Field notes from the brokerage trenches

The notebook
we wish we’d had.

Hard-won lessons from the agencies finding the most money: how to spot a Walmart A176 abuse pattern in 30 seconds, which buyer questions actually move authorizations, what to do when your best AE quits with the rolodex. Operator stuff. No fluff.

Latest · all categories
Updated weekly
Commission
K-Solve

The KeHE recovery playbook.

Billbacks, freight, spoils — the KeHE deduction landscape, how disputes actually work through K-Solve, and the recovery patterns that pay for the review.

Commission
800/mo

UNFI deduction codes, decoded.

MCB, CBPB, OIA, PP, PB — every code that shaves your principal’s check, which ones you can dispute, and how to reconcile 800 a month without drowning in spreadsheets.

Team
7 yrs

When your best AE quits with the rolodex.

Seven years of buyer intel walked out the door in a Moleskine. We talked to four agency owners who survived it — here’s the system they built so it can’t happen again.

Industry
20+

Why every retailer sends statements in a different format.

It’s not laziness — it’s leverage. A short history of why 20+ retailers settled on 20+ statement formats, and what it costs brokers every Friday afternoon.

Strategy
71%

Kroger floods you with Code 5. Dispute anyway.

EDI fee disputes have a 71% win rate. The reason agencies don’t bother — and the four-step process that turns “this isn’t worth my time” into $24K recovered.

Commission
3.2×

The baseline trick: how AI knows what “wrong” looks like.

Anomaly detection isn’t magic. Here’s the math behind why a 3.2× baseline charge gets flagged — and why you can’t do it in Excel without a 200-row VLOOKUP nightmare.

Industry
$53K

Where Q1 actually went: a 14-agency audit.

We ran our AI across 14 mid-size broker agencies’ Q1 statements. The line-item breakdown of where $53,180 (per agency) quietly disappeared — and which retailer was the biggest offender.

One field note a week.

The pattern we caught, the dispute that worked, the buyer who said the quiet part out loud. Operator stuff. No fluff. No “5 tips for productivity.”

~700 brokers read it. Unsubscribe in one click.