How Promo Distributors Grow Without the Added Chaos
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Key Findings
- Growth can expose inefficient processes – manual entry, tribal knowledge, disconnected systems – leading to chaos.
- Promo distributors that relied on a centralized system saw measurable results: faster invoicing, recovered revenue, and shorter onboarding times.
- The answer isn’t adding more people or disconnected tools; it’s creating visibility across the business, added documented SOPs and more efficient processes, and connecting systems and tools.
Table of Contents
- What are the challenges that slow promo distributors down?
- What happens when nobody knows where things stand within the promo business?
- What happens when every order is dependent on manual work?
- What happens when information lives in someone’s head instead of being documented?
- How do you fix what’s slowing your promo business down?
- What does it look like when you’ve fixed what was preventing your promo business from growing?
- Growing your promo business doesn’t have to create chaos
Every promotional product distributor wants to grow. Not every distributor wants what comes with it.
More orders are typically accompanied by more questions. More invoices. More follow-ups. More people to hire and train. More orders to track. More opportunities for error. More chances for things to unintentionally slip through the cracks. That’s when more revenue begins to feel like more problems.
The chaos doesn’t come from growing business too fast. It comes from the way the business was built. Information that only lives inside one person’s head. Tools that aren’t connected. Teams that have no insight into what’s really going on. Too many people wearing too many hats.
Sound familiar? Three Facilisgroup partners, Prosperity Promotions, PS Promotions, and HF Custom Solutions faced these same challenges. Here’s how they got past them.
What are the challenges that slow promo distributors down?
Quick Answer
Most challenges are connected to manual and outdated processes, disconnected systems, and knowledge that only lives in someone’s head.
Each distributor struggles with different challenges, but they typically all share the same underlying problems. For example, work that depends on people and not real processes. Orders that can’t be traced consistently across teams. Invoicing processes that rely on manual steps and hard copies. Important information that isn’t documented anywhere.
What happens when nobody knows where things stand within the promo business?
Quick Answer
Order processing slows, invoices age, and the business is largely left in a reactive state instead of a proactive one.
For Prosperity Promotions, open orders piled up with no clear view of what stage any of them were in. Accounts receivable follow-ups were nonexistent, leading to aging invoices because they didn’t have the system to see them or process them.
“We really had no idea how many open orders we had, how many were in the middle of being processed, or getting ready to be invoiced,” said Co-Owner & CFO Pamela Bickett. “All I knew was I had a stack of paper here, and there was a stack of paper in the warehouse.”
On the sales side of the business, the story was similar: “Salespeople used to have 25–30 questions for CSRs asking for tracking info and other updates on each order,” said President John Byron.
The problem wasn’t just having no clear view of order status. It was that information was scattered in many different places and communication was disjointed.
What happens when every order is dependent on manual work?
Quick Answer
Manual processes slow down processing times, invoicing falls behind, errors occur, and things fall through the cracks.
PS Promotions had a very similar situation. “We would probably go through a case of paper a week because we printed everything from every email to every invoice to every purchase order,” said Owner Paige Sheesley. “I had a stack of Manila envelopes, and I’d go through each one and invoice the customers – it was a very manual, time-consuming process.”
Manual processes like these slow down order processing and invoicing, leaving room for things to get misplaced or miscommunicated between teams and clients. Invoices fall behind, and there’s no real support system to turn to.
All of the printouts weren’t the issue. It was that every step of the order process relied on these manual steps.
What happens when information lives in someone's head instead of being documented?
Quick Answer
Onboarding slows down and becomes more challenging when there are no documented processes in place.
HF Custom Solutions ran into a different version of the same type of issue: onboarding and training new employees. “You can’t train people on things that are living in someone else’s head that have just been passed down or done a certain way for a long time,” said CEO Joe Brown.
Many promo distributors experience this problem without realizing it. The business runs smoothly because experienced team members know what to do and when to do it. But that knowledge isn’t documented anywhere, so it can’t be taught, delegated, or scaled.
