Prepare for the worst—and still hit your goal

I was talking with another distributor executive recently, a guy who has been in this business a long time, and he told me something I have not been able to shake. He said he tells his sales reps the same thing at the start of every year: “Something crazy is going to happen every year.” None of us knows what it is yet, but it’s going to happen, and their job is to figure out how to hit their number anyway.

To be clear, he’s not saying, “Let’s hope nothing goes wrong.” Rather, assume something will go wrong. Build the year around the certainty of disruption instead of a fantasy.

Think about what we have lived through in just the last five to 10 years. A worldwide pandemic shut the country down overnight. A winter storm froze the urethane plants in Texas and choked off our raw material for months. Several rounds of tariffs rewrote pricing in a single news cycle. There is a war affecting supply lines somewhere in the world right now. If you sat down in January of any of those years and waited for stable conditions to get serious about your sales goal, you likely never got that chance.

That is the part that stuck with me. The distributor rep, the commercial PM, the retail sales associate who treats every disruption as the reason they missed is going to just keep missing because there is always going to be a disruption. The calm year is the exception, not the rule. If your plan to sell floors every single day only works when nothing goes wrong, your plan is flawed before the coffee pot comes on.

I want to be thoughtful here, because some of these things are not a simple inconvenience. People lost businesses in the pandemic, and tariffs crippled countless importers in recent years. I am not here telling my industry peers to shrug off real hardship—nor is that the contention of the aforementioned executive. There is a difference between being callous about what happens to people and being clear-eyed about what it means to meet your sales goals despite adversity. You can hold both values. You can have genuine compassion for a hard situation and still refuse to use it as a reason to accept defeat or status quo.

Here is what an excuse actually costs you: Every hour you spend dwelling on a down market is not just an hour spent away from a customer, but it’s an added distance from the mentality you need to strengthen yourself. The market being down in aggregate does not mean your specific customer is down, it doesn’t mean the realtor or designer that sends business your way is down and it doesn’t mean the GCs asking for flooring bids don’t have a pipeline, either. At the end of the day, somebody is still building. Somebody is still remodeling. Somebody still walked into the flooring store today with money in their pocketbook and a project in their head.

I think about this most for the retail sales associate and the residential remodel outlook right now. Picture yourself or your friend as the one standing on a slow showroom floor, reading the same gloomy headlines everyone else is reading, and slowly talking themselves into a bad month on day one. If you have already decided the market is against you, the end users feel it the second they approach you.

In part 2, I will discuss how a positive outlook can have a real impact on outcomes.