Darn Good Distributors

Darn Good Distributors is the podcast for B2B eCommerce professionals who are tired of fluff and ready for the real stuff. Hosted by Kyler Nixon, each episode features conversations with boots-on-the-ground leaders—from CEOs and marketers to operators and digital pioneers—who are redefining what success looks like in B2B distribution. You’ll hear practical strategies, hard-earned lessons, and honest takes on what’s working right now. Whether you’re scaling your company, rethinking digital, or just trying to stay sharp in a rapidly evolving space, this is your home for insights that actually matter.

Darn Good Distributors is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 52 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Darn Good Distributors, a business show with 52 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #51

  Everybody Has Teeth: Why We've Sold One Thing For 60 Years (with Justin Woycke from Wipeco) | Ep. 51

  Aug 25, 202623 min

  Everybody has teeth, so everybody needs a dentist. That's how Justin Woycke explains the wiping rag business: there's always going to be oil, grease, water, and spills, so the product is never going away. Kyler Nixon opens by making the case that niche distributors focused on a single product category are the ones winning in 2026 and beyond, and Justin's company is the proof of concept. ㅤ Wipers are 80% of Wipeco's business and have been for over 60 years. Justin walks through what that focus buys them on the phone, why the company runs a textile recycling collection operation that moves in the opposite direction from rag sales, and how his grandfather's failing cloth diaper service turned into a wiping products company in 1960. ㅤ The back half gets into e-commerce. Justin explains why a heavy, low-cost product makes shipping the central problem, and why he's a "no price guy" while every site pulling more traffic than his has pricing posted. ㅤ Guest Bio Justin Woycke is Vice President at Wipeco, a wiping products distributor outside Chicago, and the third generation of his family in the business. His grandfather founded it in 1960 as a cloth diaper service and moved into wiping rags when disposable diapers arrived. Justin also leads Chicago Textile Recycling, the company's collection division, and serves on the board of SMART, the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. ㅤ What We Cover Why wipers stay at 80% of the business, and what happens with the jansan add-ons they don't refuse but never advertise The Queen Bee Role: how picking, packing, shipping, and customer service each protect one outcome The 1960 origin story, from cloth diapers to recycled T-shirt rags Why textile recycling volume goes up when rag sales go down, and Justin's honesty about not being able to explain it The environmental argument against rental shop towels, and why Justin puts "green" in quotes for both sides Cutting moved overseas 20 or 30 years ago as labor got expensive, with material coming back in 43,000 pound container loads The educational series on their site and what it's meant to do Posted pricing versus quote forms when the same box costs 20 dollars to ship to Milwaukee and 50 to Seattle ㅤ Resources Mentioned Wipeco Chicago Textile Recycling Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz, the source of the Queen Bee Role concept Justin credits but couldn't name on the recording ChatGPT and Claude, referenced on AI-driven traffic to niche content Google Analytics Kyler Nixon on LinkedIn

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  Episode #50

  Ten Years In And You Don't Actually Know How To Market (with Mark Roskowske from PierTech Systems) | Ep. 50

