask better questions, and work faster. A talented employee can bring judgment, experience, and fresh thinking.

7:35The sequence matters. First define the decision, then define the ownership, evidence, and operating system. After that, use the technology to reinforce the system. Technology should make good decisions easier. It should not be asked to invent the discipline the business never built.

7:52Dan Lohman:We've all heard the phrase garbage in, garbage out. Software and AI can accelerate a process, but they cannot repair assumptions the business never challenged. If the data structure does not reflect how the shopper actually shops, the technology may optimize the wrong answer. If every department uses a different definition of success, the dashboard may make each version of the truth look more professional. If nobody owns a decision, automation may simply deliver the unanswered question faster. The easy button is not the enemy. Using it before the business is ready is the problem. Four things that must come before the easy button.

8:31A repeatable decision capability needs four things. The first is a clearly defined question. We need to grow is aspirational. We need to grow 5 % next year without compromising margin gives the team something it can work backward from. Now the conversation can include distribution, inventory, capital, trade spend, execution, and shopper

8:53Dan Lohman:demand. Consider a promotion. How did the promotion perform usually produces a sales recap. A better question might be, should we repeat this promotion at this retailer with this product during this time period? Now the team knows what they're trying to decide. The second requirement is ownership. Someone must be responsible for moving the complete decision forward. That person does not need to produce every piece of information. Sales, finance, marketing, operations, the broker, and the distributor may all contribute. But the team needs to know who gathers the evidence, brings the recommendation, and then follows through.

9:31Shared input can improve a decision. Shared accountability usually becomes no accountability. The third requirement is the right evidence. One report rarely provides a complete answer. A sales increase may not tell you whether promotion created profitable demand. You may also need margin, trade spend, inventory, retailer execution, shopper response, competitive activity, timing deductions, and evidence of whether the promotion created new demand or simply moved a purchase forward. The goal is not to collect every piece of data you can find. The goal is to identify the evidence needed to make the decision well.

10:11The fourth requirement is the operating rhythm. When will the decision be reviewed? What triggers the review? what must be prepared before the meeting, what happens after the team makes a decision. A strong operating rhythm becomes the brand's muscle memory.

10:27Dan Lohman:It allows good decisions to happen even when the founder is not in the room. Without that rhythm, even a great tool becomes another file someone updates when they remember. The goal is not to build a perfect system. The goal is to stop relearning the same decision every week. Better capability changes the conversation. This is bigger than reducing the founders workload. Stronger operating capabilities makes the company less risky to retailers, investors, strategic partners, shoppers, and potential buyers. Retailers cannot be experts in every brand and every category they sell. They depend on capable partners to help them understand what's changing, which shoppers are being missed, where the category is headed, and which opportunities deserve attention.

11:14Dan Lohman:Some of my greatest retail wins came when I helped the retailer make a better decision first. At one point, a major retailer's promotional fees were much higher than those of its primary competitor. Those fees reduced the amount of money we could invest in promotions and category growth. I did not simply complain about the fees. I showed the retailer the economics. I demonstrated the size and the value of the baskets our brands created, the return we could generate elsewhere, and how different terms would help both sides compete more effectively. I then used that support to strengthen the plan with their primary competitor.

11:50Dan Lohman:Those actions dramatically grew the brand in the market. The point is not that I negotiated aggressively. The point is that we had enough evidence, operating capability, and retail value to change the terms of the conversation. The same principle applies to investors. A founder should never have to become a perpetual fundraiser because the business never developed the capability to protect what it already built. A company becomes more attractive when it can show that it knows to recognize a signal, protect its core, allocate resources, learn from the result, and respond before a small problem becomes an expensive one.

12:28Dan Lohman:Better operating capability changes the terms of the conversation. A better operating system is your brand promise to shoppers. It reinforces their trust because it delivers consistent quality. It's easy to find and buy, and it delivers measurable value. That alone can help protect you from pricing and promotion tactics lesser brands adopt. It can help a brand keep more equity, negotiate better retailer terms, earn longer commitments, and become more valuable to a future buyer. Think in terms of risk reversal. It is how you increase the brand's value and increase its ROI. Listen, understand, decide, build.

13:05Dan Lohman:The past three episodes of the Bulletproof Your CPG Brand podcast explored the first parts of this process. Episode 328 focused on listening. Shopper conversations, email responses, demos, trade show follow-up, retailer questions, and community feedback can reveal changes before the sales dashboard does. Episode 329 focused on understanding. The shopper's math changed. The founder's math changed. The margin for error got smaller. Episode 330 focused on deciding. A report can be accurate and still produce an incomplete answer when it lacks shopper, competitive, category, and operating context. Those three episodes form the Decision Clarity Trilogy.

13:48Listen to the signals. Understand what they mean. Use them to make cleaner decisions. Episode 331 is the implementation chapter.

13:58Dan Lohman:Build the decision into the way your company operates. That same progression connects the broader retail solve system. The 30-day Extender CPG Runway Challenge helps founders strengthen the foundation before growth exposes the cracks. The 15-minute CPG Runway Leak Finder helps finders identify where the pressure may be already building. The Shopper Signal Flywheel helps the brand listen before the report reveals the outcome. The Decision Clarity Series helps the team understand and decide. The Retail Clarity decision tools turns that decision into something the team can use, own, maintain, and repeat.

14:36These are not separate collections of content. They address different parts of the same operating

14:42Dan Lohman:problem. How do you build a brand that becomes stronger as it grows instead of more fragile? Start with one reoccurring decision. Do not try to redesign the entire company this week. Choose one reoccurring decision that keeps returning to you. Maybe it's whether to support to promotion. Maybe it's which retailer deserves more attention. Maybe it's how to evaluate your broker. Maybe it's why deductions keep appearing. Maybe it's whether a new product belongs in the core assortment. Write the exact question in one sentence. Then decide who should eventually own it. Identify the evidence that person consistently needs, including the important context your current reports do not show.

15:23Finally, establish when the decision should be reviewed and what action should follow. You may discover that the business does not need another report. It may need one trusted way to make the decision. Once that foundation is clear, then ask what is

15:38Dan Lohman:the right hire, software, AI, dashboard, or outside partner to make the system stronger. The easy button comes last. The next step, if this episode sounds familiar, start with the full Decision Clarity Series. I have linked episodes 328 through 331 together so that you can start working through, listen, understand, decide, and build an order. I have also included the free 15-minute CBG Runway leak finder. No friction, no email required. Use it to identify where the immediate pressure is coming from, cash, margin, execution, visibility, or decision quality. Then choose one reoccurring decision.

16:16If your team already has reports, people, and software, but still debates what to do next, bring me that decision. You do not need a polished presentation. or perfectly clean data. Bring one report, workflow, or reoccurring question.

16:32Dan Lohman:I will help you determine whether the gap is the question, the ownership, the evidence, the operating rhythm, or the tool supporting the decision. If a focused retail clarity decision tool or capability project makes sense, I will explain what that could look like. To recap, the next software platform may help, the next employee may help, AI may help, a better dashboard may help, but none of them can replace the commercial decision capability the business never built. Start with a question, name the owner, identify the evidence, build the operating rhythm, then use the tools to make that system faster, cleaner, and easier to repeat.

17:10The spreadsheet is not the product, the decision is, and the decision should not depend on the founder being in every room. When the margin for error gets smaller, clarity becomes your competitive advantage. I'm Dan Lohman. Thank you for joining on the Bolt Proof Your CBG Brand Podcast. You can download the show notes and get this week's free guide at retailsolved.com forward slash session 331.