December 1, 2025
If You Want a Better Lighting Industry, Fix the Rep–Manufacturer Partnership
Guest author: Geoff Marlow
Geoff Marlow explores how misaligned structures are stalling industry progress
For more than three decades, independent lighting and controls representatives have been the commercial backbone of the North American lighting industry. They drive demand, shape specifications, work through utility programs, manage distributor expectations, support contractors, solve jobsite problems, and increasingly handle controls integration.
Yet much of the industry still behaves as if these firms are peripheral vendors rather than the strategic go-to-market engine that keeps the entire ecosystem functioning. The result? A channel that moves more slowly than the technology it should be promoting. It strains agencies, frustrates manufacturers, and leaves distributors, contractors, specifiers, and end users confused about who’s accountable.
The issue is simple. We ask reps to perform strategic work. We govern them as if they’re transactional. We want them to enable the adoption of advanced controls. We compensate them as if project cycles take six weeks instead of eighteen to twenty-four months.
The misalignment is the root of the channel’s stagnation.
A Strategic Engine Stuck Inside a Transactional Framework
Reps work in ways that did not exist ten years ago. They solve engineering, networking, software, cybersecurity, commissioning, and controls challenges. They engage far earlier than manufacturers realize and carry projects across long cycles.
Yet the structures governing them have remained substantively unchanged for nearly 30 years. Thirty-day termination clauses. Commission rates that have barely moved despite the complexity. Administrative burden shifted to the rep without shared investment.
Strategic responsibilities. Transactional structure.
This contradiction defines the channel.
The Administrative Burden Nobody Talks About
The administrative burden on rep agencies has become one of the channel’s biggest hidden problems. Getting paid correctly is only the visible portion of a much larger issue.
Commission reporting often resembles a scavenger hunt through incomplete data, mismatched records, unclear project codes, and Point of Sale (POS) files that don’t reflect actual market activity. Some statements are accurate. Some approximate reality. Some don’t relate to anything the agency ever touched. The rep becomes a forensic accountant instead of a market developer.
But the structural issue is broader. Manufacturers have created a maze of portals, dashboards, spreadsheets, and reporting workflows that rarely align with how agencies operate. Some systems are modern. Most aren’t. Every manufacturer has its own platform, its own definitions, its own reporting cadence.
Reps now manage what can be one hundred incompatible manufacturer systems, none of which integrate with their own CRM or with each other. There are no shared standards. No consistent taxonomy. No unified expectations. What manufacturers call visibility often becomes administrative weight shifted downstream.
This isn’t a reporting problem. It’s a system-design problem. And it slows the entire industry.
The Technology Gap
Manufacturers invest in sophisticated ERPs, CRMs, and business intelligence platforms. Agencies often operate in QuickBooks, Excel, and institutional memory. Yet manufacturers expect enterprise-grade forecasting from systems that can’t speak to each other.
Some manufacturers help reps modernize. Most don’t. When promises outpace performance, trust erodes. And with trust goes alignment.
Contracts That Only Swing One Way
Modern manufacturer-rep agreements often run twenty to thirty pages and read with striking asymmetry.
“At the sole discretion of the manufacturer.”
“The manufacturer reserves the right to…”
“The representative acknowledges and agrees…”
This isn’t partnership language. It’s authoritative language.
What makes this even harder is that these contracts sit atop multi-year investments that manufacturers encourage agencies to make.
Reps routinely sign long-term leases for showroom and office space, add personnel at the manufacturer’s request, hire controls and applications engineers, build demonstration environments, expand or realign territory coverage, and upgrade CRM and workflow systems to meet manufacturer standards.
These are material, multi-year commitments. Yet they sit under a contract that can be cancelled in thirty days.
Agencies are encouraged to invest like partners but protected only as contractors. The gap between what manufacturers request and what their agreements guarantee is profound.
And when leadership inevitably changes — which it always does — reps are left holding the sunk costs.
This isn’t shared risk. It’s exported risk.
When Manufacturers Undermine Their Own Market Messaging
There’s another dynamic manufacturers rarely acknowledge. They often unintentionally (or intentionally) undermine their own market presence through inconsistent channel strategies.
Reps are asked to represent the brand with credibility and consistency. Yet manufacturers frequently execute regional sweeps, restructuring waves, and contradictory coverage experiments that create years of noise for the very agencies expected to deliver clean market messaging.
Worse, these shifts are often accompanied by conflicting commitments made to multiple agencies at the same time. Distributors, contractors, and specifiers notice. So does the market.
Reps are then left to defend decisions they didn’t make and don’t agree with, while their own credibility takes the hit.
The truth is simple: manufacturers often underestimate the reputational damage caused by their own inconsistency.
Agencies must live in the market every day. Mixed messages make that nearly impossible. Double talk is the enemy of alignment. Clarity is the path to it.
Succession in a 30-Day World: A Risk Manufacturers Seldom Acknowledge
There’s a long-term consequence of misalignment that manufacturers rarely address: succession.
