In the Mind of a Distributor
No one teaches you how to run a distribution business. There’s no playbook for navigating shifting markets, growing sales, or making the right bets on technology. The best distributors figure it out by talking to the right people and learning from experience.
That’s what In the Mind of a Distributor is all about. Each month, Benj Cohen—founder of Proton, the CRM built for distributors—sits down with industry leaders, from owners to operators to sales pros, to break down what’s working, what’s not, and where the industry is headed.
If all goes well, listeners will leave each episode a little sharper, a little more informed, and a step ahead of the competition.
In the Mind of a Distributor
Future-proofing a 100-year old distribution business | Chuck Cohen
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Chuck Cohen is back on In the Mind of a Distributor. This time, he's pulling back the curtain on the biggest structural bet in Benco Dental's nearly 100-year history: reorganizing the entire company into three distinct divisions under a new holding company.
Chuck breaks down why they made the move, how it's designed to unlock faster growth and higher margins, and what it took to get there, including the lessons learned from years of early experiments in services before solutions became a core part of the business.
There's not as much money putting stuff in a box and shipping it to a customer as there used to be. And the real way to make money in distribution is to build great customer relationships and then sell solutions or some sort of software solutions or something that doesn't involve putting stuff in a box to those same customers.
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm Ben, founder CEO of Proton AI, the AI-powered CRM built specifically for distributors. And you're listening to In the Mind of a Distributor, where we interviewed the smartest minds in distribution. Let's get into it. Well, Chuck, welcome to your second time on the In the Mind of a Distributor podcast. You are the managing director of Benco Dental, and we have special access to you mostly because you're my dad, which is why you're the only guest now to be on the podcast twice. So thanks for coming back. For listeners who may not know Benco well, can you give a little bit of background on the business and tell us a little bit about, and then we'll jump into the topic for today?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, first off, thank you for having me a second time. I didn't think my mind was that large that you could have it's actually worth mining twice. So we'll have to find out how we do today. So Benco Dental is a third-generation dental distributor. We sell everything you see in a dentist's office across the United States. We have about 25,000 clients and we have about 1,600 employees, and we're just scraping on a billion dollars in revenue for 2025.
SPEAKER_01Just scraping. Are you gonna get there in 2026?
SPEAKER_02We better, because we came so close in 2025. We better not miss it again.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, I think the topic for today, we'll we'll cover a few different areas. One is the 1930 ventures re-org, and then that I think gives us a good view into some of your thinking around private label and value-added services that Benco offers and what other distributors can take from that. So before we get into it, can you give an overview of the 1930 Ventures Re-org? What was the thought behind the changes? And honestly, the story behind the name and the names of the of the subcompanies would be cool too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so that was one of our big events from last year, from the end of 2025, is we reorganized the entire organization. So ever since my grandfather, your great-grandfather, the original Benco Dennel, Ben Cohen, founded Venco in 1930. That's a date that we'll come down in a few minutes because it's important for the story. Ever since we've really thought of ourselves as having one organization. Now, over the last 10 years or so, we've really rethought things and we've decided that we are one organization, but we have multiple divisions, all trying to chase dollars from customers and trying to create value for customers. So after lots of thought around it, we decided to reorganize at the end of last year into three divisions, all reporting up to a holding company. The holding company is called 1930 Ventures, which is an echo to our nearly 100-year run as a family-owned enterprise. And then we have three divisions that are all working under the 1930 ventures umbrella. One is the core business of Benco Dental, which is the sales and selling and servicing of dental equipment and our warehouses that do that job. So basically, the traditional business is Venco Dental, and we've had we appointed a president, Katie Cohen, to head that operation up. Second division is called Clarion Solutions, and that's everything that we do that's not a product except for the servicing of equipment. But examples would be transitioning dental practice, which is the buy-sell function, our financial arm that finances dental equipment when dentists want to buy it, designing dental offices, which we do regularly for new practices, and a revenue cycle management business that we bought in 2023. And all that is organized under Clarion Solutions. And the objective there is to have solutions that are more profitable and stickier for customers. And then the third division we call Sapphire Brands, that's all of our private label activities, all the sourcing that we do from mostly from overseas, but not always. And we sell that only through Ben Codental, the Ben Codental division at this point. So in addition to those three divisions, each of which has a president, Katie Cohen, Anna Duhamel, and Ted Ringsdorf are our three presidents. We also have a shared services model where we have a CFO, a chief people officer, and a chief information officer, all of whom serve all three of the divisions. And that's a way that we can leverage our size, and it's also a way that we can ensure quality across the board. And I can give you the why behind it if you're interested, but um really excited.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, I think it'd be awesome to hear the why behind those breakouts. What's the advantage of having presidents of each division? And then second, how you thought about what counts as a shared service versus not.
