I've Been in Your Chair
In 2020 I partnered with Topicz — a $300M+ convenience and CPG food distributor in Cincinnati — to build an ecommerce business from absolute zero. Three years later it was a $6M operation selling across Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Faire, and more.
I'm not writing this from a consulting deck. I'm writing it from the warehouse floor and the back office, where I learned what actually works when you bring AI and automation into a business built on decades of experience.
If you run a legacy distribution business and you know you need to modernize but don't know where to start, this is for you.
Don't Start With AI. Start With Your Bottlenecks.
The biggest mistake I see owners make is asking "how do we use AI?" That's backwards. The right question is: "Where are we losing the most time, money, and margin to manual work?"
For most distributors, the answer is one of these:
- Accounts payable and reconciliation — your team is matching invoices to POs by hand
- Product data and catalog management — thousands of SKUs with incomplete or inconsistent information
- Order processing — manual entry between systems that don't talk to each other
- Ecommerce and marketplace listings — you're missing online revenue because getting products listed is too painful
Pick the one that's bleeding the most. That's where AI pays for itself first.
The ROI Has to Be Real
In a family business, every dollar of investment has to justify itself. I don't recommend "transformation projects" that take two years and a seven-figure budget. I recommend starting with one high-pain, high-volume process where automation produces measurable savings in the first 30-60 days.
When you can show your team — and yourself — that the first project paid for itself, the appetite for the next one takes care of itself.
Technology Is the Easy Part. Adoption Is Hard.
Here's the lesson that took me longest to learn: the AI is not the hard part. Getting your team to trust it and use it is.
Your veteran employees have decades of hard-won judgment. The goal isn't to replace them — it's to take the repetitive volume off their plate so they can focus on the relationships and decisions that actually grow the business. When you frame it that way, and you bring them along instead of dropping software on them, adoption sticks.
That's why change management isn't an afterthought in my work. It's half the job.
Where to Go From Here
If you've been wondering how AI and ecommerce actually apply to a business like yours, the best next step is a conversation — not a sales pitch, an honest look at where the highest-ROI opportunities are hiding in your operation.
That's exactly what I do as a fractional Chief Automation Officer. Let's talk.