Darn Good Distributors

Most distribution leaders say they're open to change. A lot fewer have actually been forced to rebuild a 70-year-old company from the inside out, with no industry background, during a pandemic, before buying out their own family to take ownership. That's the situation Marlee D'Arco walked into when she joined Safety Services, Inc. in 2019.

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On this episode, Kyler Nixon and Marlee go deep on what change management actually looks like inside a real distribution company: not the textbook version, but the version where people quietly check out, where the acquisition team is shocked they can wear jeans, and where the only way to create lasting change is to build it around a clear answer to "why us?"

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👤 Guest Bio

Marlee D'Arco is President & CEO of Safety Services, Inc. (SSI), a third-generation, woman-owned industrial safety distributor headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, founded in 1948. Before joining SSI, she practiced law, ran a healthcare marketing firm, and worked as a specialty pharmaceutical sales representative at Allergan. She joined SSI in 2019 as Chief Strategy Officer, drove a full technology and operations overhaul through COVID, and completed a family buyout to become owner and CEO in 2022. SSI is a nationally certified Women Business Enterprise (WBE) and distributes PPE, safety training, engineered fall protection systems, and gas detection instrumentation.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Marlee entered a third-generation family business with no industry experience and the early distrust she had to earn her way through
• Why she became obsessed with SSI's value proposition before COVID hit, and how that obsession set the company up to survive the commodity crunch that followed
• The signals that too much change is happening at once, including how they usually don't get voiced directly but show up in energy and morale
• Her framework for self-selection: making objectives and requirements clear enough that people opt in or opt out without a blowup
• The three criteria she used when acquiring a local competitor: technical skill, margin insulation, and low competitive density
• What she learned the hard way about communicating before a change, not after
• The "blended family" dynamic that comes with an acquisition and how cultural differences play out in surprisingly small ways
• Her warning to independent distributors who are digging their heels in: reluctance to change is probably the fastest way to erode what you've built

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Safety Services, Inc. (safetyservicesinc.com)
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• No BS Strategy by Alex M H Smith

Most distributors don't have a digital roadmap. They have a list of projects someone wants to do, a budget fight waiting to happen, and a general sense that they're behind. Kyler Nixon sits down with Sam Schwartz, B2B ecom expert, to walk through a real framework for building one. Sam presented this process at B2BEA in Scottsdale, where the RICE prioritization method she introduced reportedly had every person in the room writing it down. This episode gets into the meat of that: how to actually uncover what customers need, generate ideas worth acting on, attach financial outcomes to those ideas, and then rank them without politics getting in the way.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why voice of customer is a spectrum, from five-minute phone calls to Google Analytics, and why you need both ends to make sense of anything
• How to write survey questions that reveal actual customer behavior instead of just confirming what you already believe
• Why your technology vendors are an underused idea source, including how asking a Shopify rep for a site audit surfaced features the team didn't know existed
• How to build a business case when the ROI is fuzzy, using product data enrichment as a worked example
• Why presenting conservative, target, and aggressive financial projections is more useful than a single number, especially in front of a leadership team
• The full RICE method (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort): what each variable means, how to score them, and how the formula produces a priority ranking you can actually defend
• Why effort scoring should include every team involved, not just IT
• Why roadmapping is a cultural activity, and why change management is the part no framework fully solves

Cyberweld has been in business since 1938, online since 2000, and is watching AI-referred traffic climb from 1% in February to 15% this month, with 25% expected by summer. Kyler Nixon sits down with Bob Goodliffe, fourth-generation CEO of Cyberweld, to get into how a welding distributor builds product pages, runs retention, and survives a platform migration. Bob's philosophy on product copy hasn't changed in 25 years, but it turns out the same approach that helps his customer service reps answer questions is exactly what AI search engines reward. They also get into rewards programs in B2B, email as a retention tool, and the two-year organic hangover from migrating off a legacy platform.

