You are Alberto Hernández Midence, founder and chief executive of Distribuidora Nacional (DN), one of Honduras's largest consumer-goods distributors. It is Monday 1 December 2025 and you have just lost your biggest supermarket customer. On Friday the board expects your diagnosis of what has failed in the company's structure.
The situation
DN buys food, drinks, toiletries and electronics from manufacturers and sells them to more than 800 shops, supermarkets and pharmacies in Honduras and part of El Salvador. In 2025 it billed about USD 180 million with EBITDA of USD 8 million, a 4.4% margin: low even for a business won on volume, stock turns and price discipline. It has 500 employees and grew through three acquisitions, in 2015, 2020 and 2025, without ever redesigning its organisation.
Three regional directors split the country: Manuel Ordóñez in Tegucigalpa, with 50 people; Diego Castro in San Pedro Sula, with 150; and Carlos Menjívar in El Salvador, with 120. Another 180 people, drivers, warehouse staff and head office, have no region assigned. Each director runs sales, logistics, operations and finance for his region, with nobody between him and his people, and each region has its own accountant. There are no vice-presidents.
Grupo Retail Centroamericano, which bought about USD 12 million a year, asked for a 5% discount for 2026. Tegucigalpa said yes; San Pedro Sula said no; El Salvador offered 3% if the client took on a new product line. The formal answer took three weeks, and this morning's letter puts it bluntly: "If you cannot agree among yourselves, you cannot be our distributor." Nor is it the exception: the same product's price varies by 10% to 15% from region to region, and a request that touches more than one region takes 21 days to resolve.
At the management meeting each one brought his own reading. Ordóñez: nobody knows who is in charge of shared matters. Castro, whose region is the most profitable: decisions are slow, and regional autonomy is not the problem. Menjívar: each director does too many things at once. The finance director, Javier Rosales: three accountants, three versions of the numbers. The board wants a margin of at least 5.5%, answers in three to five days, and the same answer from every region in 90% of cases. And at 8:10 Castro forwards you an email from another client, with stores in San Pedro Sula and San Salvador, who wants to talk prices before the end of the month.