Comments on: Avoid Middleman Status

By: Fred H. Schlegel

Fred H. Schlegel — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:57:43 +0000

Hi J.D., Absolutely the right path and well expressed at your blog. Continually adding to your skill set both personally and corporately means you won’t be left behind. (Or squeezed out of existence.)

By: J.D. Meier

J.D. Meier — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:51:57 +0000

I’m a fan of staying connected with customers and building mad skills to pay the bills … a life of learning. One thing that serves me well is following the growth … in the market and in myself … and taking on projects that build my portfolio and keep me in the game. I try to avoid projects that will suck my value down.
.-= J.D. Meier´s last blog ..Lessons Learned from Guy Kawasaki =-.

By: Fred H. Schlegel

Fred H. Schlegel — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:05:00 +0000

@Terry and @Taylor – You both seem headed down the same track and maybe I’m attacking this subject from the wrong direction. To your point Terry to some extent we are always middlemen. And Taylor’s point that there are profits in the middle is dead on.

It is tiring to realize that the sands are continually shifting underfoot however. To the extent you don’t control a starting point or ending point your fortunes are hitched to forces difficult to control and often out for your lunch. However, it can be a good living and a launching pad for the next tween venture.

By: Taylor Davidson

Taylor Davidson — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:05:21 +0000

But middlemen can create value and extract profits for a period of time in many markets; not forever, but for a period of time, surely. Sometimes it takes awhile for someone to build that 30 lines of code that displaces middlemen

There are many markets where I’d love to be a middleman right now.
.-= Taylor Davidson´s last blog ..12 seconds from a 2 hour taxi ride in Mumbai, India =-.

By: Terry Heath

Terry Heath — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:16:53 +0000

As usual, an interesting and thought-provoking post.

My mind wanders toward blogging and how bloggers might also make themselves into middlemen. We can (and often do) end up being the middlemen between information and web users.

Someone wants information and Googles for it. That brings them to your blog, they read and are off again into the webosphere. Information is a commodity and readers feel no loyalty to those who provide it.

The only way for a blogger to avoid being a middleman is to become the product. If readers are coming to your blog to see you then there is no middleman involved (except maybe a search engine or some other blogger who links or twits to you).

Hmm. Scary thing, and probably difficult too, becoming the product. That doesn’t mean you can be a source for information, it means you must be the information itself.
.-= Terry Heath´s last blog ..What’s It All About, [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE]? =-.

By: Fred H. Schlegel

Fred H. Schlegel — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:55:58 +0000

Hi Brad, You’re right, the distribution function is critical and remains regardless of who controls it. Walmart simply vertically integrated up the pipeline replacing independent distribution networks with their own hyper-efficient warehouses. I imagine the pressure on distributors comes from both sides – manufacturers wanting more control and customers wanting higher margins. With that kind of pressure there must be a constant need to adapt and improve efficiency.

By: Brad Shorr

Brad Shorr — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:27:18 +0000

Fred, Having spent much of my career in distribution, I can affirm how tenuous that position can be. Distributors are like policemen and lawyers – people take them for granted or dislike them … until they need them. Good distributors work a lot harder than manufacturers at customer service for that reason, generally speaking. In any event, physical products require space and logistics to distribute, and in those cases a physical distribution network is required. Digital products are a whole different story. The sea change we’re seeing right now is the transformation of written words from physical products to digital products. On the book front, Walmart is doomed. Game over.
.-= Brad Shorr´s last blog ..Marketing and Really Good Jerky =-.