From the Proton team
Last month I hoped the weather would heat up for us. Boston is hitting over 100°F this week. Careful what you wish for.
Here’s what else is hot in June: Q1 GDP looks better on paper than it feels on the ground, distributors are lawyering up on two separate regulatory fronts, McKesson is dropping $179 million on a new DC in Oklahoma, and the M&A machine did not take the month off.
This issue covers it all, so let’s get into it!
In our ears
Kevin Short, President and CEO of ORS Nasco, on running a master distributor
In this episode, Benj sits down with Kevin Short, CEO of ORS Nasco, to talk about life as a master distributor, their four acquisitions in the last two years, and what 30+ years in chemicals, plastics, and industrial distribution have taught him about running a resilient business.
Kevin makes the case for rethinking how distributors and manufacturers allocate capital. He argues the old advice to “spend your last dollar on inventory” no longer holds, and explains why he’s on a mission to unblur the lines across the supply chain so every player in it can focus on what they do best.
AI, captain!
The AI train is leaving, are your mid-managers on it?
NAW just wrapped its first-ever Applied AI Symposium, and the headline finding was blunt: distributors running AI are pulling away from those that aren’t. But the thing holding the laggards back isn’t bad data or the wrong software. Attendees ranked mid-management resistance and undocumented institutional knowledge as the top barriers, ahead of anything technical.
“AI is changing how we work,” said Konrad Konarski, Trustee and Chairperson of AAIC. “The organizations that succeed will be those willing to challenge established ways of working and redesign how value is created, decisions are made, and work gets done.”
The reframe worth taking back to your next leadership meeting: the bottleneck isn’t the technology. It’s getting your organization ready to use it.
Things SKU should know
Last week in distribution
The economy got a small piece of good news. Q1 GDP was revised up to 2.1% growth but the fine print matters. The upward revision came mostly from lower imports, not stronger consumer spending. Key distributor-facing sectors softened. So the headline number looks better than the underlying story, which is a pretty familiar feeling heading into the second half.
On the regulatory front, distributors are fighting battles on two fronts at once. NAW joined a 17-state coalition suing California over SB 54, the state’s extended producer responsibility packaging law, as the only business plaintiff in the case. The argument: California shouldn’t get to set national packaging policy and charge out-of-state businesses fees to a private entity to administer it. Separately, HARDI, PHCC, and ACCA filed a legal challenge to an EPA refrigerant rule that extends deadlines for legacy HFCs in commercial refrigeration while the AIM Act continues reducing overall HFC supply. More demand, less supply, and EPA’s own projections show refrigerant prices rising 12 to 24% by 2029. HVACR distributors should be watching this one closely.
Big infrastructure news out of Oklahoma. McKesson is putting $179 million into a new 330,000-square-foot regional DC in Moore, replacing an older facility and adding cold chain capacity, full automation, and 100% standby power to serve pharmacies and hospitals across Oklahoma, Texas, and surrounding states. McKesson already moves about a third of all pharmaceuticals in North America. This is them building for more complexity, not just more volume.
And the consolidation keeps rolling. Danfoss entered an exclusivity agreement to acquire Alfagomma, an Italian hose and fittings maker with $690M in annual sales and 28 production sites globally, a move that would make Danfoss a dominant force in hydraulic and industrial hose distribution. On the domestic side, GMS picked up Central Materials in South Texas for its fourth acquisition of 2026, and RelaDyne grabbed Chart Distribution Group in St. Louis to keep expanding its Midwest lubricants footprint. Geographic density, product adjacency, scale. Same playbook, different zip codes.
Link(ed) in bio
It all comes down to data
Most distributors are sitting on a hundred million transactions worth of customer data. And the best sales play is still a rep walking in with donuts. The relationships behind those donuts are real, but picture what that data could tell your rep in that same moment: what the customer already bought, what they passed on, what they’re buying from a competitor instead. The gap between everything you know and what your rep actually shows up with is the whole problem. Distributors aren’t short on data. It just never reaches the rep when it counts.
New on the shelf
The arrival of Proton’s Knowledge Base
Picture this: a rep uploads a key account plan, a pricing sheet, a customer contract. It lives in their personal documents, does its job for them, and the moment they’re out sick or move on, it’s gone. The next person starts from scratch. Every time.
Knowledge Base fixes that. Documents uploaded to an account are now shared at the team level, visible to everyone and there for whoever picks up the account next. It also feeds directly into Pronto, so answers your AI assistant pulls are now sourced from your actual files, with a citation pointing to exactly where the answer came from.
Organize it with nested folders, drag and drop, rename and move. Search across everything by keyword, file type, date, or folder. Build account plans and meeting notes right inside Proton in rich text, no separate tool needed.
Your documents finally work for the whole team, not just the person who uploaded them.
Get an A+?
Grade your product data in 45 seconds
Here’s a fun tool people are having fun with on our website. Want to know your product data scores based on what fields should be represented? Here’s the steps:
- Click here
- Paste a product page URL and enter your email
- Get a score with actionable fixes to unlock growth.
It’s that easy.
A new face
You’ll notice a different name at the bottom of today’s edition. I’ve taken over the newsletter from Katie White and I’ll be trying my very best to maintain the high bar and style she brought.
I’ll also bring my own flavor, such as putting a fun fact down here just because I can.
This month’s fun fact
James Doohan, who played the engineer on Star Trek, had his ashes secretly smuggled onto the ISS. He has since traveled nearly 1.7 billion miles through space and orbited Earth more than 70,000 times. Scotty is, in fact, still out there.
Stay in touch
Just because the newsletter is monthly doesn’t mean the insights have to be. Connect with Benj on LinkedIn for his latest thinking every week. Got thoughts on this issue? Send them over. What landed, what didn’t, what you want more of. I read every reply.
Until next time
Bryan NakataSr. Demand Generation Manager, Proton.ai
