In April I spent a week fly fishing in Montana with a friend of thirty years. It’s our annual trek to Bozeman to fish the lower Madison and the Yellowstone in Paradise Valley.

I’m always puzzled by large number of fly fishing shops near Bozeman, Montana. How do they all survive?

Every fly shop looks to be the same. Each carries rods, flies, waders and boots, rain gear – the basics. Each shop promotes guided fly fishing trips. There are small shops and slightly bigger shops. The bigger stores simply carry more gear or a wider selection of brands than the small shops. One fly shop boasts that it is the official Orvis (a well known brand in fly fishing rods) dealer in the area. Each shop has an online presence, of course.

But that doesn’t really give the business that much of a competitive advantage over the others, does it?

My friend heard that Dan Bailey’s fly shop in Livingston, Montana, was doing well, and we stopped in one morning before floating the Yellowstone.

The downtown Livingstone store looked about the same as the other fly shops, but with less gear, perhaps, than some of the other, newer shops. We were the only two in the store.

Then I learned why Dan Bailey’s fly shop might be doing better than some of the others: the retail outlet is mostly a front for its business-to-business strategy.

Dan Bailey’s is a distributor of fly fishing products to other fly shops across the country. That’s where it has found success.

Strategy does matter.