You’ve baked the best sourdough in the village. Regulars. Word of mouth. A queue on Saturday mornings.
Then someone asks: “What’s your TAM?”
“About 400 people. It’s a small village.”
That’s the wrong answer, and it’s costing you more than you think.
TAM isn’t about where you bake. It’s about who eats bread.
Three miles away: four coffee shops, a deli, a hotel doing breakfast for 80 guests a day, a farm shop full of tourists buying anything with the word “local” on it. None of them are baking their own bread. All of them need yours.
You haven’t moved the oven. Your market just tripled.
Here’s where most B2B companies flinch.
Partner channels feel like giving something away. Shared margin. Less control. Someone else is in the room with your customer. I’ve heard every version of this objection, and I’ve made some of them myself.
But the math is hard to argue with.
Selling direct to villagers: €3.50 a loaf, one at a time. Supplying the coffee shop down the road: 20 loaves before 8am, recurring, predictable. Lower margin per unit, but you’re not in the unit business anymore. Multiply by four coffee shops, and you’re a wholesale supplier with a distribution network. Your competitor, obsessing over walk-in footfall, doesn’t even know this game exists.
A partner who already has the relationship, the trust, the daily touchpoint with your buyer, isn’t a threat to your margin. They’re a shortcut to scale that took them years to build.
The question isn’t whether this model works. It’s whether your current channel strategy is leaving that kind of volume on the table.
If you’re a B2B company that suspects your TAM conversation is overdue, or your partner channel is underperforming what it should be, this is exactly what we work through in an initial call. No deck. No pitch. Just the numbers and what’s actually blocking growth.
