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)

Hiring marketing talent in the unsexy world of B2B manufacturing and distribution is notoriously difficult. How do you find people who actually care about selling industrial or dental products?

Kyler Nixon sits down with Brian Shoberg to challenge everything you know about recruiting and onboarding. Brian argues that the traditional HR playbook belongs in the trash. Instead of looking for perfect resumes, he searches for raw passion and adaptability.

Brian shares his unconventional interview questions and explains why clear expectations in the first 90 days are critical for new hires. The conversation also covers how a strong brand story can change not just your external marketing, but your internal company culture.

Brian Shoberg is the Director of Marketing at Zirc Dental Products, a family-run medical device manufacturer known for its Color Method system. Before entering the dental manufacturing sector, Brian built a strong foundation in storytelling and media production.

He specializes in clarifying brand positioning and unifying cross-functional teams. His core philosophy is that clarity drives performance. At Zirc, Brian led a massive digital transformation and corporate rebranding to modernize the buying experience without alienating crucial B2B distributors.

• Why the traditional HR interview playbook needs to be thrown out and set on fire.
• How to interview for passion and why it matters more than experience in B2B marketing.
• The unexpected elephant question Brian uses to test a candidate's adaptability.
• Why paying above market value sets a standard of excellence for your team.
• The 90-day onboarding strategy: picking 10 specific things for a new hire to focus on.
• How implementing the StoryBrand framework changed Zirc Dental Products from the inside out.
• Why a strong brand story gives employees a reason to be proud of their daily work.

• Book: No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings
• Book: Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
• Company Website: Zirc Dental Products
• Guest LinkedIn: Brian Shoberg

What happens when you bring a fast-paced retail playbook into a legacy B2B distribution environment? Kyler Nixon sits down with Andy Hall to find out.

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After spending 12 years building digital experiences at The Home Depot, Andy took his philosophy to US Foods. His core rule is simple: stay close to the cash register and the customer. But how does that actually look when you are selling to thousands of independent restaurants and hospitality managers?

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Kyler and Andy examine the reality of treating B2B e-commerce like a true software product. They discuss the difference between physical category management and digital merchandising, how to run agile sprints in distribution, and why a B2B buyer never checks their consumer habits at the door. If you want to know how a multi-billion-dollar giant rolls out artificial intelligence to enrich catalogs and predict out-of-stock events, this conversation has the answers.

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Guest Bio

Andy Hall is the Director of Digital Product & Strategy at US Foods, a leading American foodservice distributor generating over $28 billion in annual revenue. Before stepping into the food distribution sector, Andy spent over a decade driving multichannel e-commerce and online merchandising at The Home Depot.

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Today, his focus is firmly on bringing a retail pace to the B2B space. He builds frictionless user experiences and scales customer-centric digital products by blending heavy data analysis with direct field feedback.

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What We Cover

1. Why distributors must separate software product management from physical inventory management.
2. The exact method Andy uses to stay close to the customer through a salesperson in the Champions Group.
3. How US Foods uses agile sprints to test, iterate, and roll out digital features without the fear of failing.
4. Practical ways to use artificial intelligence for catalog data enrichment and supply chain predictability.
5. Why cross-functional change management relies heavily on giving your team a slice of the pie to own.
6. The reason B2B digital merchandising requires specs like nutrition and box weight to satisfy chefs.
7. How hyper-personalization ensures digital features actually serve local, geographic-specific customer needs.

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Resources Mentioned

1. US Foods
2. The Home Depot
3. Microsoft Copilot

Marketing in the distribution world often feels like a constant battle for budget, attention, and sales team buy-in. How do you bridge the gap between building brand awareness and hitting targeted revenue goals? Kyler Nixon sits down with Jasmine Widmer to explore how a century-old business stays culturally modern while serving the heavy industries of the Intermountain West.

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They discuss the realities of running a marketing department as a one-person team. Jasmine explains why securing the ground-level trust of the sales team is the absolute foundation of a working marketing strategy. She reveals a highly effective media play: trading traditional TV commercials for hybrid audio-and-video streaming campaigns on platforms like Spotify.