SPEAKER_02That was an interesting place. And the question really on the last question is where you draw the line. So for example, we decided we would draw the line at shared services at operations for each business. So for example, we have warehouses, and the warehouses really only service the customers of Ben Codental. Their job is to put stuff in a box and send it out to a customer, and they do it really, really well. So that's part of Ben Codental, but there's not a lot of warehousing or any warehousing involved in our solutions business. So we put the operations side of the business in Ben Codental. And that's only that's not a shared service, because in our business, that's something that's just presumably for, you know, for one division. Finance, though, keeping the books, hiring the people, we decided to make those shared services since all three of the divisions do those activities and we wanted to make sure we ensured quality. Now, one of the things we're struggling with a little bit now is how the shared services model spreads over the three divisions. So for example, our finance team is going to look to appoint a finance person for each of the three divisions. They'll report up to the finance department, the CFO, but they'll be tasked with each individual division so that they can really understand those operations and know what they're doing there. So that's how we're drawing the line right now. But I got to admit, it's early in the process and we may decide to change things or move things around as we go, but I'm pretty excited about where we are right now. Now, the why behind the three divisions are, I think most distributors have figured out, as Amazon figured out a long time ago, that there's not as much money putting stuff in a box and shipping it to a customer as there used to be. And the real way to make money in distribution is to build great customer relationships and then sell solutions or some sort of software solutions or something that doesn't involve putting stuff in a box to those same customers. So Amazon does it through Amazon Web Services and the advertising business that they have. We've decided to take these solutions businesses and really double down on them and make sure that we are providing an unbelievable customer experience and then going out and selling those solutions to our current customers, but also to non-customers because we're going to advertise separately on the web. And when we do pick up a customer who's not a Benco customer, we're going to take that customer and maybe convert them into a Benco Dental customer to buy the traditional products as well. But having each of these divisions go after the market separately and work together sometimes when it creates synergies, but also divide them out, number one allows us to grow faster, we believe. And number two, we were getting kind of bogged down in making decisions by setting up these three different divisions we believe we can make speed an asset.
SPEAKER_01Can you talk a little bit about the decision to split out Sapphire brands? The solutions is a common pattern, like Henry Shine 1 is its own business, but private label separate with one customer. What's the thought process there?
SPEAKER_02So we've done, and I'm really I give my brother Rick all the credit for this. He did a fabulous job creating a private brand operation that is really second to none in our business. We've got a great array of products, we've got more than$100 million of revenue there, and he's done a just a terrific job of building brands. That said, we've gone pretty well. We we're at about the market, maybe a little bit more than the market in terms of the percentage of our product sales that are private brand. So we've done some great expansion there. But we believe there's places we can go and grow beyond that traditional private brand operation that we've created. One thing is we can look at other product lines that we've never looked at before, like equipment. Second one is we can vertically integrate and potentially buy some sources so that we can actually create value right from the beginning of the process. We've never done that before. And then finally, we might be able to outsource some of our private brand knowledge and know-how either in other industries or maybe with other dental distributors, depending how it goes. Like, for example, we've got a tremendous competitive advantage in gloves. We really believe that we are, we you know, we outkick our coverage in gloves. Now that we know the sources and we know how to do it, there's nothing that says we can't sell those gloves to veterinary suppliers or medical suppliers or other avenues to the market. So we believe by get by getting the private brand operation out from under Benco Dental and allowing it to breathe its own oxygen, we have some growth opportunities that we've never really looked at before.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it seems like a really exciting opportunity. I'm excited to see how it plays out. I want to double-click on the solution side of the business and talk about what Benco's has done historically, the history of what is now Clarion, and then get into the future. Could you give a background on how our thinking on services has evolved over the last, you know, 20 years?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, 20 years is about right because we've been in the services since the 1960s, defined by we have dental repair technicians who go out and service equipment when it breaks. So we've actually been in the service business for a long time, and that's really one of our neat competitive advantages, I think, versus other wholesale distributors. Other wholesale distributors figured out services were important maybe 20 years ago. We've actually been doing it for longer than 50 years. And that's been an integral part of our business. It's an integral part of our value proposition. And what we figured out, and other distributors are try are starting to figure out, is that when you offer a great level of service, it makes it easier to differentiate the products that you sell. And on the equipment side of the business, our service techs are really a differentiator for our business. So that's the original service business that we were in.
