July 1, 2025
If you sell a product, relying on distributors to sell can choke your margins and risk your brand.
UnbreakableOS’s BrandMoat law (read more about some of that here) builds a defensible position through reputation, not middlemen. If you sell to consumers, this is your playbook. I learned it at an automotive suspension company, and it changed everything.
We sold to distributors at a 45% discount, bleeding margins and risking everything if one of them walked. I visited call centers across the US and Canada to see it myself. Staff juggled 1,000 products, only pushing ours with promos—turnover and new products killed focus. Retail stores were worse, needing constant retraining as staff cycled out. We were stuck pushing, not leading.
So, I decided to completely flip it to a direct-to-consumer model.
That meant marketing and online sales. When we first launched our new online promotions on our website, distributors pushed back hard, saying we were competing with them, threatening to leave.
I knew if we built our own brand, with our clients, we would be in control of our own destiny. We built a consumer brand, telling our story. Not advertising, engaging.
Online sales soared from nearly nothing to multiple seven figures annually, with 50% better margins. Direct sales hit 10-15% of revenue. And those distributors? They doubled and tripled sales —as customers came to them and demanded our product, with no extra effort or promotions needed from their teams to make the sale.
You see, even though we pushed folks to our website, the impact of the product awareness through branding was that more people knew about it, and that meant more searching for us, which meant more sales for everyone.
As a former banker you can see why this was a strategy I was focused on...
- Selling on our own website direct to the consumer at 15% off nets $4.25M in profits.
- Matching that takes $7.73M in distributor sales at 45% off — 54% more volume.
Let's look at it from another perspective...
If company sales went DOWN 20% — from $5M sold exclusively to those distributors and we shrunk to $4M but it was all sold to directly to the end consumer – the company would make $650K MORE in gross profits.
Not only that, but you’d be spending your time building up your brand, creating content that works while you sleep, and de-risking yourself from that Friday afternoon Zoom meeting when your biggest distributor tells you they’re taking on your competitor and dropping you.
This week, I’m giving you a new handout – the Brand Pull Blueprint.
Here’s the playbook:
1. Build a Simple Buying Process
Set up an online store linked to QuickBooks or Sage100 for inventory and accounting. Make checkout one-click easy.
2. Create Daily Video Content
Use Opus Clips for daily social clips. We went over this in detail in Volume 5 - check that out here, and learn more about how to create and distribute daily content.
3. Engage Thoughtfully
Spend 30 minutes daily commenting on niche posts, per the Comment Method. Build trust, spark demand. It's included in the Brand Pull Blueprint, but here's the Comment Method PDF for you again.
Like Novocain, give it time.
Build your moat—pull customers to you. That’s how you make your business unbreakable.