339. Your Brand Grew. Why Did Everything Get Harder?

0:00Growth is supposed to make your business stronger. So why do more stores, more sales, more people, and more data often leave a CPG brand with tighter cash, more fires, and harder decisions? I've watched a profitable brand add distribution while inventory went up, free fills went up, distributor costs went up, chargebacks started showing up, and the resources required to support all those new stores went up. Sales was doing its job. Operations was doing its job. The broker wasn't necessarily doing anything wrong.

0:30Dan Lohman:The problem was that everyone was looking at a different piece of the same decision. Everyone did their job. The business still had a problem. And I think that's the biggest challenges successful CBG brands face as they grow. Ready to hear more? I'm Dan Lohman, and this is the Bulletproof Your CBG Brand Podcast. There's a free guide at the end of every episode to help you go deeper into the content we talk about. Now, let's roll up our sleeves and get started. The company that used to fit around one table. When your company is small, a lot of this happens naturally. Maybe it's you and a co-founder.

1:03The buyer meeting, production, cash, inventory, marketing, and distributor decisions all get discussed around the same table because you both need to know what's going on. You hear the retailer feedback. You see the out of stock. You know why you ran the promotion. You know why cash is tight. You probably know some of the shoppers personally. Then the brand grows. And this is where something interesting happens. You add a sales leader. Someone owns operations. Someone owns finance. Marketing becomes a team. Maybe you add category or insights. You have a broker, a distributor, maybe field sales.

1:38Those are good things. You need specialists as the business gets more complicated. Specialization is good. Isolation is expensive. because now everybody can get really good at their part of the business while knowing less about what's happening three seats away. That's when growth can start creating problems the original team never had. Use the four things everyone thinks they need. We love asking questions like what is most important to growing a great brand? A great product, of course. Brilliant positioning and marketing? Absolutely. Fast distribution? You need stores. The right team? critical.

2:15But here's the problem. You can have all four in struggle. A great product in the wrong retailer can lose. Brilliant marketing when the product isn't available can waste money. Fast distribution without the cash or execution to support it can make the business weaker. And a great team can still make a bad decision if everyone is making a decision from a different piece of the business. So the question isn't simply which one matters most. The better question is

2:42Dan Lohman:how well do they work together? That's where I think a lot of growing brands leave money on the table. If this sounds familiar, subscribe. Every week, I'm taking one retail problem that can cost a CPG brand money, margin, distribution, or runway, and showing you what I would look at before making the next decision. Not theory, real problems, real examples, one better decision at a time. So, let's say your team lands 500 new stores. That's exciting. They should celebrate it. But what happens next? Operations needs more inventory. Finance has to find it. The distributor may require more inventory, free fills, or other costs.

3:22Trade needs money.

3:23Dan Lohman:Marketing needs to create awareness. Someone has to make sure the product actually gets on the store shelf. Your forecast needs to be close enough that you don't run out or end up sitting on months of inventory, especially if your product is perishable. Then deductions start arriving long after everyone celebrated the authorization. Nothing there means getting into the stores was a bad decision, but it does mean getting into the stores was not the whole decision. This is the mistake I see over and over. We celebrate the piece we can see first, then the rest of the business gets the bill later.

3:56Dan Lohman:Nobody has to be bad at their job, and this matters because the instinct is often to find who screwed up. Sales says operations didn't have enough inventory. Operations said forecasting was wrong. Finance says trade spent too much. Marketing says the product wasn't supported itself. The broker says the brand didn't give them enough resources. And sometimes one of those can make a mistake. But sometimes nobody failed. They were simply solving different parts of the problem. The department can be right. The business can still be wrong. That's a very different problem. and another meeting does not automatically solve it.

4:31Dan Lohman:What actually gets lost? I don't think most companies have an information shortage. You've got email, slack, dashboards, reports, weekly calls, retailer portals, spreadsheets everywhere. The problem is much simpler. The person making the decision may not know one thing somebody else already learned. Finance recovers a deduction. Great. But does the person who created the situation know why the deduction happened so doesn't happen again? The field team finds an out of stock. Great information. But does the person building the forecast ever hear about it? Marketing talks to 10 customers and learns exactly why they love your product.

5:08Does sales get those words before the next buyer meeting? The broker hears an objection from the retailer. Does anyone outside the broker relationship ever learn it? If one person learns it and the rest of the business doesn't, you have to learn it all over

5:23Dan Lohman:again. This problem isn't new. CPG actually solved a version of it decades ago. I interviewed Gordon Wade on episode 266. Gordon was one of the original people who developed what became modern category management. Before that shift, manufacturers and retailers could spend a lot of time selling to one another while still working from very different priorities. A lot of the relationships were short-term. The next promotion, the next meeting, the next quarter. The relationship mattered, sometimes too much. What category management helped introduce was a more disciplined way to manufacturers and retailers to work from shared facts, bring different functions into the same problem, and think long-term about the category and the shopper.

6:07Dan Lohman:In simple terms, think of it as a better way to solve problems and help make it easier for your shoppers to find and buy your products on store shelves. It wasn't supposed to be. Here's another report. The report helped people make better decisions together. That is the part of category management that I think is incredibly important today. And it's the part of category management that's so misunderstood and underappreciated. And I think challenger brands can take that idea even further. Do not become the company you're trying to beat. Because when you're small, you already have something enormous companies would love to have back.

6:41You're close to the shopper. You're close to the buyer. You're close to what's happening at show. You can more easily pivot and change direction.

