Verno Consulting

View in Browser | Sign Up If you solve for your annual profit goal by budgeting top down, you are not alone, but you may be short-changing your profit goal. Many wholesalers do annual budgeting from the top of the P&L down to the operating profit line. In other words, they solve for their annual profit goal. We call this “settling” for your profit. We believe ownership can get short-changed when they settle or solve for the profit that’s left. From an accounting perspective, it makes sense to...

View in Browser | Sign Up When management is not around, disenfranchisement can abound. Disenfranchised employees are more likely to care less about the company or the quality of their work, and eventually leave the company altogether. Employees often view upper-level management as unavailable to workers. In most wholesalers, employees are more loyal to their direct supervisor or teammates than to the company itself. Too often, wholesaler leadership and higher-level managers are not...

Inventory theft is more than a breakage problem – it’s also a leadership problem. It's leadership’s role to make sure the right processes are in place and being followed, which makes inventory theft more difficult and easily detected. Many wholesalers have told us stories about theft problems. The risk of product theft is a real challenge in the industry, but it shouldn’t be acceptable for leadership to look the other way towards unaccounted-for inventory loss. Breakage is one of the areas...

Every time you call your sales team in for another "quick" meeting, you're pulling money out of your pocket. Is the meeting worth it? While you think you're building alignment and sharing critical updates, your top performers are sitting in a meeting room instead of closing deals. The frustration is palpable: your best salespeople check their phones, mentally calculating the commissions they're losing while listening to updates that could have been delivered through email. As a wholesaler who...

Wholesalers face operational challenges in the drug and discount channel that become more costly as more stores open. Continuing to add marginal accounts increases wholesalers’ costs and decreases profitability. When looked at in aggregate, the drug and discount channels are large. Suppliers consider these channels large volumes and want to ensure these accounts receive the necessary service. However, most drug and discount stores are small accounts for wholesalers in terms of volume and fail...