Nike lost $200B making the mistake I see B2B founders make every quarter.

Stock down 75%. They are laying off 1,400 people.

The mistake that broke them is one I see B2B founders making every quarter. Smaller scale, different industry, same shape.

Here is what Nike did. They decided to stop selling through retailers and push everyone toward their own website and stores. Higher margins, own the customer, cut out the middleman. Every textbook calls it the smart move.

So Nike pulled back from its wholesale partners. But they vacated the shelf space before their direct-to-consumer machine was ready to carry the load. And shelf space does not stay empty. Adidas, Hoka, and On Running walked into the exact retail space Nike abandoned. Nike lost the running category it once owned. The stock hit an 11-year low. They brought back a 30-year veteran to fix it, and one of his first moves was crawling back to the wholesale partners Nike had pushed away.

Founders run the smaller version of this constantly. They kill the partner program because the margins look thin. They cut the SDR team because inbound is "growing." They drop the reseller because direct feels cleaner. Then the volume the old channel quietly carried disappears, the new channel is not ready, and revenue falls through the gap.

I have watched this movie before. From the inside.

A while back, a DIY manufacturer hired me to build their sales and distribution across eastern Europe, while at the same time leadership built an online store to sell our product directly (!). Cleaner margins, own the relationship, the exact logic Nike used.

I argued against it. Hard. I believed our growth was in distribution, not a webstore.

So I got on planes. I flew to Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, signing distributors in person, one by one. Hornbach and Brico Depot, the two in the photo, each placed half a million dollars in opening orders to stock our product.

The online store generated a trickle of B2C revenue, and worse, it quietly destroyed our credibility with the very partners I was signing. We were competing against the people we were asking to bet their business on us. Every meeting carried the same unspoken question: why should I build your brand in my market if you are going to undercut me from your own website.

The webstore made a little money and cost us a lot of trust. The distribution made millions.

In the twenty-plus years I have spent building sales and distribution, I have watched this exact mistake repeat in company after company.

The lesson, whether you are Nike or a company doing a few million that nobody has heard of yet: you do not abandon a channel that works for one that might work better, before the new one can carry the volume. And you never let a direct channel quietly compete against the partners moving your real revenue.