When processes only exist in someone’s head instead of being part of documented SOPs, every new hire that gets brought on likely has to be trained one-on-one by those individuals — slowing things down and making them more difficult.
How do you fix what's slowing your promo business down?
Quick Answer
Focusing on reducing the number of handoffs and documenting real processes instead of defaulting to hiring more people, which would complicate things.
The fix doesn’t have to be complicated, but it may not be easy at first. Like the examples above, the challenges may differ, but the solutions are typically similar. Instead of trying to add more people first, try to turn the focus on what was causing the problems. Things like reducing the number of handoffs. Giving teams access to the information they need. Creating and documenting real processes before they become an issue down the road. Reaching out to others who have already solved many of the same issues.
For Prosperity Promotions, PS Promotions, and HF Custom Solutions, that fix was implementing Syncore and Core 360 Playbooks. Instead of piecing together different solutions, hiring more people, which would’ve caused added chaos at the time, or adding more disconnected tools, each distributor utilized the Syncore software platform, built for promo distributors. Its purpose is to align teams through the entire order lifecycle – from first pitch to invoice paid – automatically tracking rebates and defining processes that break through scaling plateaus.
What does it look like when you've fixed what was preventing your promo business from growing?
Quick Answer
Orders get processed faster and more efficiently, revenue gets recovered, and more time is spent working on the business instead of just in the business.
Once Prosperity Promotions gained real-time visibility into their orders and accounts receivable by implementing Syncore, the results showed up in the numbers and in the way the team performed on a daily basis.
Within a year, they cut order processing time by 66% and recovered $250,000 in outstanding invoices.
“Following up on AR was impossible, because we just didn’t have the systems in the old software to tell us, ‘Hey, this person hasn’t paid, and you’re getting ready to process a new order – they’re 120 days behind,” Bickett said. “Now I can see we have this many orders in WIP and invoicing. We try to make sure invoicing is empty at the end of every day, and we can see exactly how many jobs we’ve done this year.”
But the biggest difference wasn’t just faster order processing times. It was being proactive and changing the way that the business was being managed.
“We’ve had more time to work on the business instead of always being in the business,” Bickett said.
PS Promotions is another example of a promo distributor who saw similar improvements after moving to Syncore. They saw their sales and order processing time reduced by 50% and their revenue increased by 5%. Invoicing used to take two months, but now they go out the same day. Faster invoicing means a healthier revenue stream, and it also means their reps are getting their commissions even faster. Their clients have taken notice as well – faster order times and an overall better experience.
HF Custom Solutions saw a different kind of improvement once their processes lived in Syncore instead of in someone’s head. They doubled their revenue and reduced their onboarding time by 50%. Now new hires have documented processes to support their training. They no longer rely on knowledge and techniques that were only part of someone’s memory. With training time reduced to just a few weeks, not only hiring great people but also retaining them has become easier than ever.
Growing your promo business doesn't have to create chaos
Quick Answer
Growth isn’t always limited by demand. It’s often limited by operations.
The three promo distributors mentioned above might have experienced different challenges, but the realization was the same: their growth wasn’t being limited by demand. It was being limited by the way they were operating.
Growth will always bring new challenges, but it shouldn’t create more chaos. When there’s real-time visibility across teams, processes that no longer just live in someone’s head, and teams are aligned, growth becomes less chaotic and more sustainable.
If this sounds familiar, it might be time to take a closer look at the way your business is operating. Sometimes the biggest opportunity for growth isn’t just finding new clients. It’s removing the problems and overcoming the challenges that are holding your team back.
How can you start growing your promo business without the added chaos?
Being able to identify where your promo business may be falling short and knowing how to go about correcting those issues is the first step.
The Promo Growth Gap Calculator gives you that picture. Answer a few questions and get a personalized breakdown of where your business has room to improve and the metrics top distributors track most closely.
