For many distributors, this year has been a mixed bag of growth, challenges and change. Our team at MDM is excited to keep connecting you with the market intelligence, insights and community that will make you and your business stronger in 2023.

As our team resets over this holiday period, I’d like to thank you for giving MDM your time and attention this past year. Like every other company, we’ve experienced our share of transitions over the past few years but have continued to grow in many different and positive ways. Today we have a great team of people dedicated to the mission that has guided MDM for the past 55 years: to help leaders build stronger distribution businesses. I am so grateful that we are stronger going into 2023, and excited for the research and industry coverage we have planned.

The most important value MDM can and will continue to bring to this industry is our team’s ability to connect an incredibly diverse community of entrepreneurs, innovators, leaders and disruptive thinkers. You are an important part of this community, whether you have contributed your knowledge, experience, responded to our surveys, participated in our research or events, engaged across any of our content platforms, or simply read some of what we’ve shared back from this community to help inform your work and career.

At the risk of broken-record syndrome, I can’t help but pause every year — as I have for the past 30-plus — to reflect on what a complex, fragmented, hard-to-define and incredibly essential industry wholesale distribution is in creating the strongest economy in the world. And as we’ll be covering more in 2023, the rising trend towards nearshoring will only elevate the importance of Canada and Mexico to the security, resilience and flexibility of our North American economy.

Each of us in this industry plays an important part in creating this unique network, community and marketplace that keeps weathering disruptors, consolidators and business cycles to keep getting stronger and creating more value year after year, cycle after cycle. I hope you take a moment to pause and congratulate yourself on the contributions you make to make your team, your company and this industry the amazing — and often unseen — value creator and essential industry that it is.

Finally, I’m so excited for our research and industry coverage plan for 2023. Please mark your calendar for two MDM events in 2023. The first is our virtual Distribution M&A Summit Feb. 22-23. For the third time in the past five years, we’re bringing together the most experienced dealmakers in wholesale distribution sectors to discuss the state of the market and how you can position your company to create the most value. This year we’re also adding deeper conversations on ESOPs as a succession plan, as well as the critical people and culture side of making mergers and acquisitions successful.

We’re also well into the planning cycle for our 2023 SHIFT | The Future of Distribution Conference Sept. 18-20 in Denver. Once again, we’ll bring together industry leaders to explore how to “future prep” your distribution business to be digital-first, data-driven and relationship-led. That’s a mouthful, but it sums up the incredible transformation across sales models, digital, analytics and culture that is defining how the future of distribution is taking shape today.

In all of our 2023 programming, my hope is that we continue to help you make better-informed decisions, challenge your thinking, take market share, save or make you money, create a better place to work, and even occasionally confirm your brilliance through the stories of others – or all of the above at some point if we’re doing our jobs right. This is an incredible industry and community, and you are an important part of it. Thank you.