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👤 Guest Bio

Bob Goodliffe is President and CEO of Cyberweld, the online welding supply business operated by J.W. Goodliffe & Son, Inc. Bob is a fourth-generation family employee. His son and daughter are fifth generation. The company started in 1938 in Elizabeth, New Jersey as a traditional welding supply distributor. Bob took it online in 2000 with 50 SKUs and went fully online in 2016 after selling the gas distribution side of the business. Cyberweld now operates from locations in New Jersey and Mesa, Arizona.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Bob built Cyberweld's product pages for his customer service team and how that same approach turns out to be what AI search wants
• The 1995 marketing conference moment that put Bob five years ahead on e-commerce
• How AI-referred traffic at Cyberweld went from 1% in February to 15% this month, projected at 25% by summer
• A competitor running AI-generated product copy with disclaimers admitting the content may not be accurate, including on a $5,000 welder
• Why specs belong in the first 200 characters of a product page and marketing fluff does not
• Cyberweld's two-prong retention playbook: phone number on every page plus email replenishment to a 350,000-person opted-in list
• The reality of a rewards program on skinny industrial margins and how the math actually works
• The two-year organic search hangover after migrating off a 20-year-old e-commerce platform

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Cyberweld
• Episode 15 with Jackson Orrin from Reinders (B2B loyalty program deep dive)
• Miller, Millermatic 200
• Kyler Nixon
• Bob Goodliffe

Most marketers in distribution and manufacturing can write a polished paragraph about a product they barely understand. Rich Ward, Director of Marketing at AcroMat, decided early in his career that path had a ceiling. So he made product expertise his first deliverable, before he built a single campaign.

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Kyler Nixon sits down with Rich to talk about how that decision shaped his career and grew AcroMat. They get into how Rich learned the product by sitting in on sales calls, walking the production floor a couple days a week, and cold-calling ergonomics consultants with one line: this is not a sales inquiry, I just want to learn. They also cover why simple before-and-after content has been a steady lead driver for AcroMat against bigger competitors, and how the company thinks about retention when their product lasts five to eight years.

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👤 Guest Bio

Rich Ward is Director of Marketing at AcroMat, a 20-year-old custom anti-fatigue mat manufacturer based in Lakeville, Minnesota. AcroMat makes precision-cut mats to any shape and size for facilities run by companies like John Deere, Toyota, and Boeing. The company has doubled revenue each of the past three years. Before AcroMat, Rich came up as a writer covering healthcare, business, and engineering content, and he's now four years into industrial marketing.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why technical product knowledge is a real career multiplier in industrial marketing, not just a nice-to-have
• The exact moves Rich made in his first year at AcroMat to learn the product (sales calls, surveys with webinar gifts, shadowing the production team a couple days a week)
• How to cold-call therapists, ergonomics consultants, and 5S leaders without it being a sales pitch, and how those calls turned into blog content and customer relationships
• Why AcroMat treats LinkedIn and Reddit as paid-channel substitutes when you can't outspend Uline and Grainger
• The simple before-and-after photo format that became AcroMat's steady lead driver, and what makes it actually work
• Curling as the most common anti-fatigue mat failure mode, and why open-cell construction is the root cause
• Retention strategy when your product is built to last five to eight years (and why segmenting by buying window matters more than reorder cadence)
• Kyler's framework for B2B email retention: sales-focused content for buyers inside the buying window, education and nurture for the 90 to 95% who aren't

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• AcroMat (Rich's company)
• Reddit and LinkedIn as primary marketing channels for AcroMat
• Uline and Grainger as the larger competitors AcroMat plays against
• OSHA and Canadian MSD (musculoskeletal disorder) prevention resources Rich studied to learn the ergonomics use case
• John Deere, Toyota, and Boeing referenced as examples of AcroMat's manufacturing customer base
• Episode with Jeff Felton, Kyler's business partner at Forward Studios, where the buying-window segmentation framework was introduced

Most distributors spend a lot of time talking about retention. This episode goes the other direction. Kyler Nixon and Mark Ryan break down a direct mail acquisition campaign that Plush in a Rush ran to find new florist customers before Valentine's Day. The numbers are specific: 22,000 mailers, $18,000 all in, 130 new sales, $39,000 in revenue, and a gross profit of nearly $21,000 on the campaign alone. Not a loss-leader. Not a bet on future LTV. Profitable on the first swing. The conversation also gets into how Plush in a Rush blends D2C-style tactics into a strict B2B wholesale model, why keeping your minimum order quantity up is a feature not a bug, and where AI fits into a 30-year-old stuffed animal distributor's roadmap.

