Was listening to a new podcast Steve Marcionetti launched called CCI Drivetime. Kudos to Steve for building it specifically for the distributor audience. Most of the industry content out there is aimed at owner/operators, or at people looking to get into the business. Steve created a space that speaks directly to their side of the industry is a smart and unique move.
One of his recent episodes, Steve sat down with Brian Wallace, president and CEO of the CLA. Around thirteen minutes in, and then again around thirty-seven minutes in, Brian brought up two observations that got me to thinking and sparked this editorial.
The first one came out of Brian's day-to-day work with new members of the CLA. He explained that when new members join the CLA, one of the first things they get is a link to his personal calendar so they can book time with him directly. Brian states he has taken hundreds and hundreds of those calls over the years, and he described them as a kind of daily focus group on what's happening in the industry. He said that when he gets asked what the number one complaint is across all those conversations, the most frequent one, is that people can't get a distributor to call them back.
The second observation came about twenty-four minutes later in the same episode which made me rewind it, then pause it. Brian shared, an experience he had years ago when he had a chance to address a distribution group. He said he walked the group through a question, and here's how he put it in his own words on the podcast.
Does the sales experience commensurate with the size of investment that you're asking for?
Then he opened it up with a set of comparisons, and this is where the conversation gets really interesting. He asked whether anyone in the room had recently bought a luxury vehicle in the eighty to a hundred thousand dollar range, and what that sales experience was like. He asked whether anyone had put a couple hundred thousand or half a million dollars with a stockbroker or a financial adviser, and what that experience was like. Then he flipped it. If someone's going to put in a two million dollar laundromat, what does that sales experience look like? He was clear that he wasn't putting anyone on the spot, and I want to make sure that comes through here too. He was raising an observation, not lodging an accusation or pointing fingers. But there's a lot to that observation. Here's the president of the CLA, in front of a distribution group, essentially asking them to look in the mirror on the question of whether the experience they're delivering is worthy of what they're asking their buyers to spend. That carries some weight coming from that seat, and as someone who has never owned a laundromat, purchased laundromat equipment, and can point that out. It's the kind of question that opens a door for every owner/operator to pause and evaluate every buying experience they’ve had.
The scale of what the client is committing
For an owner/operator new to the industry, opening or retooling a first store can be one of the largest financial commitments they make in their working life outside of buying a home. People can spend anywhere from a couple hundred thousand dollars on the low end up into seven figures just on the equipment, and if they're doing a full build from scratch it can easily go higher than that. Buyers come to the purchase from very different positions, depending on whether it's a single owner/operator, a partnership, a group of investors putting money together, or someone using a mix of personal savings, home equity, and financing to get across the finish line. Either way, the money is real, the risk is real, and for most first-time buyers it represents years of work and planning showing up in one purchase.
That's the ground the sales experience gets delivered on, and it's the same ground Brian was pointing to when he raised the question, is the experience commensurate with the investment?
Which leads to a broader question worth sitting with, one that goes beyond distribution and past our industry.
What actually produces the sales experience a buyer receives?
The high price answer runs into a wall
Costco charges some of the lowest prices in retail and consistently ranks at or near the top for customer experience across the industry. Trader Joe's does the same thing at price points below the mainstream chains. QuikTrip does it in convenience stores across the American Midwest, and Mercadona does it across Spain in the grocery space. Each of these companies holds two positions at once that the price-predicts-experience framing says they can't hold together, and each of them is a case study for a researcher who has spent fifteen years asking exactly the question we're asking here.
Zeynep Ton is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management. She formerly taught at Harvard Business School and work has been published twice in the Harvard Business Review, in 2012 and again in 2017, and she's written two books on the same theme. What her research examines is a specific pattern, which is that even in the lowest-cost settings, delivering a great experience turns out to be a choice the business makes on purpose, not a luxury that higher prices happen to fund.
Ton names four operational choices that make the outcome possible. The first is to focus and simplify, meaning offer fewer products, fewer promotions, and fewer moving parts, so quality of execution becomes easier to hold across the whole business. The second is to standardize and empower, meaning standardize the common repeatable tasks so quality doesn't depend on whether the individual employee is having a good day, and empower employees to make judgment calls in the moments where standardization runs out. The third is to cross-train, so employees can move to where the customer need is on any given day. The fourth is to operate with slack, meaning staff above minimum coverage so that when a customer needs help, someone's actually available to give it.
