There is a moment in every great sales career when you finally do the math on yourself. You are the number one rep. You own the relationships, you own the trust, you own the number at the end of the quarter. And at the end of the year, somebody else owns the business. I had that moment after the biggest run of my life, and it changed what I built for the rest of it.
This is the story of my distributorship: how I stopped running someone else’s territory and started owning the channel myself.
Ten thousand reps
Before the distributorship, there was the education, and it happened in operating rooms. After Pfizer, where I finished number one in sales and took home the VP’s Cabinet Award and Rookie of the Year, I moved into medical devices: sports medicine, selling in the operating room, training surgeons on technique and equipment while the case was live.
They say to be a master at something, you have to do it ten thousand times. I entered roughly fifteen thousand doctor’s offices in my pharma years. I stood in about ten thousand procedures in the device years. By the time anyone called me an expert, I had already logged the hours that make one. I knew the hospital system from the inside: how it buys, how it decides, how a surgeon’s trust is actually earned. That knowledge became the foundation everything else was built on.
Empire: the run
Anthony Zito brought me into Empire Surgical. We had played college football together, on the number one defense in the nation, and he knew how I worked. I was the sixth team member through the door. What happened over the next four years is the run I still measure everything against.
We grew the company from $2M to $60M. We scaled from five reps to sixty. My territory went from $200K to $12M, I finished number one in sales, and I rose to Regional Sales Director. We dominated the New York market for four years, and we did it with a simple formula: we hired athletes, people who were committed the way we were, and we taught them the game. Not just the products. The game: how to build real relationships with sports medicine surgeons, how to be the rep a surgeon asks for by name.
Then came the exit. Empire was acquired by Johnson & Johnson, the kind of ending most people in medical device sales dream about. I was proud of it. I had helped build it. But the plan was never to stop there. Owning our own distribution was always the destination. Empire was where I learned the channel from the inside, and I never intended to finish as a direct rep on somebody else’s.
The exit teaches you who owns what
Here is the lesson the exit taught me. A great rep owns a number. An owner owns the channel: the contracts, the customer relationships at the company level, the team that carries them, the business itself. When a company sells, the checks are written to the people who owned the asset. The skill that built the asset is priceless, but skill rented out by the year gets paid by the year.
I had spent years making other people’s channels more valuable. I knew the surgeons. I knew the hospitals. I knew how to hire and train the reps. The only piece I had never owned was the distributorship itself. So in 2004 we started our own: TRE Medical Technology Consultants. We began as independent contractors, owning the channel from day one.
Own the channel
A distributorship is not a bigger territory. It is a different seat at the table. Instead of carrying one bag for one company, you own the route to the customer: the relationships, the reputation, the team, the standard. Manufacturers need you because you own what they cannot buy, which is trust at scale in a market. That is why distribution, done right, is one of the quiet power positions in business. Whoever owns the channel owns the customer, and whoever owns the customer is very hard to replace.
What transferred was not the product line. It was the standard. I ran TRE Medical the way we ran Empire: hire committed people, teach them the game properly, and protect the surgeon relationships like they were the business, because they were. A rep can change jobs and lose his book overnight. A channel owner keeps the book, because the book is the company. That difference is worth more than any single commission year I ever had, and it compounds. Relationships built in those operating rooms are relationships I still work with today.
It became my pattern from there. Run the play like an owner, because you are one. Build the asset, scale the asset, and let the exit come to you. We ran the play again with a compounding pharmacy: we built it, I took ownership in it and worked it closely, and it became my first exit. I tell the turnaround side of that era in The Turnaround, and the philosophy behind all of it in Built, Not Funded: own the thing, fund it with revenue, and let the asset do the talking.
If you are the best rep in your company right now, hear me. Your skill is not the ceiling. Your seat is. The day you start asking how to own the channel instead of how to win the next quarter is the day your career changes weight class. I did not stop being a salesman when I started my distributorship. I became the owner of what my salesmanship built.
That is the whole game, in distribution and everywhere else. Do not just run the territory. Own the channel. Built. Brick by Brick.