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The conversation also highlights how B2B companies build dedicated customer e-commerce portals to simplify the buying process. If you want to learn how to stretch co-op funds with major suppliers while keeping your brand highly relevant, this conversation delivers exactly that.

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👤 Guest Bio

Jasmine Widmer is the Marketing Manager at Industrial Supply Company. She has spent the last eight years climbing the ranks within the Intermountain West's largest privately owned MROP distributor.

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Jasmine specializes in modernizing industrial marketing through digital campaigns and tightening the crucial relationship between sales and marketing teams. She holds an MBA from Western Governors University and is a strong advocate for advancing women in the heavy industry and wholesale distribution sectors.

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📌 What We Cover

1. How Jasmine built mutual respect and open communication between her marketing department and the boots on the ground sales team.
2. The surprising reach and targeting power of audio and visual streaming ads on platforms like Spotify and iHeartRadio.
3. Strategies for pooling co-op marketing budgets with major suppliers like 3M Company, DeWalt, and Milwaukee.
4. Why custom e-commerce catalogs and dedicated customer portals are massive revenue drivers that relieve pressure from sales reps.
5. How Industrial Supply Company uses tool allowances to bring direct value to large customer accounts.
6. Preparing for a 110-year company anniversary while navigating massive local infrastructure projects and the upcoming Salt Lake City Olympics.

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

1. Jasmine Widmer on LinkedIn
2. Industrial Supply Company Website
3. Affiliated Distributors
4. Spotify and iHeartRadio
5. 3M Company, DeWalt, and Milwaukee

Distribution companies often rely on legacy relationships and a 20-year-old logo to drive sales. But what happens when the digital age brings fierce competition right to your doorstep? Host Kyler Nixon sits down with Mordy Kurtz, Marketing Director at The Boxery, to explore why a packaging supplier needs a distinct personality.

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Mordy explains how branding goes far beyond a simple visual identity. He details how an effective brand operates as a medium of connection, driving nostalgia, trust, and even excitement for something as straightforward as corrugated cardboard. From creating engaging unboxing videos for third-party logistics companies to understanding why a strong brand must be backed by exceptional customer service, this conversation lays out the reality of modern distribution marketing. Listeners will hear exactly why consistency builds trust and how to align visual design, written tone, and leadership vision to stay relevant in a highly competitive space.

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Guest Bio

Mordy Kurtz is the Marketing Director at The Boxery, a premier provider of packaging solutions founded in 1998 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. Since joining the company in June 2018, Mordy has shaped their organic marketing, visual design, and social media strategy, proudly adopting the tagline, "Keeping corrugated cool since 2018." Before dedicating his creative talents to the corporate sector, he co-founded the award-winning Hasidic folk-rock duo, Rogers Park Band. Mordy believes in building experiential brand connections and famously states that designing ads is his happy place.

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What We Cover

1. The Power of Unboxing: Why The Boxery launched unboxing videos for their own boxes to capture the customer experience for creators and ecommerce sellers.
2. Defining a Brand: Mordy explains why a brand is much more than a logo and acts as a direct medium of connection to build emotional trust with buyers.
3. Branding in Distribution: The shift from relying strictly on long-term relationships to using visual identity to fight off cheaper digital competition.
4. Passing the Squint Test: How colors, fonts, and patterns combine to make your brand instantly recognizable from a distance.
5. The Fyre Festival Effect: Why selling a highly attractive image will ultimately fail if your company lacks the actual customer service to back it up.
6. Aligning Tone and Design: Why your written copy must match your visual aesthetics to keep the brand accessible for everyday buyers instead of coming off as rigid.
7. Getting Executive Buy-In: The practical importance of looping founders into the rebranding process early to ensure your goals for staying relevant are perfectly aligned.

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Resources Mentioned

1. The Boxery
2. Fiverr
3. Alan Peters' book on branding
4. Building a StoryBrand