SPEAKER_01From there about the dental service business is not part of Clarion.
SPEAKER_02It is not. And that's where we drew a line there. We decided to leave it in the core business, and I can explain why if you're interested. I'm not sure it's that important here. But that's but that's our the original service solution that we were in. That said, it's so tied into our equipment business, we decided to leave it as part of our core business. Now, that said, about 20 years ago, we started dabbling, and dabbling is the key word here in the solution side of the business, starting with uh equipment financing when dentists buy equipment, and also practice consulting, meaning dentists, dentists are notorious for struggling with some of the business side of their practice. And so they're always looking for people who can help them manage their business better. So we did that for a long time. And we did it well, but we didn't make any money at it, and we really, really never found any scale in it. So we struggled with it for a long time. And I think maybe we were a little bit too early to the party. That was part of our problem. And the other part of the problem, I think, was that we really didn't get our sales team bought in to the importance of selling solutions as a critical piece of our portfolio. So we did a good job. We never made much money, we sort of dabbled in it for a long time. We had a sea change, really an important transition in 2023 when we decided to take the plunge as a private business and make our largest acquisition to date, and that was to buy a company called PPO Profits. That was an expensive acquisition for us, maybe not for other larger public companies, but for us was a big commitment. And what we decided was by buying a business that already had its own brand and its own infrastructure and was quite larger, already servicing some of our customers, we could maybe double down and do better in that side of the business. And we've had success since then. And that really inspired us last year to break all of our solutions into a separate division, to really chart out the solution side of the business that we want to be in. And I'm happy to explain how we did that because I think it may be a good lesson for other distributors to think about. Give the division its own president and really be much more active on the acquisition side/slash greenfield side to create a great portfolio of solutions that are stickier for customers and really provide a lot more value than we can do in the product business anymore.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think we should go deeper into the PPO story because the service business is different than the traditional distribution business. And so you could think that a distributor buys a service business and ends up just smothering the thing and it not being really successful. And that's not really been the case at Benco. So I'm curious, what did you do? Was that intentional? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So we've done that. Basically, just make an acquisition or start a business and just assume it's all going to work. So don't say it could happen. It did happen, and we have all the scars to show for it. Learn those lessons the hard way. Our original sort of way of doing business was let's just go into a solutions business and then just ask our salespeople to sell it and just assume that they will, and everybody will live happily ever after. That's never worked out the way we thought it did, and we thought it would, and that's really prompted some changes on our end. Why doesn't that model work? Well, I can tell you why it hasn't worked in our business, and that is that our salespeople tend to be risk-averse. So they don't want to put the core business of theirs at risk by selling a solution that may or may not work. In other words, when you sell a product and it goes in a box and it gets to the customer, it's hard to argue either they get it or they don't get it. But the solutions business is a little more esoteric. Plus, in the defense of our salespeople, we really never comp them enough to make them want to sell it. We sort of said, here's a great thing, go sell it, please. And they said, Oh, thank you, we will when we get around to it. And there was a lot of optionality around whether they, you know, sold it or not. So those are really some of the challenges we face that we're trying to fix this year.
