When Enough Is Enough: A Line Card Discipline Framework for the Lighting Channel

A principal at a well-established lighting agency told me recently that, sitting in his office on a Tuesday morning, he could not name every manufacturer on his own line card.

He estimated he had about 140 brands listed. He said this without embarrassment, in the same tone a hardware store owner might say he couldn’t name every SKU on his shelves.

A rep agency is not a hardware store.

The whole value proposition of independent representation rests on the agency’s commitment to the manufacturers it carries, and on the manufacturers’ belief that they have a sales organization that knows them, fights for them, and earns its commission. A line card the principal can’t recite is one that has stopped meaning what it once meant.

“If you can’t name the manufacturers on your line card, maybe you shouldn’t rep them.”

Five Decades of Line Card Growth

Hard data on lighting rep line card size across the full sweep of the modern era is scarce. But by drawing on MANA benchmarks, Egret Consulting’s 2019 lighting-specific survey, Channel Marketing Group’s Rep of the Future studies for NEMRA, and the publicly visible line cards of major lighting agencies, the trajectory is clear.

In 1990, a working lighting rep in a major metropolitan market typically carried around two dozen lines. By 2000, that number had drifted upward, but not dramatically. Industry surveys from that era suggest most reps were carrying well under fifty lines across all verticals, with lighting agencies tending toward the higher end of that range. By 2010, the LED transition was pulling additional manufacturers into the channel. Egret Consulting’s 2019 survey established a 2006 baseline showing average line counts of roughly 64 for small firms, 76 for mid-sized firms, and 83 for large firms.

The decade after the recession is where things accelerated. By 2018, Egret found mid-sized firms carrying 112 lines on average and large firms carrying 121. A 2024 NEMRA survey found roughly 70% of respondents carrying more than five lighting lines, reflecting the supply rep migration into lighting that has accelerated since 2020.

Where do we stand today? The publicly visible line cards of major lighting and full-line agencies tell their own story. A multi-state full-line agency in the Southwest lists more than 300 manufacturers. A long-established mid-Atlantic agency lists more than 200 product lines supported by more than 150 employees. Recent M&A roll-up activity, which has accelerated meaningfully over the last three years, has produced cases in which a single multi-region acquirer represents 90 or more lighting manufacturers in one state alone.

Do the calendar math. A year contains roughly 250 working days. An agency with 65 principals can theoretically allocate four business days per year to each manufacturer. At 130 principals, that drops to two days. At 250 principals, it’s one day per manufacturer per year.

Every one of those principals signed a contract that assumed active territorial representation, demand development, and sales results.

But here’s the real constraint. It isn’t the rep’s available days. It’s the customer’s available attention. The universe of architects, engineers, lighting designers, distributors, and contractors in any given territory is finite, and it’s meaningfully smaller than the line card. You can’t generate more qualified sales calls than that universe will absorb.

Every line on the card is competing for a window of customer attention. In that window, a rep can advance a complementary story — where multiple lines solve the customer’s problem together. But not a redundant one, where two competing manufacturers in the same category are placed in front of the customer to choose between. Redundant lines don’t earn additional shots. They fragment a single shot.

The customer universe is finite. A longer line card doesn’t generate more customer engagements. It fragments the same ones.

None of this happened in a vacuum. The LED transition flooded the market with manufacturers seeking representation, including a generation of offshore brands that didn’t exist a decade earlier. Major manufacturers offloaded field application, warranty, and end-user support services to rep firms, which then had to scale to absorb it. Commission pressure and channel splitting made line card breadth a hedge against the volatility of any single principal relationship.

These forces are real. But they don’t release the agency from its obligations to the manufacturers it carries.

The Salesperson Didn’t Keep Pace

If line card size were the only number growing, the math would be straightforward. It isn’t.

Agency headcount has grown, but the structure of that growth tells a complicated story. Between 2006 and 2018, the largest lighting reps roughly doubled their outside sales staff, increasing the average from 17.5 to 34.8 salespeople. On the surface, that growth outpaced the 50% expansion in line cards over the same period. But three things sit underneath that headline number, and together they point in the opposite direction.

First, support staff scaled faster than outside sales. By 2018, large firms had more than doubled their support headcount over the prior decade. The growth in agency headcount was disproportionately internal, operational, and project-management-driven, not field-selling-driven. Agencies grew by adding people who could quote, expedite, submit, and troubleshoot. They did not grow proportionately by adding people whose job is to be in front of specifiers and contractors, actively selling for a specific manufacturer.

Second, the per-salesperson line load was already untenable. Roughly 3.5 lines per outside salesperson, in a single-line-focused world, would be workable. In a world where each line carries specification activity, end-user calling, distributor coverage, contractor relationships, training obligations, and controls integration, 3.5 lines per salesperson on a 120-line card means each manufacturer gets a thin slice of each salesperson’s calendar, not a champion. As Ted Konnerth put it in his 2019 Egret write-up, actively promoting 100 different brands is impossible.

