“Spaceballs: The New One” lands next April, 40 years after the first movie, with Mel Brooks, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman and Daphne Zuniga all back. My brothers and I have quoted that movie to each other across a warehouse for most of our adult lives, so I’ve spent the run-up rewatching it — and started seeing our business in it. It’s either a useful lens or a sign I need a hobby.

Start with the scene everyone remembers. Dark Helmet orders the desert combed, and a hundred Spaceballs drag actual combs across the sand in perfect formation. Total effort. Total discipline. Enormous commitment of manpower. And they find nothing.

This is a lot of our weeks.

Everything we sell lives behind a wall

Nobody thinks about our products until one fails. There’s no ribbon-cutting for a correctly sized backflow preventer. The engineer who spent three weeks getting the venting right on a nine-story building gets about the same recognition as whoever picked the lobby tile — which is to say, less.

Here’s the part that isn’t funny: We’ve built a channel where value only becomes visible the moment something goes wrong. And the cost rarely lands on whoever made the mistake. It gets absorbed quietly — a manufacturer eating a return, a wholesaler eating a restock, a rep agency eating a chargeback, a contractor eating two weeks in front of his general contractor. 

Everybody pays a little, nobody bills it. It’s Pizza the Hutt eating himself, and we’ve all taken a bite.

A word on where I’m standing. My father was the sales manager at this agency, and in 2001 he bought it. My brothers and I have spent the years since figuring out what to do with it. We’re seven months into rebuilding how we handle our data, and I’d put us two-thirds there on a generous day. This isn’t a victory lap. It’s an invitation.

Ludicrous speed is not a strategy

The Spaceballs’ answer to every problem is more thrust. Light speed isn’t enough, so they go to ludicrous speed, blow past the target, go plaid and end up nowhere near where they were meant to be.

That’s the risk in front of us. The tools have arrived: most agencies have a customer relationship management (CRM) system, plenty of wholesalers are on a modern enterprise resource management program, and artificial intelligence can read a commercial drawing and produce a takeoff in one afternoon instead of a week. All real. All faster. However, none of it tells you which direction to point.

Faster combing is still combing. Which brings me to the sentence I’d put on the wall if my brothers allowed it: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth measuring. Not because measurement is virtuous, but because without it, we’re just very committed people with combs.

Potential, not volume

If I could hand one idea to every rep, manufacturer and wholesaler reading this, it’s this.

For years we ranked accounts by what they bought. The better question is what they could buy. Those are different lists, and only one tells you where to send a person on Tuesday.

Time is the one asset we all hold in fixed supply. Every hour devoted to one branch is an hour not devoted to another. So, the useful question stops being “How did we do?” and becomes “What’s the potential size of this market, which customer holds which piece of it, and what share are we actually getting?”

Building that number is imperfect work — sizing a category and a geography from what’s genuinely knowable, then dividing your own shipments into it. What comes out is a share of potential rather than a share of your own history. Ours showed we were spending the most windshield time where we already had the business and the least where the opportunity was. I doubt we’re unusual.

4 things any of us could prove

None of these requires a big agency. They require deciding they matter.

 Sales: Whitespace by branch. Compare a branch’s purchases in one product family against the adjacent family; its contractor base demonstrably buys somewhere. The gap is the number. Not a scolding, a stocking recommendation with arithmetic behind it.

Margin: Quote-to-order leakage. Track every quote to an outcome: quoted, wanted or never landed at the distribution center. That gap stays invisible unless someone joins CRM activity to order history. The first honest look tends to sting, because much of what leaks wasn’t lost to a competitor. It was lost to follow-up that nobody owned.

Breadth: Lines per account. Count how many of your lines a branch actually stocks, and track that count separately rather than burying it in total dollars. An account can be excellent in a handful of lines and invisible in the rest.

Awareness: Specification vs. fulfillment. Map spec activity by engineering firm against the branches that can actually fulfill it. A spec is only valuable if it creates executable demand. Spec a product into a job that the local branch doesn’t stock — where no one has built the demand, inventory plan or supply path behind it — and you haven’t created a sale. You’ve created a headache with somebody else’s name on the invoice.

While we’re here: The luggage combination in that movie is one through five, and it stays that way because nobody ever changed it. Every one of us knows a basis of design like that — a spec section carried forward from a code cycle two updates ago, still copied into new jobs because it worked once. It’s not laziness. It’s an engineer with rising liability, a flat fee and no reason offered to change. Giving him one is the most valuable thing a rep does, and we can’t do it on instinct alone.

Your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate

Dark Helmet’s explanation of how he’s related to Lone Starr is the most accurate description of a commercial decision chain I’ve heard. Engineer, to contractor, to project manager, to whoever’s at the counter Thursday morning when the lead time falls apart.

Most of our data tells us where the order was entered, which is a different address entirely. Until we know where the decision happened, none of us — rep, wholesaler or manufacturer — can honestly say what our involvement produced versus what would have shipped anyway. It’s the hardest number in this channel, and I haven’t solved it. Scoring wins as earned or given is a crude start, and crude beats not asking.

None of this displaces people. Software can produce a takeoff; it can’t judge whether the fixture count matches the intent or whether the engineer meant “or equal” as it reads. The inside salesperson at the wholesaler is still the last human check between a quote and a contractor’s real money.

May the Schwartz be with you

Yogurt’s bit is that the Schwartz is the real power and merchandising is the noise — then he sells the lunchboxes anyway because he’s honest about the business he’s in.

That’s our balance. Relationships are still the power in this channel. Shipments are the merchandising, and we’ve let them stand in for proof for a long time.

Our segment plays it close to the vest. Barf says he’s his own best friend, and half our industry operates that way. I’ve come to think the guarding costs us more than sharing would. We sit where nobody else does: the engineer can’t see the branch, the branch can’t see the drawing, the manufacturer can’t see either. We see all three.

To fellow AIM/R members: let’s compare methods instead of protecting them. To manufacturers who value this channel: ask us for share of potential, not only shipments. To wholesalers: put us to work on the segments where no one knows the percentage yet.

Nobody’s found anything combing the desert. Let’s go find out where the ship actually is. 

Cullen McCarthy, CPMR, is president of the Walter F. Morris Co., a manufacturers’ representative agency in Foxboro, Massachusetts, serving New England and upstate New York. He runs the business with his brothers Pat and Greg and serves on the AIM/R outreach committee.