Distributors spent much of November and December finalizing budgets, setting roadmaps for initiatives and planning how they will attack numerous industry challenges in the new year. Likewise, the MDM team has been busy planning on multiple fronts, which include events and continuing to improve what you see on MDM Premium. (Read more in MDM’s December 2022 issue of Premium Monthly.)

Let’s start with the former — MDM has a couple of upcoming events that you won’t want to miss. On Jan. 19, we kick off our 2023 webcast schedule with our Annual Distribution Industry Outlook, where R.W. Baird’s David Manthey and NetSuite’s Ranga Bodla join Tom Gale to review macroeconomic and distribution-specific trends that dominated 2022 and figure to remain top-of-mind in 2023. The event will also share new exclusive data from the 4Q22 Baird-MDM Industrial Distribution Survey.

A little later, we’re very excited about our 2023 Virtual M&A Summit, to be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on both Feb. 22 and Feb. 23. The event will cover the ins and outs of the dealmaking process, providing thought-leadership on the due diligence needed at each point of the process. Buying and selling best practices, culture and people impacts will all be discussed by our terrific lineup of speakers that includes executives from distributors experienced with recent M&A activity, investment banks and industry consultants.

Further out this year is the crown jewel of MDM’s events: our 2023 SHIFT | The Future of Distribution conference, to be held Sept. 18-20 in downtown Denver, Colorado. The inaugural edition was a great success this past September, and we’re already deep into planning this year’s SHIFT. It will bring together a who’s-who of speakers with expertise in the areas of hybrid sales, digital transformation and data analytics utilization, among other key distribution topics. Though it’s still nine months away, registration is open now, along with sponsorship opportunities.

As 2023 begins, MDM readers will soon notice a change to the look and feel of our daily e-newsletter. As of Jan. 17, we’re combining the twice-weekly MDM Premium newsletter and tri-weekly MDM Update newsletter into a new MDM Update daily newsletter that showcases Premium content, free blogs and news each day of the week. This means that when news happens, you won’t have to wait several days before seeing it in an MDM newsletter, while ensuring that our in-depth Premium blogs and reports are also highly visible.

We plan to increase our amount of Premium content in 2023, bringing you more analysis of operational topics and market trends, alongside exclusive conversations with distributors across the spectrum of demographics in this highly-fragmented industry landscape. In a nutshell, we’re looking to make MDM Premium better than ever. Read on in this issue of Premium Monthly to see the content we published in December. It included an exclusive discussion with Grainger on how it’s helping NASA return to the moon; an allegory of how dairy farming innovation encourages distributors to ask “What is possible?”; the state of various economic indicators heading into 2023; analysis of Zoro.com’s explosive growth; and more.

Amid all the continuing industry challenges (and opportunities) out there, we wish you a successful 2023!

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