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👤 Guest Bio

Mark Ryan is Founder and CEO of William Ryan Group, a Dallas-based B2B brand strategy and research consultancy. His career includes over 30 years working with companies like Exxon, Texas Instruments, American Airlines, and McDonald's. He serves as fractional CMO for Plush in a Rush, a wholesale distributor of stuffed animals founded in 1992, and led the development of their "America's Plush Headquarters" brand positioning.

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📌 What We Cover

• How Plush in a Rush built a direct mail campaign targeting florists for their biggest season (Valentine's Day), with a full cost and revenue breakdown: $18,000 spent, $39,000 returned
• Why they buy a list of contacts that haven't heard of the company yet, and how they scrub for overlap with their existing email list
• What's in the mailer itself: an eight-page, 8.5" x 11" product catalog focused on 50 to 60 Valentine's products, not the full catalog
• The first-time buyer offer ($30 off) that doubles as an email opt-in, feeding new customers directly into a Klaviyo welcome series
• Why B2B wholesale companies can apply D2C tactics like discount opt-ins and monthly giveaways without losing their B2B identity
• The discipline of holding the $150 minimum order quantity and why Plush in a Rush has never broken it to chase retail volume
• Todd Steinberg's roadmap for online logo uploading and visual approval for custom-printed t-shirt orders
• Kyler's take on building a custom B2B popup tool using Claude Code and Lovable, and why Klaviyo's popup limitations frustrate B2B marketers

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Plush in a Rush — wholesale distributor of stuffed animals and plush toys
• Klaviyo — email marketing platform used for Plush in a Rush's welcome series, seasonal campaigns, and popups
• Shopify — e-commerce platform powering the Plush in a Rush website
• Lovable — AI-powered app builder Kyler used to build a custom B2B popup tool
• Claude Code — Anthropic's coding tool, also used in building the popup tool
• William Ryan Group — Mark Ryan's B2B brand strategy and research consultancy

When a company grows by acquisition, the obvious risk is fragmentation. Fifteen cutting tool plants, each built by an entrepreneur who spent decades doing things their own way, don't automatically speak the same language. The challenge isn't the products. It's getting every part of the business to pull toward the same outcome.

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That's the problem Kyler Nixon and Shane Hollenbaugh dig into on this episode. Shane joined ARCH Cutting Tools in October 2025 as Chief Revenue Officer, five months in when this was recorded, and has already added eight new sales reps, established weekly plant-to-salesforce alignment calls, and built a system around one repeating question: what are you the best in the world at?

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The conversation covers how Shane is deploying a salesforce across 15 manufacturing facilities, how platform-based load leveling cut carbide lead times to two to three weeks against an industry average of ten to twelve, and what actually separates a sales hire that wins from one that doesn't.

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👤 Guest Bio

Shane Hollenbaugh is the Chief Revenue Officer at ARCH Cutting Tools, a U.S.-based manufacturer of high-speed steel, tungsten carbide, PCD, and CBN cutting tools with 15 manufacturing facilities across the eastern United States. Shane brings nearly 30 years in the cutting tool industry, including 14 years at MAPAL and 11 years at YG-1 as Executive Director of Sales before taking on the CRO role at ARCH in October 2025.

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📌 What We Cover

• How ARCH's acquisition model created a multi-plant alignment challenge and what Shane built in his first five months to address it
• The "best in the world at" framework: why "we're good at everything" is a non-answer, and how pushing business unit managers to name one specialty changes how a salesforce gets deployed
• Platform-based load leveling across ANCA, Walter, and Rollomatic grinding plants and how that gets carbide lead times to two to three weeks when the rest of the industry runs ten to twelve
• The one interview question Shane asks every sales candidate, and what their body language tells him before they even finish answering
• Why a candidate who asks about after-hours time during an interview is already raising a red flag, and what questions signal someone who actually wants to learn
• The two rules Shane's first mentor drilled into him thirty years ago, including why being good at golf is grounds for termination

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• ARCH Cutting Tools - ARCH's website, products, and rep locator
• Shane Hollenbaugh on LinkedIn - Kyler specifically calls out Shane's LinkedIn presence as worth following

Most distributors know they need better SEO. Very few have actually built a process around it. This episode goes deep on what it really takes: the wrong moves that cost money, the weighted analysis that told one distributor where to start, and why knowing your products is a prerequisite for any of it to work.

