Industries
Your sector sets the vocabulary. Your seat sets the problem.
Two businesses in the same industry can have almost nothing in common. A packaging converter fights input-cost lag; a packaging distributor fights quoting from a cost they have not finished earning. Same market, opposite problems — so we write the page for the intersection, not the sector.
Why this page is organised this way
One sector. Three seats. Three different money problems.
Agricultural inputs is a single market. Here is what it looks like from each side of the invoice.
Manufacturers
You make the chemistry
Programme stacking you designed
Early order, prepay, volume, market share and loyalty all apply to the same jug. You funded five programmes and you find out what they cost after the season settles.
Open this lane →Distributors
You sell it to the grower
A cost you cannot know at purchase
You commit in autumn and qualify in spring. One large grower switching chemistry can drop you below a market-share threshold and reprice the whole season backwards.
Open this lane →Services
You apply, store and haul it
Rate cards, not rebates
Almost none of your margin is a product incentive. It is contracted application rates, storage terms and equipment utilisation — priced per acre and reconciled against nothing.
Lane in progressNothing above is a different product. It is the same nine leak points, weighted by where you sit. That is why a generic industry page is nearly useless to all three of you.
Start here
Pick your seat
Every sector read below it is written for that seat specifically — the leaks ordered the way they fall on you, and the vocabulary your side of the trade actually uses.
Services — equipment rental, logistics and field application — is where rebates give way to contracted rate cards. We are writing it rather than publishing a thin version. Tell us if that is you →
Coverage
Every sector, from every seat we have written
Where a sector appears twice, the two pages are genuinely different documents — not the same copy with a word swapped.
| Sector | Manufacturers | Distributors |
|---|---|---|
| Building & construction | — | Read → |
| Chemicals & agricultural inputs | Read → | Read → |
| Earth-moving & heavy equipment | Read → | — |
| Foodservice | Read → | Read → |
| Hardware & electrical distribution | — | Read → |
| Industrial MRO | — | Read → |
| Medical devices & pharma | Read → | — |
| Packaging | Read → | Read → |
| Plumbing & HVAC | — | Read → |
| Semiconductor & high-tech | Read → | — |
Also
Neither a manufacturer nor a distributor?
Two positions in the channel that behave differently enough to need their own read.
Buying groups & co-ops
Your value to members is the terms you negotiate. Your risk is that the data those terms are settled on comes from hundreds of members in hundreds of formats.
Read more →Retailers & dealers
Vendor income is a material line in your P&L and the least systematised one. It is earned in fragments, claimed by hand, and audited annually.
Read more →Not seeing your sector?
The nine leak points are sector-agnostic — what changes is which ones dominate and what the local vocabulary is. Tell us what you run and from which seat, and we will map it.