Most people see
a trade business.
We feel it.
Thirty three years on the floor, in the branches and across the P&L of one of Australia's benchmark trade distribution businesses. Not a framework borrowed from another industry — a read on yours, from someone who has run it.
Independent advisory for trade and wholesale distributors turning over $5m to $250m.
- Gross margin
- 24.8%
- Stock turns
- 4.1x
- Branch EBIT
- 6.2%
- Quote conversion
- 31%
Merchant businesses sit at 42 on a scale from Typical performer to Benchmark quartile.
Most merchants sit mid-field on margin and well behind on stock turns. The gap is rarely price — it is discipline at the counter.
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We are not a management consultancy. There is no bench of graduates, no templated deck and no six week discovery phase. You get one operator who has carried the number, walking your business with you.
We do not sell a methodology. Every trade business is shaped by its branches, its people and the decisions of the last decade. The work starts by understanding those, then finding the shortest route to a better result.
Independent. Hands on. Accountable to the result, not the report.
How the work runs
Every engagement starts with a clear understanding of where the business is, where it needs to go, and what success looks like.
Two weeks in the business, not in a boardroom. Branch visits, counter observation, a proper read of the numbers behind the numbers. You get an honest picture of where margin is made and where it quietly disappears.
What you get
A written diagnostic covering margin by branch, category and customer, with the three findings that matter ranked by the size of the prize.
Typical duration
Three to four weeks, depending on branch count and how clean the data is when we start.
Where the gap sits
The gap between where a trade business is and where it could be is the same three levers — and a playbook for each.
Lever one
Customers who cost more to serve than they return.
Most distributors can name their largest accounts and almost none can name their most profitable. Once cost to serve is loaded properly, the bottom third of the ledger usually looks very different.
The playbook
Margin by customer, not by invoice
Rebuild the account ledger with freight, credit terms, returns and counter time loaded in, then reprice or restructure the accounts that never recover.
Lever two
An operating rhythm that reports the past instead of steering the week.
Monthly packs land three weeks late and describe a month nobody can change. The businesses that pull ahead run a shorter loop and act on it while it still matters.
The playbook
A weekly number that moves
One page, five measures, same time every week, owned by the person who can actually change it.
See the playbookLever three
A team that has outgrown the way it was set up to work.
The structure that carried the business to thirty million rarely carries it to eighty. Roles blur, decisions bank up at the top, and the best people start solving problems that are no longer theirs to solve. It is the least visible lever and usually the one holding everything else back.
The playbook
Decision rights before org charts
Map who actually decides what today, find where decisions queue, and push authority down to the level that owns the outcome — then let the structure follow.
Diagnostic
Three quick questions. One clear read on where to focus first.
Indicative only. It is a conversation starter, not a diagnosis — the real read comes from walking your branches. Nothing you select here is recorded or sent anywhere.
Selected work
What that work has looked like in practice.
Matt Rickards has spent thirty three years in trade distribution, most recently leading a national network of branches through a decade of growth.
Finding the margin hiding in plain sight
A merchant group with eleven branches could not explain why revenue growth was not reaching the bottom line. Loading freight and credit terms into the account ledger showed the largest customer had been unprofitable for two years.
Repriced or exited 34 accounts. Gross margin up 2.1 points in three quarters.
Getting the numbers to arrive in time
A distributor running on a monthly pack that landed on the twentieth had no way to correct a bad month. We built a five measure weekly page owned by branch managers rather than finance.
Decision lag cut from 21 days to 6. Branch managers now run their own reviews.
Making the structure match the business
A family owned business at eighty million was still using the decision rights it had at twenty. Every pricing exception, credit call and hiring decision routed through two people.
Pushed pricing authority to branch level inside a defined band. Exception volume down 70%.
Rebuilding a counter that had stopped selling
Quote conversion had slipped below a quarter and nobody could say when. Counter observation showed the team quoting on price alone because it was the only lever they had been given.
Rebuilt the quoting approach and coached it in branch. Conversion recovered to 37%.
Thirty three years building Australia's benchmark trade distribution business. Now working with yours.
Straightforward conversation. No pitch deck, no obligation.
Blue Bench ConsultingTrade distribution advisoryAustralia wide
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