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Kyler Nixon sits down with Amanda Clark of Barron Equipment Company to trace her journey from copying manufacturer content onto a new website to growing organic traffic by nearly 3,000% in seven years. They cover the weighted analysis framework Barron uses to prioritize which products to optimize first, how to build internal buy-in for SEO investment before the data exists, and why the relationship with your manufacturer vendors is a direct competitive advantage.

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👤 Guest Bio

Amanda Clark is Marketing Manager at Barron Equipment Company, a material handling distributor headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, founded in 1979. Barron serves Iowa and parts of Illinois and Nebraska, supplying everything from casters and dock equipment to industrial overhead doors. Amanda has been with Barron since 2018, driving the company's SEO, e-commerce, and content strategy. She holds a degree from the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why copying manufacturer product descriptions onto your website is a duplicate content risk, and what to do instead
• The weighted analysis Barron built to decide which of their thousands of products to optimize first, factoring in margin, sales cycle, and keyword opportunity
• How optimizing the industrial doors category page took Barron from one contact form per week to 12 per day
• Why category and collection pages are lower lift and higher return than individual product pages for SEO
• How Amanda built internal buy-in for SEO investment before she had hard data to back it up
• The vendor relationship strategy Barron uses to stay ahead on new products, co-op funding, and content differentiation
• Why product H1 naming matters, and how to use Semrush and Keywords Everywhere to find the name your customers actually search
• Why web personas drive better content structure, from spec tables for engineers to different image types for safety managers
• Why SEO principles carry directly into AEO, GEO, and LLM-driven search

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Barron Equipment Company
• Semrush
• Keywords Everywhere
• Screaming Frog
• Ahrefs
• WooCommerce

Most B2B distributors hear "loyalty program" and think DTC. SupplyHouse.com built one anyway — and it's been running for over a decade. Kyler Nixon sits down with Nick Haertel, Director of Growth Marketing at SupplyHouse.com, to break down the TradeMaster Program: what it is, who it's for, and how it powers retention across every owned channel the company has.

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The conversation covers TradeMaster's core benefits — free shipping, free returns, SKU-level discounts, and a dedicated customer service line — and then goes deep on the multi-channel strategy SupplyHouse runs to keep TradeMasters active: email, SMS, direct mail, surprise-and-delight gifting, and a brand-new inside sales team. The big idea: when a customer gets 10x as many touchpoints as they'd get from a competitor, there's really no contest for who wins the repeat order.

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👤 Guest Bio

Nick Haertel is Director of Growth Marketing at SupplyHouse.com, a pure-play e-commerce distributor of HVAC, plumbing, and electrical supplies serving over 7 million customers across the U.S. Before joining SupplyHouse, Nick spent several years at Uline as Director of Digital Marketing — one of the most sophisticated catalog and direct mail operations in the country. He holds an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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📌 What We Cover

• What the TradeMaster Program actually is — and why it's built for trades pros, not typical B2B buyers
• How SupplyHouse uses first-party loyalty data to show TradeMaster-specific pricing in Google Ads — and why paying to retain existing customers is a calculated call, not a mistake
• The two-track email strategy: a longer welcome journey for new members who haven't purchased yet, and a faster re-engagement sequence for customers showing drop-off behavior
• Why SupplyHouse measures TradeMaster success as a rolling one-year unique buyer file — not just opens or clicks
• How Nick thinks about SMS in B2B: start with transactional texts, let customers opt into what they want, and accept that the timing and cadence rules from email don't apply
• The direct mail playbook: predicting lifetime value from a customer's first order (SKU type, order size, cross-category behavior) to decide who gets a TradeMaster invitation piece
• Why SupplyHouse launched both a dedicated loyalty team and an inside sales team in the same year — and why those two functions are designed to work together
• Kyler's synthesis of the full strategy: retention is about touchpoints, and distributors sitting on large house files are already holding the advantage

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• SupplyHouse.com TradeMaster Program
• Darn Good Distributors Episode 11 - Kristen Dean, Universal Companies (SMS in B2B — referenced in conversation)

Most sales playbooks tell you to follow the script, hit the cadence, and move to the next number. Jeff Buster did it that way for a while, too - until he stopped, started just being himself, and became one of the top sales reps in the nation at one of the world's largest industrial MRO companies.

