Case study — Decorative lighting

One sales rep. $1.3M. This was the pilot.

Lampatron started as a test of whether the playbook would transfer to a second brand with a fraction of the headcount. Sixteen months later it was running at $280K a month on one rep.

$1.3MB2B revenue added

$280K/moPeak run rate

1Sales rep

Results at a glance

New B2B pipeline generated$0 before$1.9M

Close rate23%32%

Qualified leads, first 30 days150+

Primary acquisition channelPaid adsB2B outbound by day 90

Marketing budgetCut to 1/10 of previous spend

Avg. cost per qualified lead — cold email vs paid

Google Ads$352

Meta Ads$298

Cold email$33

Cold email brought in qualified buyers at roughly a tenth of paid CPA — and every dollar not spent on ads goes straight to the net. That gap is how the marketing budget fell to 1/10 of previous spend while pipeline kept growing.

Part 01 — The challenge

No sales team, no track record, no room for a slow burn.

Lampatron had none of the advantages that make a wholesale channel easy. No trade reputation. No existing buyer relationships. No sales department to absorb the work — one person, who already had a job.

It also had the constraint that kills most B2B attempts before they produce anything: it could not afford to wait. The received wisdom is that trade channels take two to three years to mature, and for a small brand that timeline is not conservative, it is fatal. Nobody funds eighteen months of nothing.

This was the honest test of whether the system was a system. Lampadom had a strong brand and two dedicated reps behind it. If the same playbook only worked with those advantages, it was not a playbook — it was a good year.

Part 02 — The solution

Narrow the target until one person can own it.

With one rep, the entire problem is leverage. Every decision was made to reduce the number of different conversations that person had to be good at.

Step 01

One segment. One offer. One script.

A larger team can afford to work three buyer types at once. One person cannot. We picked the single segment with the shortest decision chain and built one offer for it — so every reply the rep handled was a variation of a conversation he had already had, not a new one.

Step 02

Automate everything that is not the conversation

List building, sending, sequencing, follow-up triggers, quote generation and CRM hygiene were all built to run without him. His time went exclusively to replies and quotes — the two activities that a human has to do and that actually produce revenue.

Step 03

Engineer for early proof

The first target was not scale, it was a signed order fast enough to justify continuing. We front-loaded the buyers most likely to move quickly, which is how a channel with no track record earns the runway to build one.

Step 04

Compound the accounts, not the outreach

Once accounts existed, reorder became the growth engine rather than new volume. That is the only way one person reaches $280K a month — most of that number is accounts buying again, not new logos being opened.

Part 03 — The outcome

The pilot that proved it transfers.

Lampatron reached $1.3M in trade revenue inside sixteen months and peaked at $280K a month, carried by a single sales rep.

It also answered the question it was built to answer. The playbook was not a function of Lampadom’s brand equity or headcount. Given a defined segment, a correctly priced offer and automation on everything that is not a conversation, one person can carry a mid-seven-figure channel.

That is the number worth holding on to if you are reading this with a small team. The constraint on a trade channel is almost never how many people you have. It is how many different conversations you have asked them to be good at.

Before you decide

If you are thinking…

"We are too small and we do not have a sales team."

Lampatron did this with one rep who already had a job. Headcount is not the constraint — focus is. One segment, one offer, and automation on everything that is not a live conversation is what makes a single person viable. More people working three segments badly performs worse than one person working one segment properly.

"B2B takes years and we cannot wait that long."

It takes years when you start with outreach and discover the offer was wrong six months in. The system is installed and live inside a month, first replies land within days of launch, and quotes and purchase orders show up inside 90 days. You will know whether this works long before it needs to have worked.

"You had an advantage — these were your own brands."

That is exactly why Lampatron was run as a pilot with the constraints stripped away: no trade reputation, no buyer relationships, one rep. It was built to test whether the result was the playbook or the circumstances. The same build now runs across client brands in categories we do not own.