supersign......
I can tell you for a fact, I've had a least a dozen or more wholesalers/subs go behind my back and contact my customers directly over they years... and some recently.
If it was competition, that's a different story, but I had one customer contact me one time to get off his back and I had no idea what he was talking about. After calming him down, he told me how I was calling him and using a different trade name to be urging him every few weeks to do more work... and for less money.
You see, many wholesalers have all the contact information needed to go to your customer... act as if they are acting on your behalf by offering discounts if they buy this or that in a certain time frame. Sure, they make a little more money and you're cut out of the picture.
Recently, [like two months ago], I had a a wholesaler tell me if I didn't cooperate with him on a particular matter, he was going to go to my customer and offer him prices I couldn't touch. He threatened to go after my customer on his own. He did a job for me and he did it wrong. He demanded payment or he would go to my customer. He actually told me that. I had to pay for the bad project and then for him to do it over. It was clearly his mistake, but he held the upper hand.
Some years ago, I had a wholesaler drop some work off at a customer for me. He said it was not out of his way and he'd do me a favor. I agreed. Called this customer back to find out where there next order was and they told me that they went with the nice guy I sent who gave them even better pricing.
Had another guy handing out business cards and brochures after doing jobs for me. Seems this guy thought his niche was finding out your customers and then stopping in on them and offering them competitive pricing since they knew what was already going on.
Wholesalers have a pretty good chance of stealing clients away from everyone and acting on your behalf.... my butt. Their chances are excellent for doing this and they do it.
As a wholesaler, I never go after my customer's [sign shops]work and wholesaling falls into that area. I've had a sign shop's quoted customer call me for a quote already.... and I call them [the sign shop involved] immediately, discuss this and make a deal as to whomever gets the job, we will negotiate discounts then. I've witnesses and have been given too many lines of BS to fully trust a wholesaler, but there are some out there that go by the good book.
Some of these examples.... and others are why we brought more and more services in-house.... so we could control 'Quality Control' and stop our wholesalers from stealing from us.
LOL