  Aug 18, 202619 min

  Organic traffic is falling thirty to forty percent across multiple industries, but the raw number of leads looks about the same. That combination is strange enough to stall a marketing team for a quarter. Mark Roskowske has now watched it happen from inside three different businesses, and his read is that the funnel didn't shrink so much as it shifted downward. ㅤ Kyler Nixon and Mark work through what happens when the channel you built the company on starts to wobble. Mark spent about 15 years in e-commerce where paid search fed the pipeline and scoring systems handed prospects to sales. It worked until cost per acquisition went through the roof. ㅤ They get into why years of bottom-of-funnel spend covered up a messaging problem, what it costs to rebuild mid and upper funnel work you skipped, and why trade shows are the number one budget item at Mark's company this year by ten X. Plus the first mention of ABM in 50-plus episodes of the show. ㅤ Guest Bio Mark Roskowske is VP of Marketing and Technology at PierTech Systems, a Chesterfield, Missouri manufacturer of patented helical pile and deep foundation systems sold to general contractors and specified by engineers. He spent roughly 15 years in B2B e-commerce marketing across the ShowMeCables and Infinite Electronics family of connectivity brands before moving to the manufacturing side. He consulted with PierTech for ten years and directed its marketing before taking the role full time, the first full-time marketing hire the business has had. ㅤ What We Cover Why thirty to forty percent organic traffic declines aren't showing up in raw lead counts yet, and what that says about where the funnel actually moved How plenty of budget, plenty of runway, and not enough competition let a team harvest buy-ready demand for years without building anything above it What happens to your campaign ROI when you subtract branded search from the reporting The USP work Mark did at his last two companies, and finding messages the company believed that customers had never heard Why trade shows are the number one budget line by ten X when a project takes three years from booth conversation to active bid Selling to general contractors, chasing spec position with engineers, and Kyler's former boss's term for it: belly to belly The account-based marketing push aimed at a dozen named companies, opportunities that would double or triple the business, and another 50,000 square feet of manufacturing space Why Mark can use generative AI safely and would be nervous doing it at 22, plus Seth Godin on attention as something you ask people to pay ㅤ Resources Mentioned Seth Godin , on attention as a currency Lovable , the AI build tool Kyler used to make the Forward Studios site look like an email inbox Jeff Hedrick of Keep Supply, from the previous episode on attention Google, TikTok, and Facebook, as channels discussed Dell and the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" campaign, referenced by Mark's former boss The CMO of Harley-Davidson, on doing the opposite of everyone else

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  Episode #49

  What Amazon Strips Out Of A Certified Product (with Greg Raece from Online Metals) | Ep. 49

  Aug 11, 202622 min

  Raw materials break most e-commerce assumptions. One alloy comes in dozens of shapes, lengths, and certification states, and a 20-foot bar weighing thousands of pounds doesn't drop neatly into a 3PL warehouse. Kyler Nixon sits down with Greg Raece of Online Metals to talk through what happens when a distributor decides the answer isn't more inventory. ㅤ Greg describes the problem as an infinite warehouse: there is always another material a customer wants that requires additional processing before it can ship. Rather than stock it all, Online Metals opened its own website to third-party sellers, with their pricing, their descriptions, and their fulfillment, intertwined into one catalog and one checkout. ㅤ The conversation covers how they spotted latent demand, why they rejected the direct drop-ship model, what selling on Amazon costs a certified product, and how they market a marketplace when 100-plus sellers all want the same email slot. ㅤ Guest Bio Greg Raece is President of Online Metals , the Seattle-based e-commerce supplier of cut-to-size metals and plastics, founded in 1998 and now part of thyssenkrupp Materials NA. He was appointed president in November 2016 and led the launch of the company's third-party marketplace, which has since grown past 100 curated sellers and doubled the size of the catalog. His background before Online Metals includes Microsoft, Starbucks, and startups. ㅤ What We Cover Why a raw materials catalog behaves like an infinite warehouse, and why six warehouses still can't cover it How Online Metals read latent demand from site searches, sales conversations, and customer service calls The direct model they rejected: when a supplier's price moves after you've already promised it on the website Letting sellers control price, description, and fulfillment so the seller owns their own profitability What Amazon strips out: no heat lot, no alloy history, no mill test report, and a B2B order compressed into a B2C format with lower AOV One cart, one checkout, shipping from different locations, with marketplace product intertwined into the main catalog rather than behind a login Sellers using the marketplace as a live pilot before Online Metals decides to stock an item itself The product data gate every seller clears before graduating into loyalty, email, and promotions, plus why selling coal to blacksmiths made the newsletter ㅤ Resources Mentioned OnlineMetals.com Amazon, referenced as both a channel Online Metals sells on and the model they deliberately built against Greg Raece on LinkedIn Kyler Nixon on LinkedIn

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  Episode #48

  Your E-Commerce Strategy Should Fit on One Page (with Stacy Hanks from SureWerx) | Ep. 48

