Marva Sadler – Perils of Shifting Distribution Models
Marva Sadler is the owner of MLS Odyssey LLC and an award-winning, results-driven, and tenacious Senior Executive who has delivered multibillion-dollar total impacts and unlocked the potential of hundreds of pathbreaking organizations across some of the most competitive sectors—including automotive, clean energy, education, finance, healthcare, and philanthropy. Among her many career accomplishments and esteemed positions, Marva was the COO of Coaching.com. She holds an MBA from BYU, she’s a Theory of Constraints Jonah, she’s a former Bain and Company Management Consultant, and, in her own words, loves solving gnarly business problems.
Marva Sadler – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marva-sadler/
Marva Sadler and Matt Wilhelmi – Episode 1
Marva Sadler joins Matt Wilhelmi for an exciting first episode in their series where they discuss the perils of shifting distribution models.
In the case study they discuss, Matt was brought in to fix the Job Costing System within this organization. What he soon learned was that this manufacturing company wanted to shift from a direct to consumer business model to become a national distributor.
Marva delicately and efficiently hits the three main concerns or issues right on the head as she asks her diagnosing questions! She identifies that the first issue is likely with the people. The second issue is with their finances. The third issue she clarified was more related to operations. These three key issues could spell disaster for this organization on the brink of internal combustion.
You’ll want to hear how Marva quickly diagnoses this messy business problem and summarizes their issues! The ultimate goal; growing the company while avoiding bankruptcy.
Marva Sadler and Matt Wilhelmi – Episode 2
Marva Sadler joins Matt Wilhelmi for their second episode in this trilogy where they discuss some cautionary tales. Marva talks about the “Kiss of Death” when it comes to breaking into the big box retailer market in her first cautionary tale related to a makeup and cosmetic company.
She smartly details the perils of forecasting cashflow, shifting focus and strategy of the team, production capacity mismatch, and the issues with their pricing model. She even talks about a CFO who tried to argue with Marva and, from the sound of it, didn’t fully understand retail pricing in the first place.
Matt talks about a group of muscle bound guys who own, of all things, a candle manufacturing company! They made a quick “hard pass” call on a retail opportunity because of their dedication to and conviction of their current, monthly recurring revenue strategy. They were making so much money doing things the way they were doing it – selling monthly recurring memberships to their candle club – on social media they didn’t want to take their focus off of it. I don’t blame them!
Marva reminds us of the nasty fine print that retailers use to ensure they can ship their unsold inventory right back to the manufacturer. She calls it the “Black Death of Retail.” We both agree there’s value in a retail strategy but that it’s better explored with a more cautious approach; a pilot testing. This provides for real data like adoption rates, usage rates, and customer feedback.
Marva Sadler and Matt Wilhelmi – Episode 3
Marva Sadler joins Matt Wilhelmi for their third and final episode in this trilogy where they’ve been discussing a business case study.
Matt was brought into the organization to fix their Job Costing System and noticed they were attempting quite a massive business shift. The organization was a specialty manufacturing company that sells into restaurants across the country. The shift they were working on was to go from a direct to consumer model with lots of smaller orders to a distribution model with fewer orders but higher total order size.
In episode 1, Marva smartly deduced their three top issues; people, finance, and operations. This manifested itself in employee burnout, faulty thinking with their broken financial model, and their constricted operational capacity.
In this episode, Marva talks through a pilot program as one potential solution. She says it’s like a market test where you get to standardize your process with a smaller risk potential. There’s more learning to be done through a pilot than making massive profits.
This episode is a “open the notebook, find a blank page, and get ready to start taking notes” kind of an episode. She provides a current client example that fits perfectly with this business case study. Then, she literally walks us through what it looks like to launch a successful pilot. She likens it to a terrarium!
