Inventory Dead Weight

38% of everything in a small distributor's warehouse, on average, is inventory they don't actually need.

Read that again.

More than a third of the capital sitting on those shelves — tied up, not moving, quietly costing money in storage — is excess stock. Dead weight.

And here's the part that gets me: Netstock's 2024 Inventory Benchmark Report found that nearly 80% of small businesses are overstocked *and* suffering from insufficient forward planning at the same time.

So they're running out of the right things. And drowning in the wrong things. Simultaneously.

I've sat with owners who had no idea this was happening to them. Not because they weren't paying attention — they were working flat out. But because they had no system that could show them the picture clearly. They were ordering by gut. Reordering when someone noticed the shelf looked thin. Holding onto slow stock because "it'll move eventually."

It doesn't move eventually. It just keeps costing you.

The fix isn't complicated in theory. Know what you have. Know what's moving. Know what's not. Act on that data before the cash is already gone.

The hard part is building the habit — and having a tool that gives you that picture without requiring an IT department to run it.