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Kyler Nixon sits down with Jeff Buster, Owner and President of Buster's Industrial Supply in Fort Worth, Texas, to talk about what it actually takes to build relationships that last 20 years. Jeff walked away from a corporate career, started his own company in 2015, and has been taking market share in the DFW industrial market ever since - without a big ad budget or a national account team.

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The conversation covers the founding moment Jeff describes as getting fed up making the right call for a customer and getting reprimanded for it, why VMI now makes up 70-80% of Buster's revenue, and how Jeff approaches direct sourcing and building a proprietary product line on top of a distribution business.

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👤 Guest Bio

Jeff Buster is the Owner and President of Buster's Industrial Supply, a Fort Worth-based MRO distributor he founded in 2015 after nearly two decades in industrial sales. Buster's serves fleet, automotive, construction, manufacturing, and government customers across the DFW area, offering 50,000+ line items, VMI programs, custom product development, and a proprietary branded product line. The company was voted "Best of Industrial Equipment Suppliers" Fort Worth 2024.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Jeff ditched the corporate sales script - and how going off-book turned him into a national top rep
• The moment he told his employer to get bent and launched Buster's Industrial Supply the same day
• How showing up to a customer who said "we can't buy from you" ten times eventually turned into running their entire department with several thousand SKUs
• Why VMI accounts for 70-80% of Buster's business and why that model still wins against national competitors
• The stair-step approach to deciding whether to one-off a product, stock it for one customer with a purchasing agreement, or bring it into the full lineup
• Quarterly warehouse turns as the core inventory health metric - and why that discipline protects profitability
• Going direct to overseas factories for sourcing, preferring DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) to sidestep customs complexity, and why product knowledge is the real barrier
• The Buster's Industrial private label product line - including a reverse-engineered non-acid concrete dissolver built to solve a real customer problem

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Buster's Industrial Supply
• Jeff Buster on LinkedIn
• Kyler Nixon on LinkedIn

How do you stand out as a small distributor in a category dominated by massive conglomerates with sales teams bigger than your entire company? For Pineapple Hospitality, the answer isn't revolutionary: it's doing the fundamentals really well.

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Host Kyler Nixon sits down with Lynn Martin to talk about how her team has carved out a real position in the guest room amenities space by serving independent, boutique, and luxury properties that the big distributors can't (or won't) serve well. Lynn shares why they walked away from chasing big chain contracts, how relationships with manufacturers send referrals their way, why they skipped Google Ads, and what's behind their move from Magento to Shopify.

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It's a candid look at how a small team with big technology can out-service bigger competitors on the fundamentals.

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👤 Guest Bio

Lynn Martin is the owner and CEO of Pineapple Hospitality, a Fenton, Missouri, distributor of luxury guest-room amenities, dispensing systems, and other lodging supplies, founded in 2005. Lynn joined the company nearly 10 years ago, and her background spans finance, accounting, and systems work at startups across roughly 10 different industries. She's known for getting her hands dirty on ERP, shipping, and e-commerce integrations herself.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why Pineapple intentionally avoids big branded chain accounts and the "red tape" that comes with them
• The line on their website ("odds are, if you're here, you're looking for a change") and where it came from
• How they serve everything from a one-room vacation rental to a 1,000-room resort waterpark, with an average customer around 100 rooms
• Why manufacturers send them referrals and how the reciprocal relationship works when a deal is too big to route through them
• How being the SEO "go-to" for specific retail brands in hospitality drives inbound leads, and why Google Ads didn't pay off
• The move from Magento to Shopify, the agency relationship, and why Lynn insists on handling three-fourths of the integration work herself
• How their ERP, website, and shipping systems are integrated so orders flow from click to tracking email in minutes
• Why doing the fundamentals extremely well is the real way to stand out in a crowded space

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Pineapple Hospitality
• Magento (current e-commerce platform)
• Shopify (platform they're migrating to)