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SPEAKER_01What have been the big learnings for you in buying PPO and some of the other services businesses that we've gotten into in terms of how you manage a service business relative to a distribution business? Like, does it require a change in how you look at the metrics or otherwise, other than the sales, the sales sort of how you sell a solution is different? Are there any other differences that distributors should be mindful of? I mean, PPO profits has no inventory, for example, so their their PL looks different.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so it requires a different set of skills. And so one of the things that we figured out is that our core shared services struggled a little bit in the beginning on the hiring of the people and when to exert more control and when to let it go on its own. Both of the the PPO profits business has a fair number of employees who are overseas, so we got to figure that out as well. But if I were to summarize, I'd say there's probably three things that we've had to learn to manage better. Number one is the sales side. I mean, that's really the key thing. And and what happened, what I believe was we weren't really A, comping our reps enough and B, providing enough support to really get them to go through the hard process of learning all these new services and solutions that then we might want them to sell. So number one is figuring out how to get our core sales team really engaged in the selling process. Number two is how to manage the different financial metrics, because the financial metrics that worked traditionally in our business around inventory turns and even profitability metrics and things were all different in these solutions businesses than the others. And then the third one was how to create real stickiness with the customers. So our stickiness with our customers now is based on getting the product out the door every day. In this new businesses, we've had to create a different kind of customer experience. And honestly, it's a little bit harder. Our business now is a doctor places an order, we put the stuff in a box, we send it out, and we're done. These solutions do require more time and energy and people knowledge to deliver. Like, for example, in PPO profits, a big thing we do is negotiate different rates with customers for their insurance rates. What we figured out was that you can sell that service to a customer today, but it might take six months until you actually implement it. That's very different from the core business we're in where we take stuff and put it in a box today and you get it tomorrow. So it's keeping the customer engaged, making sure they understand it, making the rep engaged, you know, like keeping this whole thing going for six months and then making sure the customer is happy with the results. So selling a solution not only has a longer sales cycle, it also oftentimes has a longer implementation cycle for the customer. That's been a big learning for us.
SPEAKER_01Will the sales team get there? What are the changes specifically you're making? And then do you think there's a world where you have solution sellers who come in on top of the traditional distribution reps that have the relationship?
SPEAKER_02We're actually doing two things. One of them is the second one you said, which is we are going to go out and hire a small group of salespeople who are gonna work with our traditional salespeople to go to help them sell. Because what we figured out was that they just need more hand holding than we've been giving them. And I don't blame them for that. They've already managed a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of products that they have to keep track of and you know, a hundred and plus customers, 150 customers. So this is just another thing to learn. So the first thing is we're adding a small cadre of salespeople who are gonna help do that. Second thing is we really didn't do a great job of commissioning them. We didn't put our money where our mouth is. And honestly, yeah asking them to do it, giving them a small Vig on the sale, I don't think, you know, move the needle. We got a lot of yes, and then they didn't. This year, we're gonna really give them some incentives to go out and sell the products and really hang with some of the challenges of selling and actually implementing. Because what we figured out at Bedco is the future of our profitability is more in solutions than it is in products. So if that's gonna be true for the company, we've got to make sure that at least we're moving in that direction for our sales team.
SPEAKER_01I want to pivot to talk a little bit about private label and sapphire brands. You mentioned briefly that there's this vision that we can sell the private label products outside of just the dental industry, but I want to double-click on it, this tension that exists when you have private label and branded products where you just don't want your percentage of revenue from private label to be too high. Can you talk about that dynamic and how you think about managing that in the business?
SPEAKER_02Sure. Well, my observation is there's always a dynamic, but the dynamic may be different depending on the industry you're in. For example, a company like Medline, the medical supplier, sells mostly private label products. That is a lot of their go-to-market. They're like Trader Joe's in their private label, is my understanding. We don't compete with them, they're not in our space, but that's my understanding. There are other businesses out there where, you know, you're selling screws and the screws are commoditized to the point where the customer doesn't mind, you know, what brand they get, right? That's my understanding on some of the industrial supplies, supplier.
SPEAKER_01Like Granger, a lot of their products don't they don't even talk about who the supplier is.
SPEAKER_02Sure. So in our business, our relationships with our vendors are key to our success. We have to make sure that our private brand doesn't compete directly, but actually augments and maybe competes better in some segments that are more commoditized than others. For example, our disposables business is mostly private label, but some of the more technique-sensitive products are not. But overall, managing that relationship, that tension between private brand and a vendor brand, what we would call traditional products, is really important. And there are a lot of segments where we say, look, we are not interested in growing our private label product sales in this segment more than they already are, because we've got important relationships with vendors and we don't want to make them angry. Some of our competitors may or may not feel that way. I'm not quite sure. And as we look at the private brand segment, I also think that we've got some competitive advantages that we're not fully leveraging. One of them is sourcing. So we've got great sources overseas for products that we can source and sell only through Benco. We can use some of that sourcing knowledge in other segments that we don't now compete in to try to build some business and some market share and some profitability.
