By Remco Livain in Fractional Executive — 13 Jul 2026

Where headquarters ends and the distributor begins

Your distributors keep asking HQ for more support. The real gap is quieter: nobody ever agreed where headquarters' responsibility for growth ends and the distributor's begins. Here's how to draw the line, market by market.

Every so often a manufacturer brings me the same situation. Their independent distributors — strong local operators, often spread across the world — have asked headquarters for more marketing and sales support. It looks like a simple resourcing request.

It’s reasonable. It’s also almost never the real one.

Underneath “we’d like more support from HQ” sits a question that quietly caps most distributor networks I’ve worked with, and it’s rarely asked out loud. Where does headquarters’ responsibility for growth end, and where does the distributor’s begin? Nobody agreed the line. So both sides assume. And the assumptions don’t match.

The request is never really about support

Dig into “we need more support” and it’s seldom a shortage of brochures or another training deck. Those are easy to ship. What’s missing is a boundary nobody ever drew.

The distributor feels unsupported. Headquarters feels the distributor isn’t pulling its weight. Here’s the uncomfortable part: both can be right at the same time, because the work in the middle — the demand, the positioning, the follow-through — was never assigned to anyone. It just sat there, each side quietly assuming the other had it.

Two decades, one recurring pattern

I’ve watched this play out across B2B2B companies for the better part of twenty years, in different industries and on different continents. The specifics change. The pattern doesn’t.

The relationship runs on goodwill and history rather than on an explicit split of who owns what. Everyone’s polite. Everyone means well. And the growth conversation quietly stalls, because it’s actually an ownership conversation wearing a marketing costume.

Meet-ups help. Alignment calls help. Org charts don’t, because the gap isn’t in the hierarchy, it’s in the work. I’ve argued before that a distributor can be far more than a box-shifter: the ones who generate their own demand stop being middlemen and start being market makers. But you can’t ask a partner to step into that role if you’ve never agreed where their turf starts.

Where growth actually leaks

Growth doesn’t leak where people are lazy. It leaks in the ungoverned gap.

Headquarters assumes the local distributor owns demand generation on the ground. The distributor assumes headquarters owns the brand and the demand, and that their job is the relationship and the logistics. So both wait for the other to move. Meanwhile the market keeps moving without them.

McKinsey put the healthy version plainly: in a well-run channel, all parties play to their core competencies — the manufacturer drives demand generation where it is best placed, and distributors take responsibility for the segments and fulfilment they own best. The sharpest question in that work is one most networks never turn on themselves: are my distributors engaged in the activities for which they are clearly the best owner?

And this isn’t a shrinking pie that forces a turf war. Medical-device distribution alone is a market worth tens of billions and growing at more than eight percent a year. The constraint isn’t demand. It’s coordination.

A distributor network rarely underperforms because people aren’t trying. It underperforms in the space between two parties who each assumed the other had it.

The questions that draw the line

The fix is unglamorous, which is why so few teams reach for it. You make the boundary explicit, in writing, market by market. A handful of questions surface it fast.

Who owns creating demand in this market, and who owns converting it? What can this distributor realistically do that headquarters can’t, and what can headquarters do that the distributor never will? Where is HQ the best owner, and where is the local partner? And the one that cuts through the fog: what does “support” actually mean here, in concrete deliverables, not in sentiment?

One warning. Drawing the line is not the same as squeezing the partner. McKinsey’s research on distributor relationships found the common failure mode is a myopic focus on cutting distributor margins, a move that alienates exactly the partners you depend on. The point of the boundary isn’t to claw work back. It’s to stop the leak.

From order-taker to market maker

When the boundary is clear, something better becomes possible. The distributor can step into the role that actually compounds — not waiting for orders, but building the local market. I’ve seen it work even in tightly regulated corners of health and medtech, and I’ve written about how it plays out when you personalise marketing across a broad dealer network instead of blasting one message from the centre.

Headquarters’ job, at that point, is to enable, not to direct. That’s a harder discipline than it sounds, and a good chunk of what I get pulled in to run as a fractional executive: not adding headcount, just getting the right work owned by the right side of the table.

Naming the boundary is the cheapest growth lever in the entire network. It’s also the one nobody reaches for, because it feels like an internal org conversation rather than a growth one. It’s both, and it’s where the growth was hiding all along.

This is the first in a short series on how distributor networks actually compound, rather than just coordinate. Next, I’ll get into why the meet-ups and alignment calls everyone loves aren’t the thing that moves the needle, and what is.

Support isn’t the answer to “who owns what.” Answering it is.

Sources & further reading

External
McKinsey — A new dawn for industrial channels: meeting customers where they want
McKinsey — Creating mutually beneficial partnerships with distributors
Global Market Insights — Medical Device Distribution Services Market