Third, the conditions that produced that headcount growth have ended. The 2006–2018 window was a post-recession boom in which big lighting reps were hiring aggressively into an expanding market. What followed has been M&A consolidation, post-pandemic talent shortages, and a structural difficulty in attracting and retaining outside sales talent. Roll-up acquirers combine line cards faster than they combine selling teams. The acquired agency brings its lines; the buyer rationalizes overlap; and the combined line card is absorbed by a smaller-than-additive sales team.

The pre-pandemic boom obscured the problem because headline outside sales grew faster than headline line counts. The M&A wave since 2018 has flipped that pattern: roll-ups combine line cards faster than they combine selling teams.

The number that has genuinely compressed since 2018, regardless of headcount, is active selling time per line. The NEMRA Manufacturer of the Future research from 2024 makes the per-line expectation clear: more end-user calling, more specification activity, more demand generation, deeper product expertise. Those expectations are rising at the exact moment the line card is growing and selling capacity per line is contracting.

When Does More Stop Creating Value?

There’s no universal answer to “how many lines are enough.” The right number depends on agency size, market structure, product complexity, and the depth of your bench.

But the inflection point has recognizable symptoms.

The first: the principal can no longer recite the line card from memory. The second: salespeople start referring inbound inquiries to inside staff because they can’t recall which line is the better fit. The third: the agency loses competitive bids not because the price or product failed, but because the wrong product from its own line card was offered. The fourth, and most material: the agency starts representing manufacturers whose strategies actively contradict each other. Sales calls become exercises in option presentation rather than recommendation.

“Do you want this one or this one?” is the mark of an agency that has stopped adding value. Channel partners read it as indecision. Manufacturers read it as a divided commitment. Specifiers read it as the absence of a recommendation.

The inflection point isn’t 50 lines, or 100, or 200. It’s the point at which the agency’s promises to its principals have become unkeepable. Every additional manufacturer past that point makes the unkept promises worse, not better.

Here’s the deeper irony. The original case for the independent rep model rested explicitly on the rep’s ability to advocate for a manufacturer’s products in a way that broad-line distributors could not. The argument was that distributors, by virtue of carrying so many manufacturers, were structurally limited in their capacity to champion any single brand. The rep model existed to fill that advocacy gap.

Applied to a rep agency carrying 150 or 200 lines, that same observation now describes the rep.

A Framework: Five Questions for Honest Line Card Review

The right question isn’t whether the line card is too big. It’s whether each line on it still earns its position.

The framework below is for principals and ownership groups doing an annual line card review. Answer each question for every line individually, not for the line card as a whole.

1. The complementarity question. Does this line strengthen your value proposition to specifiers, distributors, and contractors, or does it merely add presence? A complementary line completes your offering, enabling you to solve a customer problem you couldn’t before. The clearest test: can this line be sold to the same customer, on the same call, as the lines you already carry? When your lines all reach the same specifier or contractor, every call generates a potential opportunity across multiple principals, which industry observers have long called product line synergy. Where the lines call on different markets and different decision-makers, every addition dilutes per-line call frequency rather than concentrating it.

2. The redundancy question. The multi-name specification environment has made limited redundancy strategically defensible. A spec written with five named manufacturers in the same category rewards the rep who carries two or three of those names. But there’s a difference between strategic redundancy and accumulated redundancy. Strategic redundancy means deliberately carrying two manufacturers in the same category because the spec environment rewards it. Accumulated redundancy means ending up with four manufacturers in the same category because each was added at a different moment for a different reason, and no one inside the agency can articulate the rationale for any of them. If your sales team can’t explain to a customer which of the four to recommend and why, the redundancy has become a drag, not a leverage.

3. The bandwidth question. Does the agency actually have the time, talent, and infrastructure to deliver on what this manufacturer expects? The rep model justifies its commission economics precisely by amortizing sales call costs across multiple principals on each call. That amortization works only when the lines are reachable from the same call, and you have the capacity to make enough of them. A line the agency cannot actively work, because the right specifier relationships aren’t in place, the inside team can’t quote it competently, or the outside team has simply run out of hours, is a line the agency is not positioned to represent. More lines tend to produce worse representation per line, not better.

4. The shelving question. The Egret survey found that nearly a quarter of reps take on lines specifically to keep them out of competitors’ hands. That deserves more scrutiny than it typically gets. A rep who needs to shelve a line to prevent a competitor from carrying it has implicitly concluded she can’t outsell that competitor on the lines she already has. The shelved line generates little or no revenue for the manufacturer, contributes nothing to the agency’s reputation, and ties up a roster slot that could have gone to a manufacturer the agency would actually fight for. Letting a worthy manufacturer go to a competitor who will work it is almost always better for the channel than warehousing it on a line card, where it goes underdeveloped.

