By Geoff Marlow, Founder & President, Marlow Advisory Group
This article is reprinted with permission from MarlowAdvisoryGroup.com.
The lighting industry is at an inflection point. After decades in this business, I’ve watched the same patterns repeat, the same mistakes compound, and the same opportunities slip through our fingers. It’s time we had an honest conversation about what’s broken—and more importantly, what we can do to fix it.
The Wave We’re Riding
Let me paint you a picture with some numbers. In 1996, design-build activity represented roughly 15% of the lighting market. By 2025, that figure had grown to 35%. By 2030? Industry projections suggest we’ll hit 50%.
This isn’t just market evolution—it’s a fundamental restructuring of how projects get done. Design firms are buying design firms. Reps are buying reps. Manufacturers are buying manufacturers. And behind many of these transactions sits private equity money chasing spreadsheet synergies that often don’t materialize in the real world.
The question we should all be asking is: Why do people think they want to be in this business when they don’t understand it?
TTO: The Three Forces Reshaping Our Industry
When engineers, designers, and contractors ask me what they need to understand about the next 24 months, I point them to three converging forces. I call it TTO: Talent, Technical complexity, and Outcome-driven demand.
- Talent scarcity is perhaps the most pressing. We’re witnessing a massive exodus of people who understood the nuanced aspects of this business. The institutional knowledge that took decades to build is walking out the door, and there’s no systematic way to replace it. The industry has always been complicated. Now it’s losing the people who knew how to navigate that complexity.
- Technical complexity has exploded beyond anything we knew before. A decade ago, if you understood lumens, wattage, and could read an isocandela chart, you were in good shape. Today? You’re dealing with cybersecurity, IoT, and applications that want to understand the entire user experience from the moment someone knocks on the door to when they sit in a chair. The technical demands have multiplied exponentially.
- Outcome-driven expectations represent a shift from selling products and components to delivering complete results. The application wants to be fully understood and fully realized. Customers don’t want to buy lighting—they want their space to feel a certain way, perform certain functions, and deliver specific experiences.
COMPASS: Navigating Market Turmoil
Beyond TTO, there’s a constellation of pressures I organize under the acronym COMPASS: Constraints, Outcome-driven demand, Market turmoil, Project complexity, Ambiguity (strategic), Scope shift, and Speed.
Each of these could fill an entire discussion on its own. But here’s what matters: we can be brilliant inside our own four walls. We can sit together, share ideas, and celebrate how bright we are. The real test is what happens when we take that brilliance into the market.
Too often, leadership hasn’t met their own employees, hasn’t visited key specifiers, and hasn’t walked the ground with contractors. There’s an old show where business owners would put on a fake mustache and work alongside their people. There’s power in that—you learn things that spreadsheets will never tell you.
The Inductive Trap
This industry is far too inductive.
Think about it this way: inductive reasoning is when you and I sit down with a pile of blocks, start stacking them, and at some point someone says, “Hey, looks like you’re building a house.” Maybe we were, maybe we weren’t. We just started laying bricks and hoped something useful would emerge.
Deductive reasoning is the opposite. You start with a clear concept, a blueprint for where you want to go, and then build accordingly. The lighting industry desperately needs more deductive thinking.
Take a large controls application—an airport that wants to create a seamless lot-to-gate experience. The specifier is working in their silo, the contractor is running in their own direction, and timing isn’t aligned. Everyone starts laying their bricks, and at the end, there’s finger-pointing about who specified what. In some cases, you’d be shocked to find out the contractor already issued a PO for a system that wasn’t even defined.
You have to have a deductive blueprint. Where are we going with this? Who’s involved and when? Who do they need to talk to through the process? Do we have the right people in the right conversations? Controls experts can be incredibly cerebral at 30,000 feet, but by the time rubber hits the road with the local contractor doing the install, they might need different support. That’s okay—it doesn’t have to be one person. But you’d better understand the architecture of your project, or you’re setting yourself up for failure.
When Poetry Isn’t Enough
If we’re going to say that a relationship is poetry, we’re not going to get anywhere.