6:48Dan Lohman:You can try something next week instead of putting in our next year's planning cycle. One of my old bosses at Unilever used to say, it takes an ocean to turn an oil tanker. Don't grow your challenger brand into an oil tanker. You don't have to choose between being nimble and becoming sophisticated. Keep the speed, add the capability. Borrow the discipline, borrow the data, borrow the process that makes sense, but don't give away your closeness, creativity, and speed that helped you get here. That can be one of your biggest competitive advantages. This is what I mean when I talk about building your retail muscle.

7:22Dan Lohman:It doesn't mean everyone needs to understand everyone else's job. Finance does not need to become sales. Sales does not need to run operations. Marketing does not need to become category management. But before you make a decision that affects the entire business, the people involved need to have enough of the picture to understand what they may be changing somewhere else. That's the muscle. And when the business learns something important, you capture it. So you don't have to relearn it the expensive way six months later. Eventually, the company starts saying, this is how we handle this here. That is when the lesson becomes part of the company and eventually it becomes part of your brand's DNA.

8:01Dan Lohman:Why this becomes a competitive advantage? Think about what your competitors can copy. They can copy a promotion. They can buy similar data. They can hire the same broker. They can use the same AI tools. They can walk the same trade show floor. What they can't instantly copy is years of learning. What your shopper values. What your retailers respond to. Which promotions actually work. Which stores deserve more support. Which distributors fit you. Which mistakes you've made. What those mistakes taught you and how your team uses all that when making the next decision. That is your moat and your competitive advantage.

8:37Dan Lohman:Not another dashboard. A company that gets better every time it solves a problem. This is also why my work tends to look a little different depending on the problem. I've sat in a lot of seats in this industry. I've worked in the stores as a grocery manager, sales, category management, syndicated data, shopper insights, with brokers, with retailers, and strategy. That doesn't mean that I know your sales leader's job better than they do or your finance person's job. That's not the value. The value is that I can often see where a decision in one part of the business is creating a problem somewhere else.

9:12Dan Lohman:Maybe you think you have a sales problem. It turns out to be the assortment. Maybe you think it's a broker problem. It turns out nobody agreed on what happened after the retailer says yes. Maybe the dashboard says the item should go, but the shopper and retailer economics say cutting that item won't actually hurt the category. Maybe sales are growing and everybody's celebrating while cash is quietly getting tighter. My job is to help you find the actual problem before you spend a lot of money solving the wrong problem. Then solve it with your team and leave the team better equipped to handle the next one.

9:47Dan Lohman:That's much more valuable than making you dependent on another consultant forever. Here's the practical exercise. Here's something you can do this week. Don't redesign the company. Pick one decision that keeps creating frustration. One retailer, one promotion, one deduction problem, one skew, one broker issue, one forecast. Then ask five questions. Number one, what problem are we actually trying to solve? Number two, who knows something about this that the rest of us may not know? Number three, what are we trying to accomplish for the whole business, not just one department? Number four, if we do this, what else does it change?

10:25Dan Lohman:Number five, what do we need to do afterwards so the next decision gets easier? That's it. You do not need everyone sitting in the meeting. You need to have the right people looking at the same problem before you commit the money. And while I was thinking about this, I realized something uncomfortable. I had created the same problem inside Retail Solved. I record hundreds of podcast conversations, including with top CEOs and industry thought leaders. There are guides, courses, decision tools, YouTube playlists, shopper resources, trade resources, broker resources, category management resources, all useful, but it was basically saying, good luck figuring out which one you need.

11:06Dan Lohman:That's backwards. You shouldn't have to understand my business before I can help you with yours. So I've rebuilt the starting point. Go to RetailSolve.com forward slash start. It doesn't begin by asking you what course you want. It doesn't ask you whether you're founder, sales leader, or an operations person. Ed asks, what retail problem is costing you the most? Maybe you're trying to get into retail. Maybe you already got in the store, but they're not working. Maybe sales are growing, but cash is getting tight. Maybe your broker isn't delivering what you thought they would. Maybe promotions are costing you more and doing less.

11:41Maybe you have all the data and still don't know what the decision to make. Start with the problem,

11:46Dan Lohman:the three paths. From there, choose the level of help you need. Number one, you can solve it yourself by using the free videos, podcasts, and free resources. Number two, you can build the capability more deeply with the guides, tools, and training. Number three, or if the problem is expensive enough that learning it slowly costs more than bringing in help, send it to me. One problem, one better decision. Then make the learning repeatable. I want challenger brands to win. Not because they can outspend the biggest companies, most can't. But you can be closer to the shopper. You can be more useful to the retailer.

12:23Dan Lohman:You can learn faster. You can make better decisions. And you can build those lessons into the company as you grow. So don't measure growth only by how many stores did we add? How much did revenue increase? How big did the team get? Ask one more question. Did the business get stronger? Because bigger and stronger are not automatically the same thing. I'm Dan Lohman and this is the Bulletproof Your CPG Brand Podcast. Find the problem, solve that, build the muscle, and keep getting a little better every time. One question for you. As your brand has grown, what got harder that you didn't expect to get harder?

13:00Dan Lohman:Put it in the comments. I'm going to use those answers to decide which problems to tackle next. And if you want to see one reason why a perfectly good looking report can send a company toward a completely wrong decision watch the data to decision video on the screen now this week's free guide is the founder problem finder it's your very own focused personal version of the start here page it lists 10 common problems brands face with the top three recommended podcast episodes to help you solve them and build the next retail muscle you can get the show notes and this week's free guide at retail solve.com forward slash session 339