Comfort is the enemy of growth in the channel

Andrew Harris, chief sales and marketing officer, DCC Technologies. (Image: DCC Technologies)

---

Everywhere you look, disruption is now the constant. AI is rewriting the rules of productivity. Vendor roadmaps are evolving faster than procurement cycles can keep up. Partners are demanding smarter, faster and more collaborative ways of working. And yet, too many players are still holding on to yesterday’s playbook, hoping it’ll carry them through tomorrow.

It won’t.

Doing nothing might feel safe. Familiar processes, long-standing routines, systems that haven’t broken yet. But in this environment, standing still is not neutral. It is decay, just in slow motion.

The cost of inertia is subtle. It shows up as lost margin because your pricing engine couldn’t react in time. It looks like a missed opportunity because the partner went with someone who could integrate faster. It feels like stagnation, until the pipeline shrinks and no one can explain why.

The hardest thing to admit is that success breeds repetition. We stick with what worked. Until it doesn’t.

This is especially true in distribution, where efficiency and scale used to be the main differentiators. But now? Speed is assumed. Scale is expected. The real differentiator is relevance. And that comes from constant reinvention.

Reinvention doesn’t have to be radical. It starts with questioning the everyday. Are your processes serving your people or making their jobs harder? Are your teams reacting to data or waiting for someone to send a report? Are your partnerships transactional or transformative?

There is also a human cost to doing nothing. In uncertain times, people crave clarity and momentum. When they don’t see either, morale dips. The wrong people stay. The right people leave. And the culture becomes less resilient with each unchallenged habit. Organisations that create space for learning, adaptation and measured risk-taking are the ones that keep their edge, and their talent.

If you are in the business of ICT, then you are already in the business of change. The channel is being reshaped every day by rising customer expectations, growing complexity in vendor offerings and the democratisation of digital tools. AI is not waiting for businesses to finish their strategies. It is already being used in configuration, forecasting, support and decision-making. The question is not whether you will need to change. It is whether you’ll still be in a position of strength when you do.

I’ve seen it firsthand. When businesses hesitate to evolve, they create a vacuum. Sometimes that vacuum is filled by a competitor, but increasingly it’s filled by automation. It’s not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it’s a customer self-servicing instead of picking up the phone. Or a process once handled by a trusted team now handled by software. Change doesn’t always announce itself. More often, it just arrives, quietly, and starts replacing the gaps we refused to close ourselves.

Every strategic plan sitting untouched, every outdated system still limping along, every meeting that ends with “let’s revisit this next quarter” – they all carry a cost. Not immediately. But inevitably.

The businesses that are growing, thriving, building loyalty in this space? They are not waiting to feel ready. They are moving. Testing. Learning. Adjusting.

If you have been in this industry long enough, you’ll know. It is rarely the big bet that catches you out. It is the slow erosion of relevance. And by the time you notice, it has already become expensive.

Standing still used to be the safe option. Now, it is the riskiest move on the board.