SPEAKER_01On the solution side, are we competing with a lot of non-distribution businesses? In traditional distribution, there's like the other distributors and then there's these marketplace players. On the solution side, who are the competitors? Are they mostly service-only companies, or are we mostly competing with the services offering of distributors? I'm curious, sort of, what the breakdown is there.
SPEAKER_02So in our segment, I would say it's both. Several years ago, Henry Sine, the largest player in our space, really entered the solutions business in a big way, and they really pioneered this idea. So it's not our idea. I think is really smart. We waited a little bit to go after it because we didn't have the national footprint where we could really leverage acquisitions. They really got there a lot for a lot faster than we did. So number one is in our world, one of our two main competitors is already in this space through Henry Shine One, and they've really shown in a lot of positive ways how a distributor can sell solutions very successfully. The other of our main competitors really hasn't gotten into that space at all. They haven't figured it out yet. I'm not sure that they will or they won't. They haven't, other than practice management software, which they own, they really are not in the solutions business. Now, that said, beyond Henry Shine, as a traditional distributor who's also in the solutions business, there are a lot of smaller players in every space.
SPEAKER_01One other question, we're obviously thinking a lot about AI for distributors and AI for our own company. What is the impact of AI for your customers and how does that impact how Benko is approaching customers?
SPEAKER_02So the first place we're seeing AI influence dentistry is really in the reading of images, reading of x-rays. And we're seeing some interesting observations so far. It hasn't taken off nearly as quickly as I thought it would. And I do think part of the challenges, and again, I think this is one of the challenges that AI has overall, and I think we're seeing in dentistry as well, is the practitioners don't want to admit that AI can do some things better or more efficiently than they could do them themselves. So I think they do get there's an inherent pushback. So whether it's AI doing writing or AI doing math projects or stuff like that, I think getting the user of AI, getting the users to really admit that AI is a force multiplier for them is really important. And when you've got a profession like dentists or other professions, I'm sure are similar, like lawyers and others, the first thing they don't want to hear is, oh, these this computer can do it better than you can do it. So I think in dentistry, that's one of the first places we're getting some pushback is dentists don't want to admit, if that's the right word, that a computer driven AI program can read a dental x ray as well, or maybe better than they can read it themselves. So we'll see how that. Goes as things happen. Second place we're seeing it is in practice management software and really a lot of the insurance stuff and some of the basic business elements of a dental practice. Good or bad. I don't know that we'll see a lot of AI around actually doing the dentistry for a long time. We'll see there are some people who are working on robots and some other some other AI-driven products, but I think we're a far way off from that. So those are the two places we're seeing in the dental offices themselves. As far as Bennco is concerned, we're trying to implement AI in a lot of places, but that's internal to BENCO, not with our customers.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02Now, the one place that we're going to see a lot of AI in every healthcare profession, I think, is on the insurance side of the house.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So really reading x-rays, reading reports, making sure that whatever the insurance company is reimbursing for is legitimate. And I do think that's going to be a place where AI is going to play a role because there's a lot of money involved there. And I think we'll I think we're going to see that pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_01The last question we always ask, because curiosity is one of our core values, what's one thing that you're still curious about or trying to learn?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I'm trying to learn how to get our sales team excited about selling solutions.
SPEAKER_01We've got our next round of experiments to run and we'll see how it goes.
SPEAKER_02I'll let you know. You'll be the second person to know when we actually crack that code.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing this again. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your meeting and everything today. So appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02Benj, it's a pleasure to spend time with you. I love sharing my mind with you and whoever's listening to this podcast.
SPEAKER_01That's it for this episode of In the Mind of a Distributor. If you like this conversation, leave a review. It helps more folks in distribution find the show. If you're thinking about a CRM for your business, head to proton.ai to see how Proton can help you grow faster. Or if you want to connect with me, you can add me, Bench Cohen, on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.