CASE STUDIES
Decisions made in market.
A career on both sides of the manufacturer–distributor relationship. Seventy markets, six owned subsidiaries, sixty-five distributor markets.
Not everything worked. The ones that didn’t taught me considerably more than the ones that did — a distributor who performs for eight years tells you very little about which of the things you did actually mattered.
Clients and companies aren’t named. The decisions are described exactly as they happened.
01 · PORTFOLIO STRATEGY · GLOBAL
Why a spread of markets beats a big one
02 · PARTNER DIAGNOSIS · ASIA
When the board has already decided to fire the distributor
Read 02 and 03 together. These two reach opposite conclusions from a similar starting point — a partner who isn’t delivering. That’s the point. The question is never fix or replace. It’s which of the two you’re actually looking at, and the cost of getting it wrong runs in both directions.
03 · EXIT & TRANSITION
The distributor you can’t fix
04 · MARKET ENTRY · NORTH AFRICA
You don’t have to fund the ramp-up alone
05 · THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE