When Not To Exercise Your ‘Rights’ To A Particular Opportunity

This particular item has been 48 hours in coming.   Or maybe a couple of years.   I simply cannot not write this.

This article contains several challenges because the responses are going to include (a) ‘sounds like sour grapes,’ (b) ‘you seem to have a thing about that particular supplier,’ and (c) ‘you think the opportunity should have fallen to your business.’

Let me respond to (a) and (c) by saying that in the event the story had played out differently, I still have no reason to believe that our store would have been chosen; and respond to (b) by saying I think the story loses everything without some specifics.

At issue is a principle. The principle is this:  There are some things that other stores can do better than my store can do them.       In other words, there are opportunities I am prepared to pass on when I believe that the client — not to mention the Kingdom of God — would be better served if I simply passed the opportunity on to someone else.

We do this all the time with VBS.   We’re not a strong VBS store.   I no longer bother to track the suppliers and the various themes.   But 20 minutes to the west of us is a store that has proven itself worthy of handling this particular category.   So unless the customer has something very specific in mind, I simply refer everybody to Durham Christian Books in Bowmanville.

But there are some things I think we do well.   And that’s why it bothers me when stores an hour away take out yellow pages ads in our territory.

Here’s the story. One of our stores is located in the same town as the district office and summer camp location of this area’s branch of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC).   For the last two or three years, the opportunity of being the supplier for their camp bookstore has fallen to our nearest wholesale supplier, Foundation Distributing (FDI).

I am sure that this was one of those “somebody knew somebody” networking kind of things.    We’ve worked really hard over the last twenty years to build a relationship with the camp and the district office; and we’re there for them 12 months a year, not just the summer.   But you don’t always win every spin of the wheel, and they often go out of their way not to build relationships with local suppliers.

That’s not the issue.

The issue is based on the aforementioned principle:  Who can do the best job of supplying books, Bibles and music that Pentecostals want to read and listen to?

The answer is clear:  Not FDI.

For starters, their Bible sources are all ESV and NLT.   Pentecostals much prefer NKJV and NIV.     And the large metal easel highlighting the John Calvin commentary — not that Charismatics would never read Calvin — was just absolutely hilarious.

There’s a smattering of Karen Kingsbury fiction, but absent is FDI’s own best selling fiction title, the new Francine Rivers’ hardcover.   Actually, FDI has a handful of titles on the Christian Retailing top 100; all conspicuous by their absence.    But the rest of that top 100 is an impossibility for a wholesaler, though for an individual store it would be no problem.

More important however is that, irrespective of the top 100, you have to breathe in PAOC or Assemblies of God culture and know the things that such people want to read.   There were about 2,000 people at a concert there on Saturday and with exaggeration — and totally factoring in the concert artists’ sales would dominate transactions — I could easily do about $7 – $8,000 with a group that size and the right product.    I suspect that they actually did about 5% of that.

You just have to reach a point where you say; “Hey, we’d love to help you out but we can’t do the job as well as ____ or ____ can do it.”   You admit that the publishers you represent don’t represent Charismatic or Pentecostal interests.   You concede that you won’t be “on site” to replenish items as needed.  You confess that your system can’t make allowances for new titles releasing after the camp session has commenced.

Or you can try to own all the marbles.   (A compromise would be to farm out the contract to a retailer with the proviso that there is good representation of FDI merchandise.)

This year, a large one-day conference happened in our city for which we were offered the exclusive book sales rights.   Looking at the conference topic, and talking to people who registered, we realized that there was very little we could offer that would connect with the people who were scheduled to attend.

Instead, another retailer took the opportunity.   Frankly, they probably did no better than we would have, but they are from a small town and probably were grateful for every book they did sell.    We had the staff, we had the product, and we were close enough to incur no other expenses.    But it did not impress us that we should own this particular event.

We put principle over profit and allowed someone else to have the experience.   So I’m willing to allow that this works both ways.

My strongest, personal conviction is that the selection of merchandise available for sale at the Pentecostal Camp on Saturday represented everything you should not do if asked to provide sales at an event for Charismatic or PAOC people.  The wrong titles in the wrong place.  Trust me, if your store got this opportunity, the books and Bibles on display this weekend represent all the titles you would not choose.

It was, as my kids would say, an epic fail.

It’s not just that we could have done a better job.   It’s that our most junior employees could have done a better job with their hands tied behind their backs.

Just because somebody “knows somebody” is no reason to allow them to be the starting quarterback.   You recognize your strengths and limitations and place each opportunity into the hands of those capable of rising to the occasion.

If you are a wholesale publishers’ representative having only about 12% of the available products; then that’s a limitation that precludes any possibility of doing a decent job.