Trader Joe's, at price points below the mainstream chains, generates roughly three times the sales per square foot of a typical supermarket, driven substantially by what customers experience when they walk in. Costco holds one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in retail while pricing below competitors. Neither of these companies is charging more to fund a better experience. They're making a set of operational choices that decouple the experience from the price, and the choices are what produce the outcome.
That's the finding that reframes Brian's question. If experience doesn't follow the check size, what actually produces it, and what would it look like to build that on purpose in laundry equipment distribution?
The wealth manager sat us down for a lunch we weren't expecting
A few years ago, my wife and I met with a private wealth team at a major institution to discuss investments. This was before we had committed to do anything with them. They had reached out, invited us to their office, and set up a meeting with the head of the team that would potentially work with us.
When we got there, we didn't go into a standard conference room in the general areas. They took us into a private area of the building on the higher floors. After we sat down, a gentleman introduced himself as Jim, and handed us a menu, which we hadn't been expecting, and they had lunch prepared for us while we sat and talked. We ended up running into a few people we knew in the building, which added to the feeling that this wasn't a transaction, it was the beginning of a possible relationship.
The materials they brought to the meeting weren't a generic slide deck. They had booklets and brochures put together that reflected our specific situation and goals. They asked a lot of questions, they laid out multiple scenarios, and they walked us through what working with them could look like across different products and different levels of engagement. None of that experience depended on us having committed money yet, because it was baked into how the firm chose to operate. The sequence was pre-designed, the materials were built once and adapted per client, and the follow-up was built into the process instead of depending on whether the individual advisor felt like doing it.
That's the piece worth studying, and it's not the private area or the food. It's the sequence they setup.
A pre-meeting exchange to understand who the buyer is and what they need. Materials that are tiered by buyer type, so a first-time investor doesn't get the same booklet as a family office. A meeting flow that assumes the buyer's time matters. Follow-up that arrives before the buyer wonders whether it's coming. Templates and playbooks running quietly in the background so the whole thing works whether the advisor is having their best day of the year or their most tired one.
The infrastructure gets built once, and every client afterward benefits from it. The marginal cost per client is close to nothing compared to what a bad experience would cost the firm in relationships that walked away or spoke badly of them.
Now consider a second parallel outside of laundry, from the luxury auto side of the world. Certain dealerships have made design choices around the ownership experience that other dealers haven't. Loaner vehicles as standard rather than as exceptions. Valet drop-off at service so the customer doesn't have to walk into a service bay. Transparent inspection apps that show the customer what was checked, what was replaced, what it cost, and what's recommended next. Waiting areas designed around the customer's day, not the dealer's convenience. These aren't decisions driven by the price of the car, because every luxury brand in that segment charges a premium. These are decisions about what the ownership experience should feel like once the car is bought, and they get built into the operation the same way the wealth manager's sequence gets built into theirs.
All of these examples require a decision that the experience is worth designing on purpose, and then the discipline to build the sequence and run it every time.
The structural direction of the system, honestly considered
Laundry equipment distribution runs on a territory model. A specific distributor holds selling rights for a specific manufacturer's brand across a defined geographic area, which you are familiar with.
That structure has been studied outside our industry. Patrick Rey and Joseph Stiglitz published a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1994, examining how exclusive territory arrangements affect competitive dynamics in a market. Their finding, which follow-on research has been done on, is that exclusive territories change the perceived elasticity of demand facing a seller, and that sellers behave differently when they aren't competing directly against other sellers of the same brand. The structure doesn't determine what a distributor delivers, but it does shape the competitive pressure a distributor feels to deliver at a particular level.
Now, that pressure cuts in two directions, and both are worth pointing out honestly.
On one side, the territory model can discourage some distributors from investing in an elevated experience, because they know that if a buyer wants their brand, the buyer has to come through their door. The competitive pressure that would exist in a more open market simply isn't there in the same form. On the other side, the exact same structure creates an opening for a distributor who chooses to invest in an experience that stands out. Because if a buyer's experience with the distributor of Brand A is transactional and slow, and the buyer then walks into a showroom of Brand B where the sequence I described above is running end to end, that buyer might decide their preference for Brand A isn't strong enough to stay. The brand loyalty gets overridden by brand experience.
That inversion is what makes this interesting. The same structural feature that could suppress experience quality in one distributor can create a competitive moat for another. The variable is what the distributor decides to build.
Consolidation is now tightening the structure further. Alliance Laundry Systems went public in 2025. EVI Industries has completed thirty-one acquisitions since 2015. Between them, the two publicly traded companies have acquired forty-seven equipment distribution businesses in seven years. I discussed that change in a prior editorial, Two Companies, 47 Distributors, Seven Years, and it's worth reading alongside this piece because the two conversations touch each other directly.