A relationship has definitive, qualified elements that turn the dial. It means you’ve done work together. There’s trust. You’ve exercised projects together where the outcome was positive. When things went wrong, you resolved them. When you didn’t know something, you knew how to find the answer. And, when you delivered that answer, it was timely.
The poets don’t know how to be analysts, and the analysts don’t know how to be poets. We’d better figure out how to unify our approach and get rid of that language if we have any intention of moving forward.
Think of our industry like a relay race. Sure, speed matters—we’ve covered that with market changes. But what’s the make-or-break element in a four-person relay? It’s the handoff. The ability to create appropriate handoffs. And that’s exactly where we’re failing.
When I talk about shifts in local connectivity, I’m describing something rampant in our industry. The person you talked to yesterday is now somewhere else, or they’ve moved on, or they’ve become exasperated and left entirely. There’s an enormous financial consequence to all of that churn.
The Consolidation Question
I’m not sure—and this might be provocative—that everyone in the channel likes the members who are there.
Does your manufacturer like having a rep network? Some do. Some don’t. You’d have to listen to the back-channel discussions to fully understand the tension. Everybody likes the arrangement so long as everybody makes money. But when margin compression hits, when tariff activity creates pressure, there’s a lot of finger-pointing about where dollars are and demands to reconcile them.
Here’s the thing: 1 + 1 is equaling maybe 1 in many of these acquisitions. That’s not good math from an investment standpoint. And the arithmetic fails because the business isn’t getting local the way it needs to be conducted.
I have a firm belief that the local specification community and the contracting community don’t care how many dots with your logo you have on the map across the country. What the customer wants is to understand how those dots connect specifically to them. They don’t care how big you are. They want to know how well you’ll service them locally.
Margin Dollars Are Earned
Here’s something I tell everyone willing to listen: Margin dollars aren’t owed—they’re earned. Partnership isn’t owed—it’s earned. Enthusiasm isn’t owed—it’s earned.
Together, we need to send our margin dollars to those we believe have earned the opportunity to receive them. If we’re indifferent to that—and there is indifference being executed right now in the channel—we can’t expect change.
This might seem idealistic. There might be an element of poetry to it. But I’m increasingly considerate, even in my own daily spending. If that margin dollar doesn’t feel like it’s going to the person who deserves it, I’m not sending it there.
This logic applies directly to the specification world. If it matters to you, if quality, reliability, and relationship actually matter, then you have to vote with your dollars. You can’t speak out of both sides of your mouth, saying it matters while making choices that undermine the very things you claim to value.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The industry right now is muddy. People are overwhelmed with how to think about all these changes, and they’re not sure how to start.
We don’t have an industry think tank. We should. It shouldn’t be all like-minded people—it should be diverse. But it should be required to produce outcomes: recommendations, something for viewing and discussion, and action items to drive forward. We can’t stay in stasis. We can’t be as disparate as we are in our thinking.
Most importantly, we have to make people feel safe to speak. If we can’t create that space, we’re all in a lot of trouble.
Here’s the blessing and bane of our industry: if you’re right slightly more than 50% of the time, you probably already have a job. That’s the blessing. The bane is exactly the same. That low bar means mediocrity can persist indefinitely.
This Is Solvable
I won’t leave you thinking that nothing can be done. This is solvable.
At this stage of my career, I’ve seen many landscapes. I’ve traveled successfully, some not. But I’ve learned one thing that matters more than any methodology or framework: Find those people who can teach you how to get an A.
I had a college professor who started class by putting a big F on the board and explaining what it would take to avoid failing, and I was horrified. I was there to learn how to excel, not how to avoid failure. That’s what our industry needs—people who will show us the path to excellence, not just help us avoid disaster.
Connect to those people. Drive yourself forward accordingly.
This industry needs you. It needs your talent, your fresh thinking, your willingness to challenge the broken systems we’ve inherited. The wave we’re riding is reshaping everything—design-build growth, technical complexity, talent transitions, and consolidation pressures. You can either be carried along by that wave or learn to navigate it intentionally.
I choose navigation. I hope you will, too.
Original article is here.
Image above: MarlowAdvisoryGroup.com
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