5. The champion question. Every line on the card needs a named internal champion, a specific person whose job it is to know the line cold, manage the manufacturer relationship, train the rest of the agency on it, and own its number. Lines without champions become lines without futures. The test is mechanical: walk the line card with the ownership team and assign one person to each line. If two or more lines map to the same person, ask honestly whether that person can sustain both. If any lines have no champion, those lines are running on inertia.

A rep who takes on lines to keep them from a competitor has implicitly concluded she can’t outsell that competitor on the lines she already holds. Defensive shelving prevents competition. It doesn’t constitute representation.

The “No Visits” Signal

An increasing number of lighting agencies are voicing some version of a “no visits” policy to their principals: don’t send your regional sales manager to ride along with our team unless there’s a specific, agreed reason to do so.

The reasoning is usually framed in efficiency terms. With 100+ lines, every manufacturer wanting two ride days a year adds up to 200 ride days, more than the agency has outside-salesperson days available to absorb.

That accounting is correct. But it overlooks a more important point.

A manufacturer ride-along, properly used, isn’t a cost to the agency. It’s the most direct mechanism the principal has to confirm the agency is calling on the right specifiers, to train the agency’s people in real time on product positioning, and to develop the personal relationships that determine which lines actually get sold under pressure.

The underlying constraint when agencies adopt a “no visits” posture is the difficulty of accommodating the training and accountability load associated with 100+ active manufacturer partnerships. That constraint is real. But it’s a function of line card size.

A more useful framing: manufacturers should visit selectively, with purpose, and with measurable agendas. That’s a reasonable governance norm. But if the agency can’t meaningfully accommodate the manufacturers it has agreed to represent, the issue isn’t the visit.

The issue is the contract.

A “no visits” posture is, in most cases, a function of line card size. 100+ active manufacturer partnerships exceed what most agencies can accommodate.

The Manufacturer’s Mirror

It would be unfair to write this only from the rep’s perspective.

Manufacturers carry rep partners the way reps carry manufacturers, and the same arithmetic applies in reverse. A manufacturer’s sales leadership team that can’t name and characterize each of its rep agencies has the same problem, just transposed.

The classic complaints manufacturers voice about their rep partners, reps spend time on everybody’s product but ours; reps chase quick orders and easy sales; reps won’t prospect or develop the market, each one maps to a specific constraint of bandwidth, focus, or champion-level commitment that an oversized line card tends to produce.

NEMRA’s 2024 Manufacturer of the Future research signals clearly what manufacturers now expect: more end-user calling, more specification activity, more demand generation, deeper product expertise, and a more strategic technology stack. The NEMMY award criteria weight planning, demand generation, marketing investment, and end-user engagement above raw line card or revenue size.

The implication is direct. Manufacturers increasingly reward depth. Recent rep growth has favored breadth.

A useful diagnostic for any principal: plot the rep’s importance to the manufacturer (the share of the manufacturer’s territorial revenue flowing through this rep) against the manufacturer’s importance to the rep (the share of agency income this manufacturer represents). The most fragile relationships are where the manufacturer matters greatly to the rep, but the rep matters little to the manufacturer. Those are the relationships that get terminated in downturns. The most strategically valuable relationships are mutual, where both parties need each other in roughly equal measure.

The least examined relationships, but often the most expensive on both sides, are those where neither party matters much to the other. That describes a meaningful fraction of every long line card in the lighting channel.

What “Enough” Really Looks Like

The best line cards in the industry share a few characteristics.

The principal can recite them from memory. Every line has a named champion, a stated economic rationale, a defined market role, and a place in the agency’s specification strategy. Where redundancy exists, it’s deliberate, with a clear reason for the second or third name in any category. Lines added in the last twelve months have replaced lines that were resigned, not been layered on top of them.

And the answer to “could your top three specifiers name this manufacturer if asked who you represent?” is yes for every line, not just the top ten.

This framework isn’t a prescription for fewer lines. A larger agency in a larger market with a broader specifier and contractor footprint can sustain a larger line card, provided it has the bench, the operations, and the leadership to do so. The framework is a prescription for rigorous line card review. A line that fails the bandwidth question, the shelving question, or the champion question should be resigned, not because the line is necessarily a poor one, but because the agency isn’t positioned to represent it adequately.

At NEMRA’s 2026 annual conference, Channel Marketing Group’s David Gordon, co-developer of NEMRA’s Rep of the Future report, forecast a 25% reduction in the number of rep agencies over the next five years due to M&A consolidation, with the market ultimately consolidating to four to six national firms and thirty to forty regional ones. That contraction won’t be driven by economics alone. It will be driven by the inability of overextended agencies to sustain the commitments they nominally carry.

The agencies that thrive in that landscape won’t be the ones with the longest line cards.

They’ll be the ones whose principals can still name their manufacturers, whose salespeople still champion their brands, and whose manufacturers still recognize the agency’s name as the first answer to the question: “Who is selling our product in that market?”

That’s what enough looks like. It’s the line card whose contracts the agency can still honor.

The work of getting there begins with an honest line card review.