The channel talks about technology, controls adoption, and systems. What it almost never talks about is the absurdity of trying to build a multi-generational firm on contracts that can be cancelled in about as long as a manufacturer’s latest org chart stays in place.
Most rep agreements are lengthy, one-sided, and filled with “sole discretion of the manufacturer” clauses. At the same time, manufacturer leadership rotates faster than agencies can update their org charts. The person who recruited your agency may not be there by the time your child graduates their next grade — or even by the next regional meeting.
This instability has consequences. It undermines internal succession planning, casts doubt on the durability of the business being handed off, forces principals into broken promises with internal successors, shrinks the pool of next-generation candidates willing to assume risk, makes estate and retirement planning nearly impossible, and destabilizes rep continuity in key markets.
And the problem intensifies when manufacturers publicly endorse regional roll-ups while privately assuring agencies of ongoing commitment. Agencies are left to work through contradictions that manufacturers rarely feel but the market never forgets.
You can’t build a stable, generational business on unstable, discretionary agreements governed by leadership teams unlikely to outlast the contract term.
In M&A, ambiguity is a discount. When manufacturers simultaneously endorse the incumbent and the incoming roll-up, they create maximum ambiguity. That ambiguity instantly reduces enterprise value, cripples internal succession, and funnels the agency toward the only buyer left standing — the consolidator.
This isn’t merely a structural failure. It’s a succession crisis rooted in conflicting commitments that compromise the integrity and long-term viability of independent agencies.
Misunderstanding the Rep Business Model
Another force undermining trust is that many manufacturers don’t fully understand the economic realities of running a rep agency.
Reps carry the operational and financial risk. They guarantee payroll. They fund benefits. They maintain showrooms, demos, samples, and customer relationships. They absorb every shift in market demand.
And here’s a truth manufacturers often overlook: successful rep principals spend years trying to buffer manufacturers from the full force of market cycles. Manufacturers feel those shifts. Reps absorb them.
What appears as high earnings from the outside frequently reflects decades of reinvestment, risk-carrying, and exposure that manufacturers never directly experience.
This gap isn’t about compensation. It’s about context. And when context is missing, alignment suffers.
A Channel Becoming More Litigious
As trust erodes, litigation rises. Disputes over compensation, territory, and interpretation increasingly default to counsel.
This isn’t progress. It’s evidence of structural and leadership failure.
The Commission Stalemate
The commission model has barely moved in thirty years, even though everything else has changed.
In the early two-thousands, projects weren’t always faster, but they were far less complex. Today, reps move through the same calendar time with exponentially more technical, administrative, and coordination demands layered on top.
Manufacturers want strategic behavior. Reps want economic alignment. Neither moves. The market stalls.
This isn’t incompetence. It’s misalignment.
A Lesson From Nelson Wax
Years ago, during breakfast at The Rittenhouse in Philadelphia, I asked Nelson Wax what it took to be valuable to his agency.
He took a slow drag from his cigarette, paused, and said:
“What most manufacturers don’t understand as well as they should is that before we ever sell your product and brand, we have to want to sell your product and brand.”
It sounded simple. It wasn’t. It was the truth.
When a rep wants to sell your line, the market moves. When they don’t, nothing does.
My counsel to reps is straightforward: Send your margin dollars to the manufacturers who behave like partners.
Enthusiasm is earned. Commitment is earned. Margin dollars are earned. None of it is owed.
Reps Have Work To Do Too
Manufacturers aren’t the only ones who need to evolve. Reps must modernize. Controls capability is essential. CRM discipline is essential. Vertical expertise is essential. Agencies clinging to legacy habits won’t survive what comes next.
If you want to be treated like a partner, operate like one.
The Path Forward
Real partnership requires real commitment.
Align compensation with value creation. Modernize systems and data. Balance contracts. Share scorecards. Co-invest in strategic markets.
None of this is radical. All of it is overdue.
The Final Word
The independent rep model isn’t broken. The alignment is broken.
Direct sales can’t scale. Digital tools can’t replace expertise. Distributors can’t create demand across the construction cycle. The entire commercial lighting and controls ecosystem depends on a functional, aligned manufacturer-rep model.
When manufacturers treat reps as true partners and reps operate as professional go-to-market platforms, the industry accelerates.
When they don’t, it stalls. We are stalled. We can fix this.
And the organizations that do will own the next decade.
The channel isn’t failing because the work is hard. It’s failing because the partnership is weak, and in this industry, partnership is everything.
Geoffrey Marlow
Geoff Marlow brings over 30 years of unparalleled experience and achievement to the industry, solidifying his reputation as a principled leader and innovative strategist. He has held senior-most executive roles across mid-sized specialty manufacturers, multi-billion-dollar manufacturing enterprises, and as an entrepreneurial start-up manufacturer's representative within a top 10 construction market. Most notably, Geoff led his start-up representative agency to unprecedented success, growing it into the largest agency in its market within just five years.