  Aug 4, 202629 min

  Nobody funds a strategy they can't repeat back to you. That's the problem Stacy Hanks set out to solve, and it started long before e-commerce. Her time at Altria taught her that simple frameworks and clearly articulated goals make execution easy. Then she moved into digital commerce, where the words alone are enough to lose a room. ㅤ Kyler Nixon walks Stacy through the one-page plan she puts in front of her executive team and her board. North star metric at the top. Mission, vision and values carved out for the digital team. Three pillars across the middle: customer experience, inventory, and operations. A strategic deployment cycle along the bottom. ㅤ They get into why digital commerce keeps getting treated like a sidecar, how Stacy used photos of Home Depot planograms to explain the digital shelf to a CFO, why awareness is really a fight for attention, and the reason inventory earns its own pillar instead of living under operations. ㅤ Guest Bio Stacy Hanks is Vice President of Global Digital Commerce at SureWerx, a private-equity-backed manufacturer of safety, PPE and industrial products with roughly 18 brands. She spent six years at Amazon in vendor management and business development, then led e-commerce at Master Lock before joining SureWerx in 2021. She began her career in outside B2B sales at Altria. In November 2025 the B2B eCommerce Association named her B2B eCommerce Leader of the Year. ㅤ What We Cover Why people can't understand 18-point frameworks, and what Stacy puts on the one page instead The Home Depot planogram photos she used to explain digital shelf software to a CFO who didn't know what a digital shelf was How the one-pager stops what Kyler calls organizational whiplash, when a new marketplace at the top gets absorbed entirely by the e-com team Why Stacy separates inventory from operations instead of collapsing them into front end and back end Adapting versus reacting, and why she puts the same slide in every board deck and every digital commerce meeting The framework she runs every acquisition through when the question is "is this a good fit for digital commerce?" Awareness as a competition for attention you can only win Monday through Friday until 5:00 Whether customers are searching by your brand, your solution, or your product, and why companies get that wrong Why inventory availability, a clear shipping time, and a clear price decide the buy moment ㅤ Resources Mentioned SureWerx Master Lock Amazon Altria Grainger The Home Depot OSHA B2B eCommerce Association

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  Episode #47

  The Business He Wasn't Even Looking to Buy (with Kyle Brown from 1877ForParts.com) | Ep. 47

  Jul 28, 202625 min

  Kyle Brown wasn't looking to buy a business. He was building a consulting practice, working through his LinkedIn contacts, and reached out to two owners he'd once tried to acquire a company from years earlier. A few conversations later, they asked him a different question: did he want to just buy the business? ㅤ That business was 1877ForParts.com, an HVAC and industrial parts distributor whose sales had dropped roughly fifty percent in the months before Kyle stepped in. Kyler Nixon talks with Kyle Brown about buying a distressed turnaround with no broker, closing in under forty-five days, and running the business himself pre-close to figure out what was actually broken. ㅤ Most of the growth story comes back to the basics. Answering the phone. Calling back every weekend's missed calls. Talking to customers every day. Kyle's argument is that the service bar in industrial distribution is low enough that doing the unglamorous work well becomes its own advantage. ㅤ Guest Bio Kyle Brown spent years in finance, investment banking, and private equity before moving into the operational side of e-commerce distribution about a decade ago. He worked at a couple of e-commerce distributors, including one sold to private equity in 2022, where he stayed on for a couple of years. In July of 2025 he acquired 1877ForParts.com, an HVAC and industrial parts distributor selling both to contractors and homeowners, and now runs it as owner-operator. ㅤ What We Cover How Kyle went from building a consulting practice to acquiring a business he wasn't looking for, all from one LinkedIn message Valuing a break-even turnaround where you can't just slap a multiple on EBITDA, and why the price has to be discounted for risk Closing in under forty-five days with no broker, negotiating directly with two owners, and waiting two weeks to close on the end of the month Why Kyle started running the business pre-close and brought in former colleagues who needed no ramp-up The revenue Kyle says came directly from calling back every missed call from Friday 5 PM to Monday 8 AM Why answering the phone with an actual human surprises customers in the age of Amazon The two near-term priorities: listing parts they already sell but never put on the site, and leaning into B2B and outbound Kyle's case that ad spend and AI are wasted if you're not picking up the phone or shipping fast ㅤ Resources Mentioned Kyle Brown on X (@MSUKyleBrown) 1877ForParts.com BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento (e-commerce platforms discussed) Amazon (referenced on customer service and technical questions)

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