The open question worth thinking about is what happens to the buyers experience as consolidation continues.
Consolidation could raise the floor. A national footprint means standardized training, unified systems, and service infrastructure that a small independent couldn't fund on its own. The customer call gets routed through a consistent process. The buyer experience becomes more predictable, less dependent on which local distributor happened to answer the phone that morning. There's a real version of the future where consolidation makes the average buyer experience better than it is today.
Consolidation could also lower that ceiling. Fewer independent distributors means fewer businesses competing on relationship and hustle, and corporate playbooks optimized for shareholders, margins and efficiency could replace the local operator who used to know every client by name. The buyer experience becomes more uniform, but also more transactional, and the incentive to invest in a wealth manager sequence disappears when the alternative is a call center handling volume. There's a real version of that future too.
Which direction it goes isn't decided by Alliance or EVI or by anyone in a boardroom. It gets decided by which set of operational choices actually get built into the businesses as they scale, and Ton's research is worth remembering here. Structure sets the floor and choice sets the ceiling. Some distributors will excel inside consolidation, some won't, and the variable stays the same as it was before consolidation began.
The return of the buyer experience
A buyer who has an exceptional experience with a distributor becomes a source of referrals over time. Not immediately, and not always through a formal referral program, but organically, because the experience gave the buyer something to talk about. Buyers in this industry talk to each other constantly. They talk at industry events (by the way, are you going to WDF Workshop 2026? Let me know in the comments), in Facebook groups, on text threads with friends who are considering entering, and in DMs after LinkedIn posts. The word of mouth compounds quietly and quickly.
I broke down a version of this in a prior editorial about clients in the wash and fold side of the business, Why Your Best WNF Client is Worth 10x Your Average Client. The math applied to WNF clients applies here too. The best clients aren't the average clients multiplied, they compound. A distributor who builds the wealth-manager sequence and runs it consistently across every buyer isn't just serving each buyer better in that moment, they're producing the referral engine that fills their pipeline for the next five to ten years.
The reverse is worth stating because it's easier to see one side than the other. A buyer whose experience falls short tells that story to the same people the raving-fan buyer would have told. The intake data Brian described from his hundreds of calls isn't just a signal about the current state of the buyer experience. It's a signal about the pipeline. What shows up in that data today shapes what shows up in a distributor's sales funnel tomorrow.
Thinking about the thinking of laundry:
When you realize your sales experience isn't a function of what a buyer pays. It's a function of the level of respect the seller has for you and your business.
The decisions were made long before any specific buyer walked in, and they're running quietly in the background of every meeting, every callback, and every follow-up email. The variable isn't the territory, and it isn't the margins. It's the set of choices sitting there in plain sight for any buyer paying attention.
Which brings me to something I've been thinking about since the podcast finished. If a distributor were to build the sequence I described in this piece, how would the industry find out about it, and how would that distributor find the buyers who most valued what they'd built?
For now, the question sitting on the table is the one Brian raised on the podcast, and it's worth discussing wherever you sit in this industry. If the experience being delivered is telling you something about the decisions behind it, what is your experience telling you?
That's all I got for you today.
Waleed
Echoing the thoughts of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
FOOTNOTES
¹ Steve Marcionetti and Brian Wallace, CCI Drivetime podcast, "In Conversation with Brian Wallace, CLA". Brian's remarks on the number one complaint from intake calls appear around the 13:50 mark. His observation on whether the sales experience commensurate with the size of investment appears around the 37:44 to 39:31 mark.
² Zeynep Ton, "Why 'Good Jobs' Are Good for Retailers," Harvard Business Review, January to February 2012.
³ Zeynep Ton, "The Case for Good Jobs," Harvard Business Review, November 30, 2017.
⁴ Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits (New Harvest / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).
⁵ Zeynep Ton, The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone's Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).
⁶ Patrick Rey and Joseph Stiglitz, "The Role of Exclusive Territories in Producers' Competition," National Bureau of Economic Research working paper #4618, 1994.
⁷ Trader Joe's sales-per-square-foot data: [Worldly Partners multi-decade study, October 2025.]
⁸ Alliance Laundry Systems public offering and distributor network. [SEC filings; also referenced in Wash Weekly, "Two Companies, 47 Distributors, Seven Years."]
⁹ EVI Industries acquisition history. [SEC filings; also referenced in Wash Weekly, "Two Companies, 47 Distributors, Seven Years."]
