Chuck Cohen has been in the room for two decades at Benco Dental working to build out solutions alongside its core distribution operation. In his second appearance on the "In the Mind of a Distributor” podcast, he shared the most important things he’s learned along the way.
Below are six lessons any distributor can take from the conversation.
Lesson 1: There's less money in products than there used to be
Chuck opened the episode with a line that most distribution executives already feel but rarely say out loud: "The real way to make money in distribution is to build great customer relationships and then sell solutions or software - something that doesn't involve putting stuff in a box."
Amazon figured this out and built AWS. Henry Schein figured it out and built Henry Schein One. The pattern holds across industries: product margins compress, solutions margins don't. If you're still treating your distribution operation as the primary profit engine and solutions as a nice-to-have, the pressure you're feeling on margin is only going to get worse.
The question isn't whether to add solutions. It's how to do it without creating a slow-motion failure that looks like progress for two years before it collapses.
Lesson 2: Just asking reps to sell solutions doesn't work
Chuck shared that Benco ran the obvious playbook for years. Launch a solutions offering, tell the product reps it's now part of their portfolio, add a small spiff on the sale, assume the rest follows.
Except it didn't work.
"We sort of said, here's a great thing, go sell it please," Chuck told Benj. "And they said, oh thank you, we will when we get around to it."
The reasons aren't complicated. A rep managing 150 accounts and hundreds of thousands of SKUs doesn't have the mental bandwidth to learn a new kind of sale. And solutions are riskier to sell than products.
When a box doesn't arrive, the rep can track it. Solutions (and their implementation and subsequent results) are less cut and dry. That ambiguity creates reluctance, even in reps who want to support the business.
Lesson 3: Solutions have different metrics and a longer sales cycle than you expect
When Benco acquired PPO Profits, a revenue cycle management company, back in 2023, they quickly learned that managing a services business is much different than a distribution business. "The financial metrics that worked traditionally in our business around inventory turns and profitability metrics, all of those were different in the solutions businesses," Chuck said.
No inventory. Different working capital requirements. Profitability that doesn't map to anything on a distribution P&L. If you evaluate a services acquisition using the same framework you'd use for a product business, you'll either kill it before it can breathe or misread how it's actually performing.
The sales cycle issue caught Benco by surprise too. Chuck shared that often times services can take six months from signed contract to implementation before a customer sees any results.
That's six months of keeping the rep engaged, the customer confident, and the relationship intact — all for a deal that was already hard to close. If your team isn't built for that kind of long-cycle delivery, they'll make the sale but then drop the ball on what comes next.
Lesson 4: Give your solutions business its own leadership
At the end of 2025, Benco reorganized the entire company under a new holding company: 1930 Ventures, named for the year Chuck's grandfather Ben Cohen founded the business. Under it sit three divisions: Benco Dental (core distribution), Clarion Solutions (all non-product services), and Sapphire Brands (private label). Each has its own president and chases the market independently.
The reason for this structure is straightforward. When a solutions business sits inside a product distribution company, it competes for attention, resources, and executive bandwidth against a much larger, more established operation. It almost always loses, not because it isn't valuable, but because it can't get enough oxygen.
Chuck was direct about what that independence is supposed to accomplish: "The future of our profitability is more in solutions than it is in product. If that's going to be true, we've got to make sure we're moving in that direction."
A dedicated president means someone's entire job is to grow the solutions business, not treat it as a side project on top of a distribution operation.
With this approach, decisions get made faster. Accountability is cleaner. And it sends a clear message internally that this isn't a pilot program, it's a long-term investment and vision for the business.
Lesson 5: Know where to draw the shared services line
The 1930 Ventures reorg created an immediate practical question: what stays shared and what belongs to each division?
Benco's answer is a simple test: if a function primarily serves one division, it goes there. If it serves all three, share it.
For example, warehouses exist to serve the core Benco Dental distribution business. They put things in boxes and ship them. There's no warehousing component in the solutions operation, so warehouses stay with Benco Dental. On the other hand, Finance, HR, and IT serve all three divisions, so those have become shared services under the holding company.
What doesn't work is making everything shared in the name of efficiency. Chuck acknowledged Benco is still working through this. For example, their finance team is in the process of embedding a dedicated person into each division who reports up to the CFO but is fully focused on that division's operations.
Lesson 6: Hire solutions sellers to work alongside your product reps
Benco's answer to the "reps won't sell it" problem has two parts. The first is fixing the commission structure by paying meaningfully for solutions sales, not just offering a token spiff. The second is adding a small dedicated team of solutions sellers whose job is to work alongside the traditional product reps, not replace them.
"What we figured out was that they just need more handholding than we've been giving them," Chuck shared. "And I don't blame them [sellers]. They've already managed a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of products. This is just another thing to learn." The product rep holds the customer relationship. The solutions seller knows the pitch, handles the complexity, and helps answer questions.
Most distributors resist this because it feels expensive before it pays off. What's more expensive is leaving your solutions business entirely dependent on a product sales force that isn't comped, trained, or motivated to sell it.
One thing Chuck is still trying to figure out
When Benj asked Chuck at the end of the episode what he's still curious about, his answer was immediate: "I'm trying to learn how to get our sales team excited about selling solutions. We've got our next round of experiments to run."
If the Managing Director of a nearly $1 billion distributor is still running experiments on this, you probably are too. The difference is whether you've built an organization that can run those experiments without the solutions business getting squeezed out by the core or whether you're starting from scratch every time the product business needs attention.
Frequently asked questions
What is the biggest mistake distributors make when adding solutions?
Assuming their existing product sales reps will sell solutions without dedicated training, meaningful commission structure, and hands-on support. Solutions have a longer sales cycle, a longer implementation cycle, and a fundamentally different value proposition than products. A rep managing 150 accounts can't absorb all of that without structural help.
Should a distributor create a separate division for its solutions business?
Most distributors that have done this successfully, including Benco Dental with Clarion Solutions and Henry Schein with Henry Schein One, have separated the solutions operation into its own division with dedicated leadership. The core reason: a solutions business inside a product org will consistently lose the competition for attention, resources, and executive bandwidth.
How do you decide what belongs in shared services vs. inside a division?
Benco's framework: if a function primarily serves one division, it belongs to that division. If it serves all divisions equally, it belongs in shared services. Finance, HR, and IT serve all three Benco divisions, so they're shared. Whereas warehouse operations serve only core distribution, so they stay with the product business.
How are the financial metrics for a solutions business different from distribution?
Distribution metrics like inventory turns, gross margin per SKU, and fill rate don't translate to services businesses. Solutions businesses carry no inventory, have different working capital profiles, and show profitability differently on a P&L. So managing a services business through a distribution lens produces bad decisions.
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